An article in today’s New York Times gives an interesting view about Barack Obama and his meteoric rise.  The article says that Obama, “has risen in politics less on his track record than on his telling of his life story — a tale he has packaged into two hugely successful books.”

The article, “Obama’s Story, Written by Obama,” tells how  Obama’s success as a writer interweaved with his success as a politician.  The article says, “The story of Mr. Obama’s life as an author tells as much about him as some of the stories he has recounted in his books. It possesses at times the same charmed quality sometimes ascribed to his political ascent — an impression of ease, if not exactly effortlessness, that obscures a more complex amalgam of drive, ambition, timing and the ability to recognize an opportunity and to do what it takes to seize it.”  Excerpts from the article:

• He untethered himself from his longtime literary agent in favor of Robert B. Barnett, the Washington lawyer who had gotten Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton an $8 million book advance and then landed Mr. Obama a $1.9 million, three-book deal.
• He finished his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” 18 months into his first term in the Senate, edited the proofs late at night on a Congressional fact-finding trip to Africa, plunged into campaigning for colleagues in the midterm elections, took time out for a 12-city book tour, appeared on programs like “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and “Charlie Rose,” then announced four months later that he was running for president.
• Out of his story, he has also drawn the central promise of his campaign: if a biracial son of a Kenyan and a Kansan could reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable in himself, a divided country could do the same.
• His memoir is, as one publisher put it, “the single most vetted book in American politics right now.” Written at a time when Mr. Obama says he was thinking less about a career in politics than about simply writing a good book, it leaves an impression of candidness and authenticity that gives it much of its power. Reporters have questioned Mr. Obama’s use of fictional techniques like composite characters, but some editors and critics say that is common in memoirs.
• “This is an example of what happens when you look at things backwards,” Mr. Obama said when asked whether he had his political future in mind when he first began to write. “Then everything looks like, ‘Ah! Of course this was part of some well-calibrated consideration.’ But frankly, no. It would have been very hard for me to anticipate that I’d be where I am today, where a book that I wrote almost 20 years ago now would even be read.”
• Mr. Obama’s story first surfaced publicly in February 1990, when he was elected as the first black president of The Harvard Law Review. An initial wire service report described him simply as a 28-year-old, second-year student from Hawaii who had “not ruled out a future in politics”; but in the days that followed, newspaper reporters grew interested and produced long, detailed profiles of Mr. Obama.
• The coverage prompted a call to him from Jane Dystel, a gravelly-voiced literary agent described by Peter Osnos, then the publisher of Times Books, as “a good journeyman with a hard edge.” The home page of her firm’s Web site currently features clients’ best sellers including “Lies at the Altar: The Truth About Great Marriages.” Ms. Dystel suggested Mr. Obama write a book proposal. Then she got him a contract with Poseidon Press, a now-defunct imprint of Simon & Schuster. When he missed his deadline, she got him another contract and a $40,000 advance from Times Books.
• Mr. Obama acknowledged his use of pseudonyms, composite characters, approximated dialogue and events out of chronological order. He was writing at a time well before a recent series of publishing scandals involving fabrication in memoirs. “He was trying to be careful of people’s feelings,” said Deborah Baker, the editor on the first paperback edition of the book. “The fact is, it all had a sort of larger truth going on that you couldn’t make up.”
• The book came out in the summer of 1995, shortly before Mr. Obama announced that he was running for the Illinois State Senate. …Kodansha Globe, a now-defunct branch of a Japanese company, bought the paperback rights for $5,000 to $7,500 and printed about 6,000 copies in 1996, said Philip Turner, Kondansha’s editor in chief at the time.
• “Even now, it’s hard to get my mind around the idea that this person is in politics,” said Ms. Baker, who described Mr. Obama as a born writer. … “Barack is worth millions now,” Mr. Osnos said. “It’s almost all based on these two books, two books not based on a job of prodigious research or risking one’s life as a reporter in Iraq. He has written about himself. Being able to take your own life story and turn it into this incredibly lucrative franchise, it’s a stunning fact.”

From The New York Times, Obama’s Story, Written by Obama

One web-site I like to check regularly is a site that references recent economic articles — Economist’s View. Today, I found this interesting article with an interesting theory on why the unemployment rate remains low and explaining the difference between the unemployment rate and the jobless rate.

About unemployment rate, the article says, “Historically, the rate is actually somewhat low. At 5.0 percent, it is lower than the average for most years since the 1970s. Still, there is some concern that the low rate does not necessarily imply a strong labor market because of how the unemployment measure is calculated. For instance, the unemployment rate measures only a subset of employable people—those in a country’s workforce who are over the age of 16, do not currently have a job, and have been actively seeking work in the past month. It does not account for discouraged workers, workers who want a job but are not currently looking due to adverse job market conditions, or part-timers who would like full-time work if it were available.”

About the jobless rate, the article says, “One alternative measure of employment conditions is the jobless rate, defined as the percentage of the population without a job. Unlike the unemployment rate, its denominator is the entire working-age population, not just the labor force, so it does not have the problem of a denominator that fluctuates over the business cycle. Recently some observers have noted that the jobless rate for prime-age men is historically high.”