Joan Didion on Election 2008
[Roxane Gay / October 17th, 2008 / Young Bright Things ]“Senator Biden himself was said to have ‘a great story,’ the one that revolved around the death of his first wife and child and taking the train from Washington to Wilmington to be with his surviving children. Senator McCain, everyone agreed, had ‘a great story.’ Now as then, the ‘story’ worked to ‘humanize’ the figure under discussion, which is to say to downplay his or her potential for trouble. Condoleezza Rice’s ‘story,’ for example, had come down to her ‘doing an excellent job as provost of Stanford’ (this had kept getting mentioned, as if everyone at Fox News had come straight off the provost beat) and being ‘an accomplished concert pianist.’”