I picked up the Paris Review Interviews Vol. IV at the library yesterday, which despite having been published just a few months ago contains interviews as old as 1954 (William Styron) and as recent as 2009 (Marianne Robinson). The journal has a fine tradition of publishing interviews with notable writers that run the gamut from the louche to the illuminating, and this collection is no exception.

From 1968 there is a rambling wreck of an interview with Jack Kerouac, who was deep in his cups at that point and living with his mother in Florida. At first mere Kerouac tries to scare off the interlocutors (Ted Berrigan, Aram Saroyan and Duncan McNaughton), mistaking them for hippies come to lay flowers (or whatever) at the feet of their hero. Once she is assured that this is a literary enterprise she allows them to stay and get drunk with Kerouac as he free-associates his way past their questions.

Despite the sometimes maudlin self-congratulation in some of his answers, there are moments of luminosity and even a pointed riposte when Berrigan asks, “How come you’ve never written about Jesus?” to which Jack sputters, “I’ve never written about Jesus? In other words, you’re an insane phony who comes to my house…and…all I write about is Jesus.”

He  still had some of his wits about him, but it’s depressing to see these acolytes smothering him with the very substances — fame & alcohol — in which he ultimately suffocated.

Contrast this with the interview Gerald Clarke did with PG Wodehouse in 1974. Wodehouse was 91 then, and still going strong. “How about the Beats?” Clarke asked him. “Someone like Jack Kerouac, for instance, who died a few years ago?”

“Jack Kerouac died!” said the Master, clearly shocked. “Did he?”

“Yes.”

“Oh… Gosh, they do die off, don’t they?”

‘Deed they do. And while it may sound like sacrilege to some, I return to The Code of the Woosters with far more enthusiasm than I do anything by Kerouac. Which proves nothing, of course.

Both men were born writers. “Did you always know you would be a writer?” Clarke asked Wodehouse, who had written nearly a hundred books by then.

“Yes, always,” he replied. “I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”

In the other words of another born writer: Take it easy, but take it.

Buried deep in John Heilemann & Mark Halperin’s best-selling Game Change is an epitaph for McCain’s campaign, and as good a single example of why Obama won as I’ve seen in print. The book, in case you missed it, is a kind of pot-boilerish account of the ’08 election, chock-full of cliches, gossip, a lot of stories you remember all too well — but absolute buttered popcorn for politics lovers.

At the end of September of that year, in the midst of complete meltdown of our financial system, JMC suspended his campaign — and then returned to Washington for a White House summit that he asked for and then failed to lead. Obama throughout was calm — while McCain seemed increasingly passive and confused. Jim Wilkinson, who was working as Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s chief of staff, is quoted saying:

“I’m a pro-life, pro-gun Texas Republican. I worked all eight years for Bush. I helped sell the Iraq War. I was in the Florida recount. And I wrote a letter to John McCain asking for my five-hundred-dollar contribution back, when he pulled that stunt and came back to DC. Because it just wasn’t what a serious person does.”

Wilkinson was more than your average Bushie: he appears in Mission Al Jazeera (the book I wrote with former Marine captain Josh Rushing) as a serial propagandist, practically a dirty trickster of the Nixon stripe. He strutted around Centcom during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, wearing a three-star general’s uniform. And he wasn’t just “in the Florida recount”; he helped orchestrate the Brooks Brothers riot, one of the key roadblocks to a legitimate tally of votes in that state’s primary.

“To his amazement,” the authors write, “Wilkinson determined he would be voting for Obama.”

What, I wonder, does Wilkinson make of McCain’s current denial that he asked for that meeting at the White House? The senator, facing a challenge from JD Hayworth, a Tea Party radio host in the GOP AZ primary, is trying to s say he was “misled” by Paulson, Bush, the whole TARP thing. But as he likes to say of his opponent (and as someone like Wilkinson can remind him) “facts are stubborn things.”

There’s a fascinating story buried inside today’s Wall Street Journal about the negotiations inside the White House around the health-care proposal Obama unveiled yesterday (and that Republicans have essentially already rejected). According to this anonymously sourced report — which cites “one person close to the White House deliberations” — the version the president is putting before the GOP, and the nation, represents a “victory for those in the White House who want to press ahead with ambitious legislation,” and a rebuttal to the small-change crowd pressing for what they called “a skinny bill.”

Chief among the skinny kids is WH Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who seems to favor of passage of a health care bill — any health care bill, regardless of if it does anyone any good — as more important than achieving the goals most Democrats agree on: insuring the millions of uninsured; regulating the profits of health care insurers; eliminating the pre-existing conditions clause that allows insurers to reject those that need insurance the most.

I was among those excited by Emanuel’s appointment to chief of staff, at least at first. A lot of the president’s Chicago team seemed too wonky and not sufficiently wise to the ways of insider Washington. Rahm had the rep — he was combative and obscene; he sent an opponent a dead fish once and was nothing if not willing to fight.

But fight for what? If the change Obama promised (and has been hard-pressed to deliver, due as much to Republican intransigence as discombobulation on the Democrats’ part) is going to be worth anything, especially when it comes to a system as big and broken as health care, it’s going to have to be painful for some people — which is why insurers, and even some doctors and pharmaceutical companies are crying about the president’s proposal (which is essentially a more liberal version of the Senate bill, even though it still does not include the public option).

