Casey N. Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

It was the best of hugs; it was the worst of hugs. Or so the description might have gone had Charlie Crist labored a bit longer on his new memoir, in which the erstwhile governor of Florida—who is now campaigning for the job again—relives the fateful embrace with President Obama that he claims sunk his political fortunes in 2009. Rather than try for style, Crist renders the moment with the racy, staccato gusto that one might expect from a pulpy romance.

“We shook hands. The new president leaned forward and gave me a hug. Reach. Pull. Release.” A hundred or so words later, Crist finishes: “I didn’t think a thing about it as it was happening. But it changed the rest of my life. Reach, pull, release—just like that.”


This is, of course, not only mawkish prose, but pure fiction. A hug didn’t ruin Crist’s career as a Republican; his support of the president’s controversial $787 billion economic stimulus package did. Crist’s subsequent wandering party affiliations—he became an Independent to avoid being clobbered in the 2010 Republican primary, and more recently became a Democrat to run in this year’s gubernatorial race—were also of his own making and had nothing to do with who he was throwing his arms around in public.

But fiction is yours to write if you’re an aspiring politician with a book deal. Crist’s The Party’s Over: How the Extreme Right Hijacked the GOP and I Became a Democrat, released in February, isn’t an aberration in the genre of campaign memoir—indeed, it’s an exemplar of the smarm produced by the union between politics and publishing. Hillary Clinton's memoir, due out June 10, promises "candid reflections about key moments during her time as Secretary of State." But don't bet on it: These forgettable books are a yellow brick road where heartless prose, brainless policy prescription and cowardly confession meet.

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It used to be that political biographies were written by biographers, and politicians waited until they left office to write their memoirs. Now, it seems like you can’t run for office without first penning a bestseller. And despite a news media more than equipped to sift through everything a candidate has done, aspirants for public office nonetheless insist on writing, or at least co-writing, a version of their own life stories. By design, campaign memoirs are meant to introduce candidates with a narrative that’s longer than a press release or sound bite. John McCain was cast as heroic POW from a family of naval warriors in Faith of My Fathers; Mitt Romney assumed the role of economic savior in Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games.

Write Your Own Campaign Book! Think you’ve got what it takes to contribute to the most banal genre in American letters? You definitely do. Just follow these 8 tips from the pros: 1. Mix in a torrent of metaphors. A real deluge: “When the rain started to fall on America’s picnic, Washington hung up a big old plastic tarp to protect us from the deluge. (Ever wonder why they call some of these things ‘TARP funds’?) Good intentions? Maybe. But a bad decision. The problem was, the rain just kept coming. The tarp started sagging in the middle and filling up with water. Poke it with a broom handle all you want, try to drain some of the rainwater over the sides, but the blanket below is getting awfully wet in the meantime. Everyone can see the tarp’s starting to tear at the seams, and we’ve run out of duct tape. This whole thing’s going to collapse—and the picnic will simply be over. Time for a new plan.” —Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Courage to Stand: An American Story 2. Be grandiose about your calling: “I became totally convinced that serving the public was how I wanted to spend my life. I didn’t care so much about making money. It wasn’t the fame or the power that drove me. This might sound corny—I don’t know—but the joy of helping people was almost indescribable. I felt like I had found my purpose in life.” —Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, The Party’s Over: How the Extreme Right Hijacked the GOP and I Became a Democrat 3. Aim high with your book title: Former CEO, Godfather’s Pizza, Herman Cain, This is Herman Cain! My Journey to the White House 4. Don’t worry when nothing much happens. Just keep typing: “The green grass smelled so good, I couldn’t believe all of California wasn’t outside for a walk on an afternoon like this. I looked up the road and tried to see around the trees that lay ahead. The turnaround point wasn’t far off, so I retied a shoelace and mentally shifted gears. ‘Dang, I must be getting old,’ I mumbled. My knees creaked underneath me as I stood up. It had been a while since I felt that stiffening and hurt you first feel when you stop in the middle of a run before picking up again. I started running again, and it wasn’t long before I started feeling pretty good, because I started thinking about some pretty good things. We’d been through amazing days, and really, there wasn’t one thing in my life to complain about. I felt such freedom, such hope, such thankfulness for our country, a place where nothing is hopeless.” —Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Going Rogue: An American Life 5. Compliment your readers: “… the people of America have extraordinary power, and when the American people work together, in common cause, there is nothing that we cannot achieve.” —Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, Winning Back America 6. A little romance helps: “… there was the matter of Donna Fletcher, the beautiful daughter of an American missionary who had every boy in school after her. One night, we were at a party playing Spin the Bottle. Donna spun and the bottle pointed at me; she came over and kissed me right on the lips. The next school day, I opened the top of my desk and found a love note from her. This was exciting! But what should I do?” —Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson , Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life 7. Be thankful for adversity: “I look back on my life now, though, and I can honestly say that there isn’t one thing I would change: not the arrest, not the violence, not the hunger, not the beatings and the brute struggles, not even cleaning up someone else’s vomit in the stairwell of my dorm at Tufts for $10 in quick cash from the resident adviser because I had no money for extra food.” —Former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, Against All Odds: My Life of Hardship, Fast Breaks, and Second Chances 8. Paint a picture that keeps ‘em guessing: “I used to say I had great faith in the American people—and I really meant it. I wasn’t just saying it in speeches; it was pillow talk with my wife.” —Vice President Joe Biden, Promises to Keep

