Lincoln team of rivals6/29/2023 Bill Clinton read the library, little good it did him his first term was a late-night scholarly mess, with book-wielding lackeys jostling for prominence. Wait up there, you might say, take it easy on the philosopher-king line. And now, so it seems, his decision to pick Clinton - barring unforeseen clangers from her husband's fundraisers - has been substantially informed by a reading of Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of Lincoln, Team of Rivals. Instead, Obama cited a difficult and interesting book by a political scientist at Princeton, Larry Bartels' new Unequal Democracy. He also recently set tongues wagging amongst Washington wonks by referencing a few works that avoided the normal mix of populism and posturing common in political bedtime reading: Blair flicks through the Koran, George Osborne loves nudge, and so on. His first book, Dreams of My Father, was lyrically written, and heavy with allusions and references. Yet, even without getting sidetracked into Bush knocking, its worth noting that Obama is an unusually studious politician. Something normally a religious text, or a neocon tract like Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy. Sure, President Bush occasionally let it be known that he was reading Office, and Obama's modeling himself on Abraham Lincoln. Obama's reading habits, the renewed influence of authors in the Oval Beneath it, though, is a more interesting story, of T his morning's papers are full of the Clinton saga - the one which will
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