McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking about Hope

• Published in: Journal of American studies 2009-04, Vol.43 (1)
• Main Authors: HERING, DAVID, Wallace, David Foster
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: McCain, John; Weisberg, Jacob
• ISSN: 0021-8758; 1469-5154
• DOI: 10.1017/S0021875809006355

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) David Foster Wallace's novella-length article about John McCain's unsuccessful bid for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination (originally published in truncated form in Rolling Stone, and subsequently unabridged under the title "Up, Simba" in Wallace's nonfiction collection Consider the Lobster) receives a timely reissue in the wake of McCain's 2008 race for the White House. Wallace is principally interested in whether a politician's attempts to tell the truth and remain "real" are necessarily subjugated by the process of tit-for-tat negative campaigning and party-line standardization and, more disturbingly, whether a new generation of young voters are so inured to techniques of salesmanship that they cannot or do not wish to distinguish between honesty and cynicism. Jacob Weisberg's Foreword, while providing further anecdotal evidence of McCain's startling frankness in interview, was composed before Obama secured the Democratic nomination, and is therefore unfortunately unable to discuss Wallace's work with detailed reference to the recent presidential campaigns.