Louis Menand asked him to name some of his influences. Gore eagerly complied, name-checking Reinhold Niebuhr, Edmund Husserl, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the author of that juicy page-turner Phenomenology of Perception. After Bush read (or skimmed) the Gore profile, he was far from intimidated; he was stoked. Bush had no intention of competing with Gore on the field of knowledge; instead, he’d play to win on the field of ignorance. Bush broadcast his status as a bibliophile by declaring, “One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”
