Must-Read Presidential Candidate Profiles

From the popular press, here are three presidential candidate profiles for your attention: Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY), John McCain (R-AZ) and Sam Brownback (R-KS).

One of the most intriguing candidate profiles I've ever read focuses on Clinton: Harpy, Hero, Heretic: Hillary, subtitled, "Why she stokes our deepest fears and darkest hatreds."

Her life, her looks, her politics, her marriage—and now her breasts—are all daily grist at the nation's coffee shops, still, 15 years after she was introduced to America. According to one accounting, there are 17,000 websites devoted to Hillary Clinton. And there is really no aspect of our collective fears or furies that cannot be grafted onto her character...

Almost every American has an opinion about Hillary. Consider her poll numbers. Hillary Clinton has favorables in the high 40s right now and unfavorables running about even. Her "no opinion" numbers are in the low single digits, approaching zero. Most politicians start with a huge swath of "no opinion" voters whom they can then try to convert. If Hillary runs, she will need to invent a whole new form of campaign strategy: She will need to flip voters who pretty much hate her.

Part biography of Clinton, part psychological probe of the American psyche, this is a must read for Clinton supporters and detractors alike.

John McCain: Prisoner of Conscience explores the conflict between McCain's image as a maverick and the very real need to appeal to "base" -- also known as party extremists -- to secure the nomination.

As he embarks on his second presidential campaign, a campaign he once assumed he would never get the chance to run, there are many questions for John Sidney McCain III. Can he bank the fires of temperament that routinely put him atop insiders' lists of the most difficult senators on Capitol Hill and become a unifying leader? Can he reconcile his unstinting support for the war in Iraq with his unsparing criticism of the Bush administration's execution of it—and with the electorate's evident yearning for a new approach? Would he be, at 72—more than two years older than the oldest man ever to assume the presidency, and more battered by old injuries than most men who have held it—too damned old to do the job?

God's Senator, a profile of Brownback, is the oldest of the three stories, written in July 2006. Before reading this, I knew little about Brownback or the powers-that-be in and reach of the Christian right -- like Salem Radio Network News and Focus on the Family.

But on this evening in January [2006], politics and all its worldly machinations have entered their church. Sitting in the darkness of the front row is Sam Brownback, the Republican senator from Kansas. And hunched over on the stage in a red leather chair is an old man named Harald Bredesen, who has come to anoint Brownback as the Christian right's next candidate for president.

Over the last six decades, Bredesen has prayed with so many presidents and prime ministers and kings that he can barely remember their names. He's the spiritual father of Pat Robertson, the man behind the preacher's vast media empire. He was one of three pastors who laid hands on Ronald Reagan in 1970 and heard the Pasadena Prophecy: the moment when God told Reagan that he would one day occupy the White House. And he recently dispatched one of his proteges to remind George W. Bush of the divine will -- and evangelical power -- behind his presidency...

When [Brownback] ran for the House he was a Methodist. By the time he ran for the Senate he was an evangelical. Now he has become a Catholic. He was baptized not in a church but in a chapel tucked between lobbyists' offices on K Street that is run by Opus Dei, the secretive lay order founded by a Catholic priest who advocated "holy coercion" and considered Spanish dictator Francisco Franco an ideal of worldly power. Brownback also studies Torah with an orthodox rabbi from Brooklyn.

Election central for US Politics; for US Liberals.

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