Candidates kick-start their campaigns with these books hoping to offer voters honey that will outlast whatever vinegar gets subsequently turned up by the press. But that sweetness is what makes these books so sickening. The authors of these doorstoppers play a game of autobiographical boggle where the only dice are faith, family, grit and patriotism.

“We are free,” Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor, wrote in Courage to Stand: An American Story, “because, throughout our history, Americans have embraced the virtues of individual responsibility, integrity, courage, and faith in God.” Former Texas Governor Rick Perry more or less agrees; in his book Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington he explains the roots of American greatness thusly, “we have done it by believing in the individual, by defending liberty, no matter the price, and by demonstrating a living, abiding faith that has compelled us throughout the generations to act against evil and to advance good.” Just shake the dice, and let the words land where they will.

In spite of the formulaic prose, there’s a recipe for financial success. Indeed, the publishing industry loves these campaign memoirs, blowing six-figure advances like kisses: $1.25 million to Sarah Palin for Going Rogue: An American Life; $700,000 to Scott Brown for Against All Odds: My Life of Hardship, Fast Breaks, and Second Chances; $800,000 to Marco Rubio for An American Son. Then-Senator Barack Obama’s $425,000 advance for The Audacity of Hope seems positively modest by comparison.

It may surprise you, but these books are actually safe bets for publishers—even if the public doesn’t buy, the campaigns themselves will turn them into bestsellers. That’s thanks to a practice first blessed by the Federal Election Commission in 1996, when New York Sen. Alfonse D’Amato’s reelection committee was allowed to use campaign funds to purchase thousands of copies of his book Power, Pasta, and Politics to give as thank-you gifts to donors. Palin’s PAC spent $63,000 on copies of Going Rogue, offering signed books to donors who gave more than $100; Herman Cain paid $100,000 in campaign funds to his own company for copies of the optimistically titled This is Herman Cain! My Journey to the White House. Not only can candidates use campaign funds to take their books to the top of the bestseller list, they can also pay their campaigns to use mailing lists for promoting them, exploit every minute of the book tour for earned media and incentivize political donations with complimentary copies.

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It hasn’t always been this way. For much of America’s history, a campaign autobiography was unthinkable. Davy Crockett wrote the first in advance of his losing bid for the Whig nomination for President in the 1836 election, but it would be decades before another politician dared to follow in the footsteps of the King of the Wild Frontier. Sen. John F. Kennedy—a dashing war hero with a biography that would later sell mountains of books—wrote Profiles in Courage with an eye on the presidency, but even he avoided telling his own story, instead focusing on eight other senators.

So, when Jimmy Carter published Why Not the Best? in June of 1976, the book was celebrated as something wholly original. “Jimmy Carter,” the New York Times announced, “has contrived a new literary form, the campaign biography written as autobiography by the candidate himself.” The appropriateness of that verb—“contrived”—has endured in the intervening decades. Like admissions essays written by consultants or novels written by committee, these books are rarely the work of the candidate alone. Crist’s was co-authored with Ellis Henican, “a Newsday columnist and popular TV commentator;” when Bill Richardson, the former New Mexico Governor, wrote Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life it was “with” Michael Ruby; onetime Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown didn’t concede a byline, but did give Lyric Winik $100,000 and a mention in his acknowledgements “for the care she gave to help put my story into words” (incidentally, almost the exact same expression of gratitude—“I am especially grateful to Lyric Winik, who helped me put my story into words”—that Laura Bush offered in her own memoir a year earlier).

