Whitmer Talks Tequila, Pearl Jam and Debates in New Book

These are tricky times to be an ambitious and (relatively) young star in the Democratic Party.

President Biden, the party’s 81-year-old presumptive nominee for president, dialed into MSNBC on Monday morning to bray about the whippersnappers snapping at his stiffened heels. “Run against me,” he said, rather indignantly. “Go ahead. Announce for president. Challenge me at the convention.”

Who would dare! “I don’t even like playing in hypotheticals,” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, 56, swore last week. “There’s no point engaging in these hypotheticals,” echoed an aide to the 59-year-old governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker.

It was Gretchen Whitmer’s turn on Tuesday. “I’m not going to entertain any conversation along that line,” Ms. Whitmer, the 52-year-old governor of Michigan, said in an interview with USA Today. “The president is in this race, he is running, and he’s got my unequivocal support.”

What unfortunate timing then for her to publish “True Gretch: What I’ve Learned About Life, Leadership, and Everything in Between,” a slim book out on Tuesday that contains just the sort of political pablum sure to keep her name circulating in “any conversation along that line.”

The final page of her book consists of a block quotation from Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech, followed by this chestnut: “Though these words were written more than a hundred years ago, they’re just as true today — except for two things. The ‘man’ may be a woman. And she may just be wearing fuchsia.” (Can you guess the governor’s favorite color?)

“True Gretch” reads like Ms. Whitmer’s collective rebuttal to the superannuated leadership that has her party in a chokehold. The book is full of contrasts that she might not have intended months ago but