Media Mash: Crashing an Obama Book | CNN: Getting as Bad as Fox

Chelsea Green, the independent, opportunistic Vermont book publisher, is crashing a new Obama book -- Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency by Bob Kuttner, co-founder and editor of the American Prospect -- to launch at the DNC next week in Denver.

The new book has the goal of encouraging Obama, should he get elected, to rise to the challenge of the multiple crises the country faces, particularly with the economy in deep trouble and the poor and middle class increasingly in crisis. But the book also has the potential to serve as an antidote to The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality by Jerome Corsi, a book that has been thoroughly discredited for its numerous falsehoods as well as its author's track record, which includes a slew of bigoted posts on the conservative website Free Republic and co-authorship of a discredited book attacking Sen. John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign. Nevertheless, despite a critical examination by portions of the media, the Corsi book has received tons of publicity, and because of right wing bulk buying and heavy promotion on right wing talk shows, it debuted at the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

In contrast, an excellent book by Cliff Schecter, The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him and Why Independents Shouldn't, which documented a large number of little known but disturbing facts about McCain's political career, didn't remotely get the exposure in the corporate media that the Corsi book is getting. But there is still time to build a larger audience for this book. Buy it here.

Kuttner is a veteran economic writer and successful publisher of The Prospect, a consistently sharply written and insightful inside-the-beltway voice for progressive policy advocacy. As Kuttner explains in the book, transformative presidents have been leaders who rose to greatness in moments of extreme crisis, and who took themselves and the Republic to places that seemed impossible -- Lincoln, Roosevelt, and the LBJ of the civil rights era:

Now it is time for the wheel to turn again. Barack Obama has both the national moment and the raw material to be a transformative president. A 46-year-old freshman senator, an African-American no less, does not decide to pursue his party's nomination against a universally presumed certain nominee unless he has an unerring sense of timing, confidence, and a feel for the broad stroke. Obama has exceptional skill at appealing to our better angels, and a fine capacity to be president-as-teacher. He inspires, as only a few presidents have done. But Obama will need to be a more radical president than he was a presidential candidate. Radical does not mean outside the mainstream. It means perceiving, as a leader, that radical change is necessary, discerning tacit aspirations and unmet needs in the people, and then making that radical change the mainstream view for which the people clamor.

This is not the first time Chelsea Green has rushed out timely and provocative books. George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant! (2004) and Naomi Wolf's The End of the America (2007) were both published as original trade paperbacks to promote an activist, progressive agenda and became New York Times best-sellers. (Disclosure: Don Hazen, Executive Editor of AlterNet, wrote the introduction to Don't Think of an Elephant!)