119. In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History - Mitch Landrieu

The blog is back!

I heard Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, speak on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah about his book shortly before it was going to be released.  He shared a really honest and revealing perspective of his controversial decision to remove several prominent Confederate statues, and I immediately bought the book online. 

I hadn't realized that Mayor Landrieu had initiated the conversation about removing the statues well before the national conversation started (which was mostly after the massacre in Charleston).  I appreciated Mayor Landrieu's acknowledgement of his ignorance in trying to understand the pain behind Confederate images for black folks.  He admitted that he grew up seeing these monuments and other Confederate images every day, and didn't think much about them.  He only was forced to consider them when he asked his good friend, Wynton Marsalis, to come back and perform for the City's tricentennial.  Marsalis conditioned his acceptance on Landrieu considering removing the statue of Robert E. Lee.

Landrieu did a deep dive into learning the history of the Confederate monuments and understood that they were constructed to send a specific message to African Americans more than they were to ever serve as a memorial to those who were killed in the war.  Marsalis asked Landrieu why he thought so many black folks left NOLA (Louis Armstrong left there, and even refused to be buried there).  Landrieu soon realized that "they are not of our age, nor of our making, and they deserve no prominence in our city."  He also realized that he had the best chance at making the removal happen, because he was a white mayor toward the end of his second term (this was around 2015). 

I remember hearing about the removal of the statues in the news, but I had no idea about all of the violence and drama leading up to the removal.  White supremacist groups surfaced.  The city had contracted with a company to effectuate the actual removal, and the owner of that company pulled out after he started receiving death threats and his sports car was set on fire while parked in his company's driveway.  The FBI had to get involved in the planning and preparation, SWAT teams were staked out the days the removal happened, and the employees of the contractors involved wore bullet proof vests and face masks, covered the logos on their company’s trucks, and removed their license plates.  The statues came down in May of 2017. 

A significant part of this book was about Hurricane Katrina, and those stories were really sobering. Landrieu was honest, even where it wasn't pretty.  It was striking to read stories about sites in NOLA that I had just visited over Memorial Day weekend a few months ago.  The Hyatt Regency, where I stayed, was ground zero for coordinating emergency operations, because it was just across the street from the Superdome, which of course was serving as an emergency shelter for thousands of people, and behind City Hall, which was flooded.  Clergy from Alabama set up a grill outside of Harrah's Casino to cook food for people who were taking shelter at the Superdome. 

Overall, this book was a fantastic read. I have to admit that the first third or so moved slowly for me (a bit of the history of Louisiana and New Orleans, setting the framework for the story of NOLA politics, etc.), but it was important for context.  I wish I'd finished reading it before my trip to NOLA, but now I have a better understanding and perspective of the city for the next time I go back!

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105. Game Change - John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

This book (a.k.a. political thriller) is about the 2008 presidential election. Yes, this is the one that you heard about in the news - the one in which Harry Reid was quoted as saying that Obama had a chance at winning the election because he was a "light-skinned African American" with "no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." It starts with laying out the candidates' decisions to run; covers the bitter debates; and goes into so much more in between.
What really struck me was how the authors exposed sides of the candidates that the public would never see. Some of my favorite parts ...

When Hillary Clinton found out that Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill said on TV, "I think [Bill Clinton] has been a great leader, but I don't want my daughter near him," ...

The phone went quiet. Hillary was speechless. A few more seconds passed, and then finally came her voice, hot with fury.
"Fuck her," Hillary said - and then called Solis Doyle and summarily canceled the fundraiser.

According to Heilemann and Halperin, so much of Hillary's campaign was centered around (and ultimately hurt by) issues with Bill: his alleged continuing affairs; how to control his mouth; and his borderline comments about race (e.g. that Obama would surely win South Carolina during the primaries, because Jesse Jackson did in 1984 and 1988). The "race issues" were quite funny to read about, though. At one point, Hillary wanted to make a commercial portraying Obama as a chameleon.

Penn and Grunwald (Clinton advisers) theorized that Obama, the darling of the left, was pandering to conservative Democrats in northern Nevada. He’s become a chameleon, one of them said.
“He has! We should call him that!” Hillary said, proposing a TV ad that somehow pictured Obama as a color-shifting lizard. “We need a visual,” she said.
“We can’t,” Grunwald replied.
“Why?” Hillary asked.
The color thing, Grunwald said. We’d get hit for dabbling with race.
“Oh Gawwwd,” Hillary groaned. “Give me a break.”

There were also so many fascinating behind-the-scenes stories about Obama. Apparently, he's a lot more cocky than a lot of people might think. Then again ... don't you have to be in order to have the guts to run for president of the United States?? But he also apparently has his emotional side. At one point, Valerie Jarrett threw a book party for him in her backyard soon after The Audacity of Hope had come out.

Jarrett introduced Obama and spoke about Audacity’s final chapter, in which he wrote about the stress that the demands of his career put on his marriage, the
disruptions to his family life. As Jarrett went on, talking about the sacrifices his wife and girls were making, she saw that Obama was crying-to the point where he couldn’t manage to speak when it came his turn. Michelle walked over, put her arm around him, and began to cry as well.
Even Obama’s closest friends had never seen him choke up in public before. He’s not emoting about the past, Jarrett thought. He’s emoting about the future. About the fact the sacrifices he’s imposed on his family are only just beginning.

