Assume the Position 201 with Mr. Wuhl2007

Robert Wuhl:
Okay, so Pierce gets the nomination, but still, nationally, he's not very well-known. So he's got to get out the word, and how do you get out the word? The same way you do now: you got to use the media. But what is media back then in 1852? There's no radio, there's no TV, there's no webcast, there's no podcast, there's no OutKast. No, what you have is books. Books are everything. So he puts out a book, but the question is: okay, it's one thing to put out a book, it's another thing to get people to read it. It all comes down to who's telling the story. Who's telling Pierce's story? None other than this old college drinking buddy by the name of Nathaniel Hawthorne. That's his college buddy; only the biggest pop-culture figure of his time, right? He has just written back-to-back bestsellers. First: "The Scarlet Letter", a love triangle about adultery, it's sort of the original "Grey's Anatomy". Then he follows that with "The House of the Seven Gables". That's the original romantic haunted house story. It's sort of a cross between "The Notebook" and "Saw". So Hawthorne's now two-for-two. He's like JT following "Cry Me a River" with "SexyBack".