The greatest tragedy of the New Yorker imbroglio was not that it so adequately highlighted the stupidity of mankind; rather, the shame was that there was so little attention given to the long profile piece that Ryan Lizza penned inside the magazine’s pages. Running to over 14,000 words and over 50 double-spaced pages, the article is a massive, Herculean feat of reporting about how the Obama of today – both man and politician – was formed during his days in Chicago.
Perhaps the most underrated artistic device is the profile. The profile – when well-researched and well-written – has the capacity to capture a person with clarity unrivaled by any other literary genre. There is something about the length of the greatest profiles ever written – somewhere between 8,000 and 30,000 words – that force the author to find the key information and come to clear, concise conclusions. When the facts are reported in a certain way, the author’s conclusion can strike in such a way and with such force that the reader can intuitively grasp its truth.
Ryan Lizza is one of the best profile writers, and he earns that distinction with his Obama piece. Here are a few snippets of his conclusions:
“Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them…
“…Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right.”
As we look to the upcoming election, it is crucial that we understand Obama and McCain. By understand, I mean not that we need to find out where they stand on the issues – though we should obviously do that also – I mean that we need to examine the experiences that defined each of them, look closely at the people and events who made them who they are. We need to understand, if possible, the nature of the man – his superhuman strengths and glaring weaknesses, his charm and his wit, his struggles and his successes. We need to find out this information in order to assess his ability (or inability) to make difficult decisions while crippling under the pressures of the highest office in the world.
When George W. Bush secured the Republican nomination in 1999, the New Yorker ran one of the best profile pieces of all time. Written by Nicholas Lemann, the piece brilliantly examined the formative years of Bush’s life: his time at Andover and Yale, his relationship with his father, and his ascent from alcoholism to the office of Texas governor and then to presidential nominee. With relatively little factual information to work with, Lemann guesses about the values and events that make up the core of Bush’s being. He posits that the theme of Bush’s campaign should be redemption because – by securing the nomination – he redeemed his father and redeemed himself.
The profile does what few other things can do – it knocks a man down to his bare bones and constructs an image of him on paper. That image – even if flawed – can help us to really know the man himself. The reverse is also true. It is very difficult to know a man without thinking deeply about the questions that are addressed in a great profile. If anyone thinks he or she can understand Bush on an intellectual level – along with the company he keeps and the decisions he has made during his presidency – without thinking about how he was raised, or how his father’s presidency affected him – is plainly wrong. The same is true for Obama.
[...] been a fanboi of the profile genre for some time, and I have written about it twice on this blog (here and here). Dick Polman, one of my favorite writers and teachers (as well as my potential Thesis [...]