The writers also exposed a lot about the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter story. How ironic that John Edwards finally came forward two weeks before this book came out and admitted that he had fathered her child. Many of his campaign staffers had been trying so hard to keep her away from him, knowing what was going on. And not that this in any way justifies his actions, but Elizabeth was apparently "an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazy-woman" who walked all over Edwards. What a stark contrast from her image as the cancer-surviving, supportive politician's wife.

I wish the authors had included more about the McCain-Palin side of the story. But a few funny pieces were that one of McCain's favorite outfits off-camera is a dress shirt and boxer shorts (eww) and that McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman would watch the YouTube clip of John Edwards fixing his hair and roll on the floor with laughter. Also, the media has already exposed stories about McCain's temper, but this part was funny:

McCain was erupting over everything. At a scheduling meeting to discuss [his daughter] Meghan’s college graduation, McCain learned that the commencement was a multiday affair that would require him to make several round trips to New York. “How many fucking times do I have to go to fucking New York this week?” he yelled. “How many fucking times can you fucking graduate from fucking Columbia?”

There wasn't anything too shocking about Palin in there - I think the media has already done a pretty good job exposing her ridiculousness. But a small excerpt shows just how hardcore these campaigns are ... something had come up about Palin, and the staffers were not getting direct answers from her and so they had to check it out themselves.

Schmidt wanted to get them on the horn and have the history of her AIP registration checked out immediately.
"But it's two in the morning in Alaska," someone said.
"The phones don't work at fucking night there?" Schmidt bellowed. "Call them! And keep calling them until they pick up!"

Overall, the writing was exquisitely entertaining. The authors call Hillary's camp "Hillaryland" and Edwards' camp "the Edwardsphere." And read how they describe one of Obama's speeches in Iowa:

With a law professor's attention to detail and a litigator's argumentativeness -- plus a hint of the defensiveness of a politician under fire -- he included rebuttals to almost every criticism that Clinton had hurled at him down the homestretch.

Brilliant! It's interesting to note that a lot of the "quotes" are actually not in quotation marks ... in the preface, the authors point out that this was purposeful and was to show that the person remembering the supposed "quote" might not have been able to remember the exact verbiage - but that the idea was close enough.

This was a long book ... but unlike The Poisonwood Bible (notwithstanding the completely different genre), it was impossible to put down.

97. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream - Barack Obama

For some reason, I thought that this book would be a "part 2" to Dreams from My Father, but it was definitely much different: less biographical, a lot more about "the issues." In this book, Obama writes in depth about his personal views on faith and values, repairing the broken political process, and issues like education, renewable energy, and the partisan divide.

I appreciated the way that Obama did not hide from the fact that he is a Democrat - but he was not as incendiary as Sarah Palin. From one part:

... Conservatives, for instance, tend to bristle when it comes to government interference in the marketplace or their right to bear arms. Yet many of these same conservatives show little to no concern when it comes to government wiretapping without a warrant or government attempts to control people's sexual practices. Conversely, it's easy to get most liberals riled up about government encroachments on freedom of the press or a woman's reproductive freedoms. But if you have a conversation with these same liberals about the potential costs of regulation to a small-business owner, you will often draw a blank stare.

I really admire and respect his more balanced approach - especially because he still stands his ground on what he believes.

I also really liked reading about an insider's perspective of Washington. The stories that he told about his interactions with Senator Byrd and President Bush were great! This part was also revealing:

If you ask my eight-year-old what I do for a living, she might say I make laws. And yet one of the surprising things about Washington is the amount of time spent arguing not about what the law should be, but rather what the law is. The simplest statute - a requirement, say, that companies provide bathroom breaks for their hourly workers - can become the subject of wildly different interpretations, depending on whom you are talking to: the congressman who sponsored the provision, the staffer who delivered it, the department head whose job it is to enforce it, the lawyer whose client finds it inconvenient, or the judge who may be called upon to apply it.

My favorite chapter was actually the last one, entitled "Family." Likely because I want to be Michelle Obama when I grow up ... I loved reading what he had to say about their marriage and their children. I laughed out loud when I read this story:

...I called Michelle from my D.C. office and started explaining the significance of the bill – how shoulder-to-air missiles could threaten commercial air travel if they fell into the wrong hands, how small-arms stockpiles left over from the Cold War continued to feed conflict across the globe. Michelle cut me off.
“We have ants.”
“Huh?”
“I found ants in the kitchen. And in the bathroom upstairs.”
“Okay…”
“I need you to buy some ant traps on your way home tomorrow. I’d get them myself, but I’ve got to take the girls to their doctor’s appointment after school. Can you do that for me?”
“Right. Ant traps.”
“Ant traps. Don’t forget, okay honey? And buy more than one. Listen, I need to go to a meeting. Love you.”
I hung up the receiver, wondering if Ted Kennedy or John McCain bought ant traps on the way home from work.

Perfection! Obama is a ridiculously amazing writer - and he makes even some of the drier topics sound quite interesting. I'll probably re-read this book some time in the near future.