Kurt Andersen

In the discussion of “electability,” and which broadly defined constituencies are and aren’t drawn to Barack Obama, the focus has been on what has turned out to be Hillary Clinton’s strongest constituencies — working-class whites and people over 65. There is conversely a tendency to consider Obama’s reliably enthusiastic constituencies — black voters, voters under 30, voters with college degrees — as an insufficient coalition on which to base a winning presidential campaign.

But do the math, and this default piece of common sense doesn’t look so convincing. College-educated people are more than a quarter of the population (and an even higher fraction of those who vote), people under 30 are 15%, and African-Americans are 11.5%. In other words, those three groups combined make up half the electorate.

In an NPR interview yesterday, Hillary Clinton was asked whether she was “willing to win ugly.” Instead of answering, she complained that the premise of the question represented “a double standard,” since Barack Obama is not being asked whether he will fight dirty to get the support of superdelegates necessary to win the nomination. “He has [only] a slight lead,” she said.

Every time I hear that piece of Clinton campaign spin — that Obama’s lead is small or slim or slight — I wonder: in what arithmetical universe? Of the pledged delegates elected so far, Obama leads 53% to 47%. After the remaining primaries and caucuses, that lead might be reduced to 52%-48%. In no election I know about has a margin of four or six percent ever been considered “slight.”

On Friday the New York Public Library announced their list of the 25 best books of the year. Among the eleven 2007 novels honored were those by Jim Crace, Junot Diaz, Denis Johnson, David Leavitt, Edmund White…and — holy cow! — me, for Heyday. And this week the Langum Charitable Trust is announcing that Heyday has won their annual Langum Prize for the best historical fiction of 2007.

As one of my daughters said about the news, “Woo-hoo!” (And as another artist said in 1985, “I haven’t had an orthodox career, and I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect…I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!”)

I want to thank all the readers who’ve written in with what they thought were errors in Heyday. So far, none of them have successfully busted me. But I’m still accepting submissions.

I’m voting for Barack Obama in the New York primary on Tuesday. There are all kinds of excellent reasons to do so, which I don’t need to rehash here.

But for wafflers and fence-sitters and even more or less committed Clinton voters who happen to be white, here’s another reason: every white vote that Obama gets will be counted by the media (and historians) as a bit of proof that America is measurably and truly moving beyond its most tragic history, and every white vote that Hillary Clinton gets will be counted as a race-based anti-black vote. Unfair and unfortunate, but that’s the way it is. In this instance, perception will be reality.

So: Clinton voters need to understand that if their candidate wins, they will be part of a depressing morning-after metric rather than a hopeful one.

I’ll be heading out across the country — to Atlanta, Nashville, Columbus (Ohio), Denver, Salt Lake City, and Portland (Oregon) — for readings and discussions and signings in bookstores. (To find out exactly where and when I’ll be appearing, you can see my schedule here.)

Now, a confession and an offer. There were two tiny factual errors in the hardcover which I’ve corrected in the paperback. To the first person who tells me what they were (at emailandersen@aol.com) — or, failing that, to whomever finds either one of them by April 1, 2008 — I’ll send a personally inscribed copy of the book plus the unabridged, 22-CD BBC Audiobooks America edition.

Happy hunting, and hope to see you soon.

The paperback edition of Heyday was published this week. It’s a very gratifying object, and not just because it’s swaddled in page after page of bits of critical praise. The cover image is the same as on the hardback — a photograph of an anonymous circa-1848 young man. But the cover has a quarter inch sliced off its right margin, so that the bright red edge of a second cover is visible beneath, this one featuring the young woman (one Kate Chase Norcross) who’s on the back of the hardcover edition.

By the way? During the last few weeks the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and Christian Science Monitor all put Heyday on their best-books-of-2007 lists; the Monitor calls it one of the 19 best novels of the year.

So: happy new year!

And now, back to work on the next one.

I have absolutely no axe to grind with Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times’s chief book critic. I know her slightly, like her personally, and have never been reviewed by her.

But over the years I’ve thought I noticed a tic in her writing — that is, an extreme fondness for the adjective “hallucinatory.” And when I saw a variation in the first sentence of her review of Denis Johnson’s new Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke (”reads like a whacked-out, hallucinogenic variation on…whacked-out, hallucinogenic Vietnam classics”), I decided to search the Times archives and make a tally to see if I was right.

