New Republic, Sept. 10 A Janus-faced cover devotes half of the magazine to previewing next week’s Republican National Convention and half to this week’s Democratic National Convention. A look at John McCain’s “bro-mance” with Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., concludes that Graham is “McCain’s ride-along id, the unleashed little jerk McCain might like to be if he weren’t now being told by his concerned campaign staff to rein in his jokes and avoid journalists.”… A longer piece delves into Cindy McCain’s history and says that her wealthy family needed him as much as he needed them: McCain’s campaign success was “fundamentally about pairing the McCain narrative with the Hensley apparatus,” Before the marriage, despite their wealth, the Hensley’s “could never quite break into the Phoenix establishment.”… On the Democratic side, an article catches up with John Kerry, whose endorsement of Obama was timed to fall at a crucial moment in the primary. Though he dwells on slim margin by which he lost the ‘04 election, Kerry now displays “a certain level of contentment, in stark contrast to the restless ambition he has always displayed.”
Atlantic, September 2008 A much-discussed Joshua Green piece dissects the corpse of the Hillary Clinton campaign, toadied by leaked internal documents, which Green says “demonstrates that paranoid dysfunction breeds the impulse to hoard.” Clinton adeptly executed the original strategy of going after blue-collar voters. But because she “she never behaved like a chief executive,” internal squabbles metastasized, leading to large missteps like failing to pay attention to delegate arithmetic until it was too late. … In a back-of-the-book piece, Caitlin Flanagan muses on the Patty Hearst kidnapping, which she thinks so captured the American consciousness because the heiress’ shocking Stockholm syndrome functioned as a metaphor for all the nice girls who seemed to change so radically in the 1970s. She was an “innocent and largely naïve young woman who was being fought over, in public, by two powerful forces: her parents and ‘the culture’ in its most extreme and violent manifestation.”
Weekly Standard, Sept. 1 An article on the “New Jews” explores the disparity between the number of Asian students who excel in high school and the percentage accepted to elite colleges. The piece argues that the students’ situation is a result of affirmative action and notes that it’s “ironic that advocates of racial preferences have taken refuge in an entirely subjective, idiosyncratic decision-making system.”… In the wake of the Obama-McCain interviews at Saddleback Church, a piece trumpets the influence of the Rev. Rick Warren, who calls both candidates his friends. The piece notes enthusiastically that the “civil discussion” the interviews provoked “also was one that most social conservatives probably liked” in no small part because it brought up the topic of the candidates’ views on abortion. The New Yorker, Sept. 1 The fall fashion issue features a profile of Mark Jacobs, whom Ariel Levy portrays as a self-manufactured fashion superhero who transformed himself from the schlubby champion of grunge to a chiseled “reality-television star without a reality-television show.” Jacobs delights in any coverage of his public and tempestuous love life, and, unlike many other designers who see themselves as pure artists, he “enjoys the idea that the brand is the product being sold.”… A delightfully meandering dispatch from Beijing, by film critic Anthony Lane, says goodbye to the Olympic Games and suggests, on the underreported topic of shot put, “If the U.S. wants to do better in London, four years from now, it had better start sending some bison to ballet school.” New York, Sept. 1-8, 2008 A cover package rounds up fall’s cultural offerings. Highlights include the bold prediction of 2008’s best stoner film, the underdog Beverly Hills Chihuaha; a preview of Toni Morrison’s new book, A Mercy, which the magazine says differs from her previous works in featuring “a pristine landscape, a compassionate white Northern farmer, and a notable absence of racial animosity”; and a piece on the comeback attempt of ‘90s group Oasis, which possesses the “glorious sound of a band unburdened of hubris.”… A piece explores Joe Lieberman’s gradual move away from the Democratic Party, evidenced recently by his endorsement of John McCain and his decision to speak at the Republican National Convention. His transformation has not only sparked vitriol in the blogosphere, but even caused some staffers to defect. To Lieberman, “foreign policy is the defining issue of the day, and [he] sees Obama’s nomination as the regrettable result of a knee-jerk, blog-fueled peacenik mentality among the Democrats.” Newsweek, Aug. 23 Obama and Biden share the cover, but the article focuses on Obama’s past largely through the lens of his absent father. The piece makes particular hay out of an incident in which Obama Sr. visited his son’s fifth-grade class and Junior was mortified by his father, who wasn’t the resplendent prince he’d described to classmates. Today, the candidate “depicts the encounter in its complexity—his staring at the blackboard, vacantly, instead of proudly into his father’s eyes.”… Novelist Claire Messud casts an outsider’s eye on the Obama campaign. While following the charismatic candidate, where she is surprised to learn “the degree to which the press live in their own world.” Journalists following the campaign “barely look up from their computers and BlackBerrys. … Google alerts send every article, every blog, every voiced opinion and every official response to their fingertips.”
