Book review 'BRACKS: FLAWED GIANT' BY ROBERT DALLEK

Note: To give context to the following post, understand that it was written after reading Paul Austin’s column and doing some research on Lyndon Johnson in quick succession.

‘Why yet another book on Bracks?’, begins Robert Dallek, biographer of JFK and LBJ, in the preface to his new 1200 page tome, Flawed Giant: Steve Bracks And His Times.

Initially it seems a good question. The Dallek book, after all, is only the latest in a string of books on Victoria’s brilliant and enigmatic Premier. It arrives on the shelves while Bracksy by Roy Jenkins (author of Churchill and Gladstone) tops the non-fiction bestseller lists.

Dallek does rehash much of what we already know: the mystery as to when the great man sleeps, as light often emanates from the Premier’s Office until after five a.m.; the ministers frequently woken up to phone calls from an agitated Premier who has found some clunky phrasing or statistical error in a policy document; the marathon night-long intellectual debates Bracks has with Sports Minister Justin Madden.

Dallek also does his best to sum up the gargantuan six-year legislative program, known better as the Bracks Revolution, that shows no sign of ebbing. While the time when newspapers printed a ‘What Bracksy Did Today’ column are over, the media remains obsessed by Bracks’s ever-more radical ideas on transforming the state.

There are some details released for the first time – for example, Dallek confirms on page 974 that West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin did, as has been widely suspected, base his character President Josiah Bartlet on Steve Bracks. Victorian viewers of The West Wing have long been suspicious of the striking similarities between the fictional Bartlet and the real-life Bracks: the exceptional mind, oratory, charisma, statesmanship. The re-election strategy Bartlet’s adviser urged – ‘make this election about smart, and not. Make it about engaged, and not. Qualified and not. Make it about a heavyweight. You’re a heavyweight’ – is eerily similar to the method by which Bracks trounced Robert Doyle in the 2002 election.

Dallek’s biography includes the controversial and unpopular decision to back the tolls in Scoresby. Bracks has appeared increasingly haggard and disillusioned in recent times as he continually faces the anger of his ungrateful lessors/public. ‘I made a decision about tolls’ Dallek quotes, ‘it was the right decision, legally and morally, and I would make it again’. Bracks, claims Dallek, is utterly convinced that, twenty years hence, history will vindicate him on tolls.

‘The great statesmen are almost all gone’ says Dallek ‘They don’t run for political office anymore. Their places have been taken by insipid and mediocre party hacks, sustained by spin doctors who provide the sound-bites that woo an apathetic public. Bracks is the last of the Abraham Lincolns’.