I was. In her thousand-odd pieces in the Times these last 25 years, she has, by my count, used hallucinatory in 63 of them, not counting a couple of references to literal drug experiences. She used to do it even more frequently — seven hallucinatorys in 1985, six in 1990 — often with only a few days separating instances. Since 2002 she has limited herself to no more than three a year.

Before Tree of Smoke, she had, in descriptions of fiction about Vietnam, defaulted to the word eleven times — and in three different earlier pieces had described Johnson’s 1985 novel Fiskadoro as “hallucinatory.” Apart from the Vietnam War, the work of Gabriel García Márquez (and fiction about Latin America generally) is the most reliable trigger: in writing about Márquez she has resorted to “hallucinatory” eight times.

By far the strongest piece of the case against Rupert Mudoch owning the Wall Street Journal are his dealings with China. During the last decade various News Corp. media entitites, in order to remain on the good side of Beijing regime, have tended to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative when it comes to the regime. Therefore, the very plausible argument goes, Murdoch ownership might well compromise the Journal’s reporting on China. That was the thrust of Joseph Kahn’s big piece in Tuesday’s Times, for instance.

But among the scads of coverage, why has no one — like, say, the News Corp. spokesman Gary Ginsberg — mentioned 24? During the last two seasons of the series, the Chinese government has been the heavy — they shanghaied and tortured both Jack Bauer and his girlfriend, conspired with Jack’s murderous father, and almost caused Russia to attack the U.S. If Murdoch were really as determined to kowtow as he’s been portrayed, why would he let one of his most successful shows consistently and grandly libel his Chinese pals?

This doesn’t, of course, prove that his Journal would cover China aggressively, but it does seem relevant to the discussion.

Having been on the road book-touring, I missed several episodes of 24. So after a DVR catch-up marathon the other night (by the way: Separated At Birth: Powers Boothe, who plays the right-wing vice-president on 24, and Kevin McCarthy), I had counterterrorist-torture on my mind.

But I would’ve found last week’s New York Times story, “3 Suspects Talk After Iraqi Soldiers Do Dirty Work” deeply provocative in any case.

The conventional wisdom among U.S. military and intelligence experts, as it’s been reported since the beginning of the Iraq war, is that torture is ineffective – that seriously hurting and terrifying people doesn’t make them give up useful secrets, the M.O. of Jack Bauer and his colleagues on 24 notwithstanding. That was the gist of Jane Mayer’s piece about 24 in The New Yorker two months ago, which I wrote about here.

Yet this Times story shows unambiguously that at least among Iraqi insurgents (as opposed to hardened Al Qaeda fanatics, one imagines) torture can indeed do the trick, and probably save American lives.

An Iraqi army captain in Baghdad had his soldiers whip a suspected insurgent on the back with electrical cables. “I prepared him for the Americans and let them take his confession,” the officer told the Times reporter. “I don’t beat them that much, but enough so he feels the pain and it makes him desperate.”

Handed over to the Iraqis’ U.S. Army partners — who apparently learned of the beating only afterward, from the Times reporter – the man led them to an insurgent safe house. There the Americans found bomb detonators, coils of blasting wire, explosives, two large antiaircraft guns, and an oxygen tank “partly cut in preparation for being turned into a huge bomb, probably similar to the one that killed four [American] soldiers in [the] regiment a month earlier.”

It was nice to think that torture is never an effective means to a desirable end. This conventional wisdom let us entirely off the hook – we didn’t need to face the end-justifying-the-means moral questions, we thought, because the means never achieved the desired end. But it turns out we were misinformed.

It’s telling that this story hasn’t become a big subject of national discussion during the last week. A few gung-ho pro-war ideologues have written about it, because it seems to justify the balls-out viciousness they want to believe could still win the war in Iraq. And a few reflexive antiwar left-wingers have written about it, because it seems to justify their morally simple view of the war. But for the rest of us it is a complicating, deeply unsettling new fact as we wonder how we should extract ourselves from this complicated, deeply unsettling war.