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

By David Foster Wallace

Book Overview

Is John McCain "For Real?"

That's the question David Foster Wallace set out to explore when he first climbed aboard Senator McCain's campaign caravan in February 2000. It was a moment when Mccain was increasingly perceived as a harbinger of change, the anticandidate whose goal was "to inspire young Americans to devote themselves to causes greater than their own self-interest." And many young Americans were beginning to take notice.

To get at "something riveting and unspinnable and true" about John Mccain, Wallace finds he must pierce the smoke screen of spin doctors and media manipulators. And he succeeds-in a characteristically potent blast of journalistic brio that not only captures the lunatic rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign but also delivers a compelling inquiry into John McCain himself: the senator, the POW, the campaign finance reformer, the candidate, the man.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316040533
• ISBN13: 9780316040532
• Release Date: June 2008
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Length: 124 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.4" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Insightful in the light of the '08 campaign

If you're a fan of David Foster Wallace's nonfiction, I think this is probably a must-read. It faces squarely off against his fascinations with issues of ethics and authenticity, and shows him in a troubled frame of mind. I can't say how much editing was done recently, but this is technically the last book he published before his death so it's also got that grim recommendation. By turns it's uncomfortably funny and fascinating, and it paints a portrait of McCain that's remarkably insightful in the light of the recent campaign. It's DFW at the top of his nonfiction game.

Important to know the context of this book was 2000, not 2008

Given DFW's recent tragic death (and the election timing of this re-release), I'd imagine alot of folks may now discover this book. What Wallace wanted current readers understand about the context, he told the Wall Street Journal in an interview from June 2008. Here's the excerpt: "The essay quite specifically concerns a couple weeks in February, 2000, and the situation of both McCain [and] national politics in those couple weeks. It is heavily context-dependent. And that context now seems a long, long, long time ago. McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now--for me, at least. It's all understandable, of course--he's the GOP nominee now, not an insurgent maverick. Understandable, but depressing. As part of the essay talks about, there's an enormous difference between running an insurgent Hail-Mary-type longshot campaign and being a viable candidate (it was right around New Hampshire in 2000 that McCain began to change from the former to the latter), and there are some deep, really rather troubling questions about whether serious honor and candor and principle remain possible for someone who wants to really maybe win. I wouldn't take back anything that got said in that essay, but I'd want a reader to keep the time and context very much in mind on every page."