per se is no substitute for good judgment in determining the
quality of a leader.
To an unusual degree, the lives of the four contenders were
the stuff of biopics. As so often happens in our culture, where
even brands of toothpaste are marketed via their own carefully
honed “stories,” the race became a battle of competing narra-
tives. McCain, who took as his campaign slogan “Country
First,” embodied a tale of courage and patriotic sacrifice as a
former navy pilot shot down over Vietnam who was tortured
while a prisoner of war in the notorious Hanoi Hilton. Since
then, he has earned a reputation as a maverick for bucking his
party on such matters as immigration and cutting taxes for the
wealthiest Americans (positions he later reversed). Born in
1961, Obama had a more exotic, more contemporary story, one
that emphasized his ties with the rest of the world. He is the
son of a black Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas,
who had struggled to raise him in Hawaii and Indonesia. All
but abandoned by his father and briefly on food stamps as a
child, Obama became the first African American editor of the
Harvard Law Review. Instead of joining a four-star law firm af-
ter Harvard, he had begun his public life as a community
organizer in Chicago. Obama, who acknowledged that he
didn’t look like the other men on American currency, ran on
the promise of change.
Like McCain and Obama, Biden had experienced a life-
changing event, a crucible that shaped his character and his
leadership. Biden was twenty-nine in 1972 when he was elected
to the Senate, the second youngest person in history to win the
office. He was in Washington, getting ready to move into his
new office, when a phone call revealed that his wife and infant
daughter had died in an auto accident back in Delaware.
Epilogue to the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition