David Maraniss Is Above Politico's Cheap Antics, Reports Politico

David Maraniss Is Above Politico's Cheap Antics, Reports Politico

Politico reports today that there is a "dangerous new Obama book" coming out that turns out to be the same book -- David Maraniss' forthcoming "Barack Obama: The Story" -- that led Politico on a merry adventure in plainly stated publisher disclosures on Wednesday.

Why is the book so "dangerous?" For the same reason that any book of this ilk is considered "dangerous." As Politico's Glenn Thrush and Dylan Byers noted on Thursday, President Barack Obama is "a control freak when it comes to messaging his own life" and turns to the memoir as a means of telling his own story.

This basically describes the point of any memoir written by a presidential aspirant. You can create a decent bedside stack of tomes from John McCain and his aide Mark Salter that set out to accomplish the same thing. (I'll allow that there is an outside chance that at some point in the near future, Andrew Cuomo might pen "I Think I Should Warn You, I Can Be a Bit of a Jerk at Times, Sorry.")

At any rate, Maraniss has earned respect for calling things like he sees them. And while Obama sat for a lengthy interview with Maraniss for this project, it appears that there is some "low-grade" worry that it will reveal that Obama is a man with a certain amount of personal ambition and not some wandering philosoph gently drawing on the spiritual energy of America. (I think that there are some reporters who made "composite girlfriend" jokes yesterday that can attest to the fact that "low- grade" worry might be understating things somewhat.)

But this part of Thursday's Politico story is pretty chuckle worthy: "Maraniss is a biographer in search of real insight, not Drudge links or Colbert appearances."

Why are you hitting yourself, Politico? (In other news, the "Colbert Report" has a solid reputation of booking serious authors as guests, and if Maraniss is smart, he'll be one of them.)

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