Lee Siegel connects Gatsby to today's politics:
Outsiders like Gatsby are quintessential figures of American democracy, a system designed to welcome outsiders by elevating individual will over group affiliation. They can redeem, but they can also unsettle. Gatsby had to escape his humble origins in order to conquer society, yet in remaking his life he generated an aura of mysterious menace. Everyone attended his parties. Hardly anyone came to his funeral.
And here we are, in a time of unsettling flux, in which one enigmatic outsider after another vies for political leadership. Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, the scores of obscure Tea Partiers suddenly thrust into Congress. Then there is the epitome of outsiderness himself, Barack Obama. No one had the audacity to ask Gatsby for his birth certificate as proof of who he really was. But until Obama produced his, he was mythologised as wildly as Gatsby had been: as socialist, communist, revolutionary, conspirator, traitor.
The Dish 