There are a lot of reasons to be saddened by the suicide of David Foster Wallace, but rereading his 2000 piece on John McCain, it's hard not to wish we knew what he thought about the candidate today.
Back then, Wallace was assigned to the Straight Talk Express by Rolling Stone, a "non-professional pencil" forced to contend with unending inanity of the presidential primaries.
In the way only he could, Wallace described Larry King as looking like a giant bug and McCain himself as being "somewhat in the ballpark of a real human being."
Reading the piece now makes you sad not only for the author's death, but for a time when we thought politics were bad, but had no idea how much worse they could get.
He talks about the exhaustion of being lied to by politicians, about being spun and distracted and confused by marketing ploys dressed up as policy, and you just think, "brother, you don't know the half of it."
It also offers a mournful glimpse of McCain the way he once was, with Mike Murphy by his side and the ability to proclaim his own political honesty without making people cringe.
"I'm going to tell you something. I may have said some things here today that maybe you don't agree with, and I might have said some things you hopefully do agree with," McCain said back then. "But I will always. Tell you. The truth."
But even then, Wallace saw the conflict in John McCain -- the battle between what was real and what was realpolitik.
"The confusion you'll feel is not all your fault," he wrote. "There's a very real, very American tension between what John McCain's appeal is and the way that appeal must be structured and packaged in order to make him politically viable."
"A real leader is somebody who, because of his own particular power and charisma and example, is able to inspire people, with "inspire" being used here in a serious and non-cliché way," he continues. "A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can't get ourselves to do on our own."
Eight years later, a very real writer is gone, but the questions he posed about John McCain as a real leader remain just as profound.
