And they're off and writing in the great race to the White House

As US presidential primaries kick off, the hopefuls are fighting it out in bookshops as well as on the hustings .

Robert McCrum writing inThe Observer

This week, the big beasts of the Grand Old Party (GOP) - ex-mayor Rudy Giuliani and ex-governors Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee - will go head-to-head for the Republican nomination in the treacherous electoral waters of the Iowa caucus. Simultaneously, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama will slug it out for supremacy among Democrats. These are the most open and volatile races in years. Anything could happen. Even a book could make a difference.

What, you might ask, do books have to do with the bare-knuckle business of politics
in the age of YouTube? But here's the odd thing. Although Americans spend
more on their lawns than on literature, come the high noon of the
democratic process, the presidential primaries, you find that all the
serious contenders have published some kind of memoir.

The campaign autobiography offers a kind of calculated full disclosure, but it does not
usually encourage further investigation. Typically, for instance, your
candidate's memoir contains no index, is often dedicated to some version
of 'the American people' and contains photographs that fall somewhere
between the embarrassingly hokey (me with 'Wifey' and the kids) and the
numbingly official (that's me addressing the state legislature). Every
last one of them tries to project that granite-jawed certainty for which
(each candidate has been told) the focus groups are hungering. So the
titles of this pocket library of presidential aspiration feature words
like 'character', 'courage' and 'leadership'.

Yet despite the ambition to be a serious campaign tool, each of these books betrays something about its 'author' or at least its subject. They turn out to be reassuringly
eccentric. For instance, Dennis Kucinich, the bat-eared congressman from
Ohio, has mobilised his celebrity connections to promote The Courage to
Survive. There's a scarcely credible blurb from Gore Vidal ('Beautifully
written, hypnotically mesmerising... as good as Theodore Dreiser') and an
effusive note of thanks to Shirley MacLaine for 'taking time to help edit'
his book. Shirley MacLaine? Gore Vidal? No wonder Kucinich is the butt of
Jon Stewart and the Comedy Central crowd.


John McCain tries to co-opt the heroes of the past on to his faltering campaign to be an American hero of the future. But who are the 'extraordinary people' he wants to associate himself with? Winston Churchill and Reinhold Neibuhr
for sure. No quarrel with that. But King Camp Gillette, the razor-blade millionaire (motto: 'Sell the Shave, not the Razor')? Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, against the advice of her coach?
Read his Hard Call: Great Decisions and the People Who Made Them and you
wonder what on earth a McCain administration would look like.



More serious, in the polls, are Republicans Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, comes from Bill Clinton country and has come to the front of the pack with a mixture of good ol' boy humour,
Bible-thumping rhetoric (he's a Southern Baptist ex-pastor) and sheer,
down-home ordinariness that might make him one of the scariest candidates
in recent memory. His book is called Character Makes a Difference: Where
I'm From, Where I've been and What I Believe. Short answer: Nowhere,
nowhere and the Bible.



Mitt Romney is the Mormon in the race, now celebrated as the candidate who drove his wife and kids in the family car with the dog on the roof. Somehow, he's overcome
that one to be a contender. He makes his pitch to the voters in Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership and the Olympic Games. The Olympic Games? That's the Salt Lake City Winter Games of 2002, which Romney organised.








And then there's Rudy Giuliani. In the opening line of Leadership, he tells the reader: 'I have
always loved to write. I have also always loved to research.' But this is
a book avowedly co-authored and researched by a magazine journalist, Ken
Kurson. Giuliani/Kurson open their account with a blow-by-blow account of
Rudy's 'finest hour' (Churchillian allusions pepper the narrative), the
emergency of 11 September 2001. Arguably, it was this crisis that made
Giuliani a national figure and launched his presidential bid. He certainly
takes a lot of credit for his coolness under fire on that momentous day.

Hillary Rodham Clinton's autobiography, Living History, has all the control freaky hallmarks of her campaign: no personality, no quirks. She can't deny that she is married to
a man called Bill Clinton, but she turns this to her advantage in narrating the story of how she became 'wife, mother, lawyer, First Lady and international icon'. Her message is: 'Vote for me; I'm an all-American superstar.' At the same time, she goes out of her way to associate herself
with the women of the electorate, a potentially match-winning constituency. 'I wasn't born a First Lady or a senator,' she writes. 'I was born an American.' Hers is the richest of these memoirs, and the most diplomatic. There are no fewer than six closely printed pages of
acknowledgements. And there is an index, with an entry for Monica Lewinsky, but no reference either to John Edwards or Barack Obama.

Edwards , a southern trial lawyer with an expensive haircut, is perhaps the dark horse of the
potential Democratic ticket. His campaign book is a collection of papers
about ending poverty in the US and is wilfully lacking in glamour and/or
celebrity. Which is probably just as well for a man famous for his $400
haircuts.


Which brings us, finally, to Barack Obama who is now, according to many polls, narrowly ahead of his rivals. Obama is the junior senator from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln's home state, and he misses no opportunity to link his name to
Honest Abe's. In one important sense, the association is justified: Obama is a graceful, natural writer and his book, The Audacity of Hope, is visibly the work of its author and has an authenticity and freshness that sets it apart. If it's contrived, then the contrivance seems to contain
spontaneity.
Obama's extraordinary popularity means that this book is a No 1 bestseller. It deals with issues like 'faith', 'race' and 'the constitution' with refreshing candour, but is much less gripping in autobiographical terms. However, it would indeed
be a bonus if 2008 saw at least one nominee display a gift for language
equal to Jefferson, Kennedy and, yes, Lincoln. Obama may yet be in their company.