Live from the Campaign Trail: The Greatest Presidential Campaign Speeches of the Twentieth Century and How they Shaped Modern America
By Michael A. Cohen
Walker & Company, 562 pages, $16.99

When Barack Obama accepts the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, he will deliver his speech the way John F. Kennedy did in 1960: in a stadium.

The image of a stadium full of people waiting to hear a speech—a political speech, no less—underscores a somewhat overlooked aspect of the American scene: Speeches matter. In a day when comments muttered into an open microphone, or a distasteful joke captured on YouTube (macaca!) can alter the course of a campaign, it’s still the vision and policies outlined in speeches that shape our political landscape.  read more »

John Edwards could have taken the Jim Webb route when NPR grilled him yesterday about his interest in reprising his role as the Democratic vice presidential nominee, but instead he said this: "I am prepared to seriously consider anything, anything he asks me to do for our country."

If Barack Obama were to choose Edwards, it would create an unusual situation in American politics. Very rarely does a losing vice presidential nominee land on someone else's ticket in a future election. Edwards would be the fourth person ever to do this, and the first since 1916.

The others:  read more »

]]> http://www.observer.com/2008/politics/john-edwards-and-rare-occasion-two-time-losing-running-mate#comments Politics Adlai Stevenson I Alton Parker Barack Obama Benjamin Harrison Charles Fairbanks Charles Pinckney Henry Davis James Blaine Jim Webb John Edwards John McCain Rufus King Samuel Tilden Theodore Roosevelt Thomas Hendricks William Howard Taft William Jennings Bryan William McKinley Wed, 09 Jul 2008 11:52:14 -0400 Steve Kornacki 71631 at http://www.observer.com http://www.observer.com/2008/nation-uncommitted-distracted-dilettantes

THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON
By Susan Jacoby
Pantheon, 356 pages, $26

A few hundred pages into The Division of Labor in Society, a 1893 tract notable for its eyeball-bleeding tedium and the insouciant unfalsifiability of its categorizations, Emile Durkheim finally addresses a matter the modern reader might care to hear about: namely, “the division of intellectual labor.”

“Science,” Durkheim writes, “carved up into a host of detailed studies that have no link with one another, no longer forms a solid whole. … The division of labor cannot therefore be pushed too far without being a source of disintegration.” Durkheim, of course, spent the rest of his life establishing sociology as its own special, separate science.  read more »