Sycophancy in Our Time

Once upon a time Lyndon Johnson's chief of staff, Jack Valenti, gave a speech in which he expressed the view that "I sleep better each night knowing that Lyndon Johnson is my president," followed by several sentences of praise for his boss's wisdom, compassion, vision, and strength of character. The reaction, in the nation's capital of 1965, was widespread laughter: Even Herblock, the Washington Post cartoonist who reliably protected Democrats in office, felt obliged to depict Valenti as a whipped servant on the White House plantation.

Now, THE SCRAPBOOK brings you up to 2009, and introduces you to Rocco Landesman, the Broadway producer who is chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Last week Landesman delivered an address in which he took (in THE SCRAPBOOK's considered opinion) Obama-worship to surreal new heights.

This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.