Every political autobiography is a meet and greet, on the cheap. “Hi! I’m Kamala Harris. I’m running for district attorney and I hope to have your support,” a young and exuberant Harris told shoppers rolling their carts through the parking lot of a supermarket in San Francisco in 2003, when she first ran for public office. “In truth I would have settled for them just remembering my name,” she confesses, in her clear-eyed and affecting memoir, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey” (Penguin Press). Campaign books, their jackets plastered with photographs of the candidates, beam their smiles at voters from every airport bookstore and wave at political junkies from every hepped-up, hot-takes Amazon home page. Even if you never pick up Harris’s book, or click on it, the gambit works: Hi, I’m Kamala Harris, and I’m running for President. I’m hoping for your support. Remember my name!

“My name is pronounced ‘comma-la,’ like the punctuation mark,” Harris writes; kamala is Sanskrit for “lotus flower.” You can learn a lot about the candidates by reading these books, and if you read them all you can learn a lot about the Party, too. It’s a moving testament to the American experiment and to the unprecedented diversity of this election’s Democratic field that so many of these candidates explain how to pronounce their names or to locate on a map the part of the world their family came from. This didn’t start with Barack Hussein Obama. (“People call me ‘Alabama,’ ” he said on the campaign trail. “They call me ‘Yo Mama.’ And that’s my supporters!”) And it isn’t even really new (“always pronounced Ra-gan,” Ronald Reagan told readers in his first memoir). But it keeps getting more interesting. Harris’s father was born in Jamaica, her mother in southern India. Her grandfather P. V. Gopalan fought for India’s independence. Castro’s grandmother Victoriana Castro grew up in San Pedro, in the Mexican state of Coahuila, and in 1922, as a seven-year-old, she travelled six hundred miles to cross the border into the United States, an orphan without a home. Just short of a century later, her grandson was appointed Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Buttigieg’s father emigrated from Malta in the nineteen-seventies. When Buttigieg ran his first campaign, for Indiana state treasurer, he and his campaign manager spent half a day coming up with a phonetic spelling and settled on “Buddha-judge,” but on the yard signs they went with “Meet Pete.” (The campaign now sells T-shirts that read “Boot Edge Edge.”) Klobuchar’s maternal grandfather, a pie maker, emigrated from Switzerland, illegally, and, as Klobuchar points out, if he tried to get into the country today the way he did in the nineteen-twenties he’d be held in detention, or deported. Her father’s grandparents all came from Slovenia; “Klobuchar means ‘hatmaker’ in Slovene,” but in the U.S. the Klobuchar men worked in the mines. “My last name is hard to pronounce,” Klobuchar writes, telling a story about being called on in her first-year torts class, in law school, to answer the question of which theory applied in a hypothetical case, and giving the answer as “foreseeability” (awarding damages based on whether someone could have foreseen the consequences). Her professor, she writes, yelled “Miss Klo-BOOSH-er, Miss Klo-BOOSH-er, do you really think the answer is FORESEEABILITY?” Then “he lay down on his back on the long table that stood in the front of the classroom, tilted his head, put his fingers in his mouth, and pretended to gag himself, all the time calling out ‘FORESEEABILITY. FORESEEABILITY. FORESEEABILITY.’ ” (Meanwhile, you picture Klobuchar, muttering, between clenched teeth, “KLOW-bu-shar, KLOW-bu-shar, KLOW-bu-shar.”) Booker traces his ancestry back to Henrietta Stamper, his great-great-grandmother, and to her father—and owner—a Virginian named James Stamper, descended from the original settlers of Jamestown, a man who also claimed as property Booker’s great-great-great-grandmother, a woman known in Booker’s genealogical research only as “Slave Mother.” Americans, together, are descended from all of these people, a family tree of tangled roots and grafted limbs and wisteria, twining along the branches, its purple flowers cascading.

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Although you can learn a lot by reading this stack of books, most of them take a very long time to say very little, and the worst of them read like résumés. “College led to a master’s degree, which led to a Rhodes Scholarship, which led to law school,” Booker writes. “Every step of the way, I had white-boards up in my bedroom or dorm room with my goals written out. I woke up and went to bed determined and focused.” Sometimes Presidential candidates write books about their vision for the country; sometimes they write books about themselves. And then, sometimes, their vision for America is a vision of themselves. Most recent campaign books aim to combine memoir and platform, no mean feat. In trying to move from their lives to their ideas, both Booker and Gillibrand lose their way and end up writing a lot about their clothes and their diets, producing books that read like the sort of self-help paperbacks you’d see on a rack next to the drugstore cash register: Selfies in Courage.

It’s not necessary to write a book about your life in order to run for President. Beto O’Rourke hasn’t bothered; instead, he blogged for a while, and live-streamed on Instagram, once memorably posting a video of his mouth while he was getting his teeth cleaned. John Hickenlooper, a Colorado governor and onetime brewer, did write a book, “The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics” (Penguin Press), with Maximillian Potter, his former speechwriter and media adviser, but it is every bit as unappealing as the view of O’Rourke’s uvula. The opening scene has Hickenlooper and his wife in couples therapy, Hickenlooper confessing that he has “issues with abandonment and intimacy” and suffered from a “general immaturity into my adult years.” Not everyone looks charming in closeup.

Most of the books by the Democratic Presidential contenders of 2020, in other words, are not great books, and some of these people just don’t seem like good people. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t make good Presidents, I guess, but it raises a question: Why do they write this stuff?

Before the nineteen-sixties, the books Presidential candidates wrote weren’t usually memoirs; they were collections of speeches. In an age of arduous travel, printing speeches was an excellent way to get ideas to voters. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln won every state in which he’d published a book called “Political Debates,” transcriptions of his 1858 debates with the Illinois senator Stephen Douglas. In 1908, “The Real Bryan: Being Extracts from the Speeches and Writings of ‘A Well-Rounded Man,’ ” promised readers that the book would help them know the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan “even as he is known by every Nebraska neighbor who has had the advantage of intimate acquaintance with the man.” Two years later, “The Real Roosevelt: His Forceful and Fearless Utterances on Various Subjects” assembled Theodore Roosevelt’s more memorable sayings, including “Populism never prospers save where men are unprosperous,” introduced with this promise by Henry Cabot Lodge: “Here in these pages is ‘The Real Man.’ We may agree or disagree with his views, but we have that satisfaction which passes all others of knowing that it is the man himself who speaks to us and not a hollow voice sounding like that of a Greek actor from behind a mask.”