Paradigm Publishers Looks at Presidency with a Jaundiced Eye

Paradigm’s lead title for Fall 08 is Ambushed! A Cartoon History of the Bush Administration, by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jim Morin. This book, according to marketing and sales people, is not so funny, and is actually a serious indictment of the missteps taken by Bush and his 7 + years in office. It discusses issues in detail, from Enron to Katrina, the budget deficit to the “global war on terror” that lost America many friends and inspired enemies worldwide. Morin, a political cartoonist for the Miami Herald, draws his caricatures of Bush, Cheney and their cronies in a whimsical style. Pat Oliphant, legendary editorial cartoonist, says of Morin’s work, “he has all the attributes of a first-rate cartoonist, including a fine design, and drafting sense and a cunning eye for the unusual.”

Another interesting new book from Paradigm is Spinner-in-Chief: How Presidents Sell Their Policies and Themselves, by Stephen J. Farnsworth, a communications professor at George Mason University. A journalist by trade, Farnsworth lays out a well-written history of how presidents frame the issues to their advantage, and attempt to limit the amount of public debate over important policies to favor themselves. It includes a primer on the 2008 election and how candidates use or misuse the media. With this book readers can learn to be smart consumers of government and the media.

A book that Paradigm was successful with in Fall 2007 was Barack Obama: The Improbable Quest, by John K. Wilson. That book laid out Obama’s essential ideas and his viability as a presidential candidate in a pretty favorable light. Wilson worked with Obama on his early campaigns from his home base at University of Chicago. Now Paradigm is coming out with a much more nuanced work, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, by Paul Street, a former director of the Chicago Urban League. This is a critical and unfiltered look at Obama’s career, his connections, and his remarkable campaign for the White House. Street worked with Obama in various primary campaigns, and witnessed first-hand the rise of the Obama phenomenon in American political culture. While Obama is aggressively touted as the agent of change in the 2008 election, Street dissects his financial profile and his connection to specific corporate and financial interests. He shows that Obama progressive persona is marketed by campaign strategists, filtered through the media, and that in fact Obama is no magical exception to the narrow-spectrum political culture that has prevailed for so long in American political tradition. He is in fact more of the same.