The terms of these publishing schemes were briefly exposed in 1999, when president-to-be George W. Bush fired Mickey Herskowitz, a Houston sportswriter and old pal who was co-authoring his campaign memoir A Charge to Keep. An anonymous source told The Sunday Telegraphthat Bush’s campaign staff didn’t want the book “dealing in any way with the issues, or the specifics of the issues,” so the campaign replaced Herskowitz with a scribe familiar with the candidate’s political message: Karen Hughes, Bush’s communications director. A Charge to Keep offered a heaping helping of banality that inoculated the candidate against the addiction stories and business scandals that would be revealed by other biographers.

The move to literally control the narrative points to the reason these campaign books make for such lousy reading: Any politician who is popular enough to attract a publisher’s attention already has too much to jeopardize with personal candor or political complexity. Mostly, these books provide the candidates the chance to say nothing at all for pages and pages and pages. Take Herman Cain’s disastrous contribution to the genre, which featured an explanation about why he wouldn’t be offering any kind of foreign policy agenda: “I think a president should first be briefed on classified intelligence about America’s relationships before offering opinions.” Even when they try to address controversy, the candidates are rarely capable of complexity. Consider Marco Rubio’s An American Son, the Florida’s senator’s 2013 autobiography, where instead of addressing allegations about his abuse of campaign funds and Republican Party credit cards, he waves them away as shoddy recordkeeping: “For much of my political career I was very young, very busy and very inexperienced, and sometimes I was sloppy in some of my practices.”

It may be that in life the less you say the better off you are, but the logic of the campaign memoir is that the more smarm you can smear across the page, the better protected you are against any future criticism. You can even get away with dodging questions by saying you addressed that at great length in your book, which hardly anyone will bother reading. Maybe the donors who are gifted these books page through them, but the only sure audience seems to be journalists and opposition teams who study their every word, hoping for something, anything that might be controversial. Rick Perry and Mitt Romney exchanged barbs over their respective campaign memoirs in 2012: Romney contending that Perry’s Fed Up! had declared Social Security unconstitutional; Perry insisting that Romney’s No Apology: The Case for American Greatness had argued the Massachusetts’s health-care plan was a template for national health care. Those were rare sparks from a flame-retardant genre.

One curious exception is President Obama’s first memoir, Dreams From My Father, which was published in 1995—so far from his run for the presidency that it barely counts as a campaign memoir. Obama’s first book wasn’t about politics, but personhood: an ongoing search for identity rather than an assertion of it. Years away from his campaign for the Senate and more than two decades ahead of his first national campaign, Obama wrote with beauty and candor that even he wouldn’t risk in his follow-up book. By the time he was a senator contemplating a run for the White House, he fell in line with the demands of the genre and offered merely an extended stump speech in 2006’s The Audacity of Hope.

Would that we could hope for anything audacious from a book-writing candidate—something like what Mark Twain produced a year before the presidential election of 1880. It was a farce and only a few hundred words, but Twain wrote: “I have pretty much made up my mind to run for president.”

“What the country wants,” he said, “is a candidate who cannot be injured by investigation of his past history, so that the enemies of the party will be unable to rake up anything against him that nobody ever heard of before.”

In that spirit, he admitted to shooting his “rheumatic grandfather” because the man snored, fleeing the Battle of Gettysburg because he was afraid, and burying his aunt beneath a grapevine that “needed fertilizing.” Twain confessed freely his two most unpopular policy positions: an indifference to the raging currency debates and his disdain for the needy, who, he suggested, could be used for improving relations with cannibal islands should his campaign slogan be enacted: “Desiccate the poor workingman; stuff him into sausages.”

Twain offered everything that a campaign memoir promises to be without any of the audience-approved sound bites that clutter the real political autobiographies. The trouble, of course, is that it’s an inherently flawed category of authors—writers whose greatest accomplishment is unrealized aspiration. Until someone comes out swinging with the honesty of Mark Twain, it’d be better to leave the campaign book unwritten and focus later on the memoirs.