David Foster Wallace's novella-length article about John McCain's unsuccessful bid for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination (originally published in truncated form in Rolling Stone, and subsequently unabridged under the title “Up, Simba” in Wallace's nonfiction collection Consider the Lobster) receives a timely reissue in the wake of McCain's 2008 race for the White House. Fortunate enough to be accompanying the McCain 2000 camp around the time when it suddenly began to look like there was a serious chance that their candidate could garner the Republican nomination, Wallace explores the tipping point where an “anti-candidate” like McCain abruptly becomes a viable concern.

Wallace is principally interested in whether a politician's attempts to tell the truth and remain “real” are necessarily subjugated by the process of tit-for-tat negative campaigning and party-line standardization and, more disturbingly, whether a new generation of young voters are so inured to techniques of salesmanship that they cannot or do not wish to distinguish between honesty and cynicism. More troubling still is the author's implication that the disenchantment of younger voters is actually a viable political strategy on behalf of the parties whose core supporters will turn out whatever the political weather. Wallace has never been a cynical writer, and his position as a non-political journalist allows him some degree of self-conscious innocence and distance from the campaigning process.

Wallace's prose is as conversational and microscopically descriptive as ever, the reader provided with a glossary of acronyms and shorthand for the political trail, which are deployed with both a sense of newfound enthusiasm and the dryly amusing anthropological bewilderment of an outsider. Writing originally for Rolling Stone, Wallace addresses the archetypal “young voter.” Deliberately non-partisan, the level of address to the reader is often disquietingly direct. “Try to imagine for a moment how much this would hurt and how scared you'd be” (16), writes Wallace while describing the horror of McCain's torture as a POW in Vietnam, at a time when the candidate was a similar age to the intended readership of this article. In such direct addresses and attempts to evoke an experience of empathy in the reader, Wallace expresses a desire to replace the cynicism or apathy of the young non-voter with an interest in the possibility of a “genuine” candidate, whomsoever that may be.

The markedly different political environment into which this article is reissued exerts a notable level of dramatic irony over proceedings. Wallace's amazement at a young audience's reaction to McCain – “500 kids at 3:00 AM out of their minds with enthusiasm for … a politician” (12) – cannot help but prompt association with the wild receptions recently afforded to Senator Obama, a politician who, in direct opposition to McCain, has seemingly usurped the latter's reputation as a “real” candidate. Jacob Weisberg's Foreword, while providing further anecdotal evidence of McCain's startling frankness in interview, was composed before Obama secured the Democratic nomination, and is therefore unfortunately unable to discuss Wallace's work with detailed reference to the recent presidential campaigns.