Emanuel and the skinny bill crowd want the passage to be painless; they just care about getting the numbers on the board, it seems. In Ryan Lizza’s 2009 New Yorker profile, Emanuel famously bashed Paul Krugman’s criticism of giving the GOP tax cuts to pass the stimulus bill. “How many bills has he passed?” he sneered of the Times columnist — unconsciously echoing Joseph Stalin’s remark about the Pope, “How many divisions has he got?”

You can imagine the chief of staff grabbing his manhood and saying, “I got your moral authority right here!” But it seems the president has gone with the conscience crowd on this one, and is not simply weighing the chances of getting a bill passed (slim, even via “reconciliation”) but is asking the question: Why are we here if not to fight for what’s right?

This time, anyway.

If you haven’t watched Obama at the House Republican Conference in Baltimore yesterday, you owe it to yourself to look at some of the video. Especially if you supported his candidacy and have wondered since last November if he had the mettle to get the job done. Especially if you have wondered if he really was invested in dialogue with the GOP and getting beyond bipartisanship. Especially if you watched the Republicans during the State of the Union address — slumped in their seats, sitting on their hands, playing with their Blackberries, altogether looking like a bunch of punks kept after school on a sunny day — and wondered if there was any chance of the president ever really reaching these mooks.

First of course he had to listen to them — many with a variation of the “When did you stop beating your wife?” question that he gently and firmly dismantled with a graceful “let’s look at some of the premises first” response. But acknowledging when he had fallen short of his own goals (greater transparency in the run-up to the health care debate being one) while giving them more respect than they generally give him.

“This is similar to what many Republicans proposed to Bill Clinton when he was doing his debate on health care,” he said of the health care bill now before the Congress. “We’ve got to close the gap a little between the rhetoric and the reality… whether it’s on health care or energy or what have you.” And the reality gap, the rhetoric overdose was  “not just on your side, it’s on our side as well. It’s part of what’s happened to our politics.”

There were no Democrats present, and hence no applause when he refuted the attacks with candor and even humor (“You’d think this was some Bolshevik plot”). “I think both sides can take some blame for the sour climate on Capital Hill,” he allowed. “What I can do maybe to help is to try and bring Republican and Democratic leadership together on a more regular basis with me. That’s, I think, maybe a failure on my part.”

Say what? Remember when George W. Bush was asked if he had any regrets, could think of anything he would do differently, and he couldn’t think of a single thing, couldn’t even make one up? (That box on his back must have been on the fritz.)

“Look,” Obama usually begins his responses by saying. It’s a verbal tic, and a time-buyer: the equivalent of Reagan’s “Well,” or the “ums” and “likes” and “you knows” of most speakers. I think when he says that he is calibrating his response — he doesn’t want to sound like he’s lecturing people and I know that is how most of his opponents think of him. But he is also inviting you to join him in observing, as independently as possible, how far we’ve fallen — and imagine how we might get up. Listen to the man. Look.

If you didn’t watch the president’s State of the Union speech last night, well, where the hell were you? I know: a lot of people think the SOU is politics at its worst, all ceremony and symbolism (the jumping up and sitting down, the endless procession in and out) but after the year Obama had, weren’t you even curious what he might say, or how he might say it?

Often the president at this treacherous juncture is reduced to the style of a husband apologizing to his wife after a weekend of fishing with the guys (or whatever they’re calling it now): “I’m gonna fix the roof! And mow that lawn! And we’ll go out Saturday night, hire a babysitter! And hasn’t it been a while since we’ve seen your mother?” Big finish, followed by make-up sex — or more likely, slow ironic clapping or worse: a steely stare, a shrug, silence.

The Republicans had plenty of the latter for Obama. He even joked about it, bless him, saying, “I thought I’d get some applause on that one” when he mentioned tax cuts and the GOP side did its impression of a bunch of wooden Indians. That kind of partisan silence was not surprising — what, you thought they were going to lay down their arms, or opposition, especially in light of having just elected another senator? Now that they can truly prevent anything from happening if they remain united in opposition?

No, the most amazing quiet — the kind where you can hear a pin drop, where the only sound of in the chamber was that of the president dropping his hands on the podium — came late in the speech: “I campaigned on the promise of change — change we can believe in, the slogan went. And right now, I know there are many Americans who aren’t sure if they still believe we can change — or that I can deliver it.”

First of all, it’s hard to remember a president inviting so much criticism — and with the Republicans in lockstep against him, who needs an invite? But to be self-critical without being dismissive, to acknowledge that you may have promised more than you delivered, without reneging on the promises, is more than skillful politics.

“Our administration has had some political setbacks this year and some of them were deserved,” he continued. “But I wake up every day knowing that they are nothing compared to the setbacks that families all across this country have faced this year. And what keeps me going — what keeps me fighting — is that despite all these setbacks, that spirit of determination and optimism, that fundamental decency that has always been at the core of the American people, that lives on.”

The silence you heard may have been truly nonpartisan: the amazement that greets anyone when they try to be truly honest, and even humble in the face of the responsibilities that come with political office.