Harvard Book Store welcomes national political columnist for Yahoo News Matt Bai for a discussion of his latest book, “All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid.”
BOOK SIGNING DETAILS
11/07/14 07:00 PM
Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave.,
Cambridge, MA 02138
About the Author
Matt Bai is national political columnist for Yahoo! News. Prior to that, he was the chief political correspondent for the New York Times Magazine, where he covered both the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns. Bai often explores issues of generational change in American politics and society. His seminal cover stories in the magazine include the 2008 cover essay “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?” and a 2004 profile of John Kerry titled “Kerry’s Undeclared War.” His work was honored in both the 2005 and 2006 editions of The Best American Political Writing. Bai is a graduate of the College of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University in Medford, MA. In 2014, Bai appeared as himself in the second season of TV show House of Cards.
About the Book
In 1987, Gary Hart—articulate, dashing, refreshingly progressive—seemed a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination for president and led George H. W. Bush comfortably in the polls. And then: rumors of marital infidelity, an indelible photo of Hart and a model snapped near a fatefully named yacht (Monkey Business), and it all came crashing down in a blaze of flashbulbs, the birth of 24-hour news cycles, tabloid speculation, and late-night farce. Matt Bai shows how the Hart affair marked a crucial turning point in the ethos of political media—and, by extension, politics itself—when candidates’ “character” began to draw more fixation than their political experience. Bai offers a poignant, highly original, and news-making reappraisal of Hart’s fall from grace (and overlooked political legacy) as he makes the compelling case that this was the moment when the paradigm shifted-private lives became public, news became entertainment, and politics became the stuff of Page Six.
“Gary Hart. Remember him: the presidential contender who rode a boat named Monkey Business into a media whirlpool? You should, as [this] book…makes clear. And the reason isn’t so much the scandal that swallowed him or his particular exit from the campaign arena. It’s the warning that his story sounded—about a new brutality on the campaign trail, about uncharted waters of media invasiveness and about the way both would wind up culling the herd, not in favor of the strongest candidates but in favor of those so driven or vacuous that the caress of the spotlight redeems the indignities of the process.” —The New York Times
