THE PLANK MARCH 3, 2008
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Adam Kirsch has an
excellent piece today on the Arts & Letters page of The New York Sun comparing
Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s memoirs. Jason recently excavated
the books’ backstories, but the critic Kirsch addresses their surfaces. Using Lionel Trilling’s “Sincerity and Authenticity” as a lens, he ascribes the former attribute to Clinton and the latter to Obama:
Sincerity "implies a public
end": It can only be manifested in relation to other people, because it involves
meaning in your heart what you say aloud. Authenticity, on the other hand, is a
private virtue, or still more emphatically, an anti-public one, since it
regards all intercourse with other people as potentially deceptive. If
sincerity is saying what you mean, authenticity is being what you are.
Each virtue, however, contains a pitfall: “"[I]f the vice of sincerity is self-pity, the
vice of authenticity is narcissism." It’s interesting and fortunate
for Obama that his and Clinton’s vices are complementary
rather than opposed: His surge may have fostered a certain arrogance, but it
has been far less dramatic than the litany of excuses with which Clinton and her campaign
have tried to dismiss him. Kirsch writes that “the overreliance of Mr. Obama's
campaign on his personal charisma is already emerging as the favorite target of
his opponents,” but Clinton’s
line of attack has been so scattershot that if often just comes off as an
elaborate, accidental exhibition of self-pity.
--Ben Crair
