Sore Winners

Jonathan Yardley

Like many others, John Powers is appalled by Bush and most of those by whom he is surrounded, but unlike most of Bush's critics -- Molly Ivins, Al Franken, Michael Moore et al. -- he takes Bush seriously. He understands that whatever the president's intellectual limitations, he is a representative figure who embodies, at this peculiar and scary moment in our history, aspects of the American state of mind and heart that cannot be dismissed as merely his own idiosyncrasies.
— The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

From Bush's infamous "how dare you ask Chirac a question in French" press conference to Colin and Condi as tokenism writ large, L.A. Weekly deputy editor Powers marshals a host of sometimes obvious, media-based critiques in portraying Bush & co. as "sore winners," the products of a populist, social Darwinist culture where doing what you want because you can is OK. Episodic chapters veer in too many directions, incorporating pre-cooked chunks of presidential media history, myriad literary and pop culture allusions (everything from Robert Musil and Preston Sturges to Alice Sebold and Courtney Love) and even Powers's decidedly layman's assessment of what he deems (sore winner) Rumsfeld's lack of planning for postwar Iraq. But Powers's deconstructions of Bush-era political coverage, though too predictable when dealing with the right, have marked range and subtlety when discussing the left's attempts at fighting back. He's best, though, on the sore winner-effect writ large, describing a kind of flip side of the late '90s Bobos in Paradise: a mean-spirited, you-deserve-it mentality that Powers finds in everything from American Splendor to American Idol. Powers can be very funny (as when advocating an "irony enema" for commentator Roger Rosenblatt), but scion Bush as sore winner isn't news, and the book is too thick with kitchen-sink ruminations to work as a whole. Agent, Bonnie Nadell. (On sale Aug. 3) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A bittersweet, breezy, smart look at current politics in the larger context of American culture-or what passes for it. "If Bill Clinton was the classical analog president-eager to hug the whole world and make everyone love him-Bush is our first fully digital model." So observes LA Weekly editor and media columnist Powers, who bravely admits that he reads books, doesn't have anything in particular against the French, and reckons that even if Bush supporters are fundamentally and irrevocably wrong, "they are ordinary people who want a safe, orderly life for themselves and their kids and fear that American culture has lost its moral bearing." As perhaps it has. Certainly it's lost any sense of manners, which explains why we're now overrun by "bad winners," "bragging, sneering, lording it over the losers, and promoting themselves with a crassness that would leave Duddy Kravitz blushing." Thus Bill O'Reilly gloats over how many books he sells, Dennis Miller crows that Americans ought to be kicking ass wherever we go, and Ann Coulter fills the air with cryptofascist bleatings about how liberals are traitors. Bush, Powers suggests, is the worst of the bad losers, behaving as if he has some sort of mandate from the American people when he squeaked-some might even say stole-into office. Powers takes brilliant turns, as when he carefully compares-and-contrasts Osama bin Laden and Dubya (both trust-fund kids, both veterans of heavy partying in their youth who discovered religion and, worse, now think in "the glossy black-and-white of the faithful"). If his arguments get a little diffuse when his gaze shifts from Bush to the larger culture, Powers sneaks in enough right-on digs at currenticons-Schwarzenegger, Reagan, and even, in a nice bit of table-turning, Michael Moore ("thanks to a president he thoroughly detests, his share of the Ownership Society keeps getting bigger")-to cover the price of admission. Solid work from a cultural critic who merits a broader audience. Agent: Bonnie Nadell/Frederick Hill Associates