David Foster Wallace on John McCain
June 4, 2008
David Foster Wallace’s essay on John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign is being re-issued as a book called McCain’s Promise. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, DFW responded to the question of whether he had changed his mind about his assessment of McCain:
"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."
Some other good stuff there about the book (and about signing a bazillion advance copies of Infinite Jest).
Tags:
dfw, essays, john mccain, politics
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September 15th, 2008 at 11:18 am
I was saddened to read of DFW’s death this weekend. The US that DFW wrote about and well, laughed at (I laughed at it) is a funny land of contradictions, now both stoic and profligate, rich and 3rd-world poor. We’re running out of time..well, at least DFW has immortalized himself in his books.