Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime

It took me a long time to read Game Change, for the ultimate result, giving us the Obama Administration, has had me munching on antacid tablets for five and a half years as of this writing. Now however, with Barack's Presidency collapsing like a folding chair, and his historic rank sure to be around James Buchanan territory, I whizzed through the book quickly, half-chuckling, half-appalled at how celebrity status, and a superior campaign combined to anoint this fakir President of the United States. To paraphrase the Latin actor, the late Fernando Lamas,"It is better to look good than govern good".From the time he gave the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention, stressing the concept of unity, Obama was headed for stardom. Unlike the other main candidates in the book, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and John McCain, his strategists functioned well together, and created an astonishing model for fundraising that made public financing, for him at least, unnecessary. Obama, cool, collected and egocentric, was, by all appearances, something new, indeed exciting. Underneath the veneer, so carefully crafted that it no doubt fooled many of his ardent supporters, was an agenda of division and an almost pathological desire to downgrade the country he is currently destroying.His combatants for the Democratic nomination in 2008 created their own problems. Hillary, thought to be a queen in waiting, hated the drudgery of calling supporters, and prized loyalty in her staff above competence, and even unity. Her staff was always battling, her first campaign manager, a Chicagoan named Patty Solis Doyle wholly incompetent. The key strategists always were thrusting knives at each other. And Clinton herself was a ponderous campaigner, maladroit at appearing, unlike her husband Bill, at ease, or making every move less than a calculation. Hillary was, and is, essentially as a campaigner, sort of a female Richard Nixon. Essentially, against her instincts, she had to use Bill as chief surrogate, and he was often out of control. But Bill Clinton, even while in the White House never had any coattails. And did not have them in 2008.The third wheel in the race for the Democrats John Edwards, turned out to have the same internal campaign problems as Hillary, a bickering staff for certain, but complicated by the role of his wife Elizabeth. Cutting, condescending and unfortunately suffering from the incurable cancer that would several years later take her life, she was a terrible presence in the campaign trail. Edwards had two other problems. Once known as a nice guy, after he ran for vice-president alongside John Kerry, he became messianic. He could do no wrong. He dropped out early, tring to swap his endorsement for a Cabinet post. His reputation became tattered after his affair with a whacked out bimbo, Rielle Hunter made tabloid headlines. Later on, it was learned that he had fathered her child, although he attemptedto cover that up by using a low level aide, married, to claim fatherhood. John Edwards, a cipher and empty suit, is as odious as they make them.McCain, after his campaign nearly collapsed in debt, recovered by running by the seat of his pants, as is his wont, since he thought the campaign was wherever he was, forget strategy, logistics and tactics. It was all about him and it showed. He won the Republican nomination because the field was so weak. There was nobody else to really challenge him, although a puff of smoke might have bowled his campaign over for good. Trailing badly, cash-strapped and not the same man who ran against Bush 43 for the 2000 nomination,and needing a surprise pick to join him on the ticket to ramp up the campaign, he chose, after little vetting, Sarah Palin. She gave great speeches, became a star, held Joe Biden to a draw in their debate, and knew practically nothing about history or policy. Palin did not know why Korea was divided, who the enemy was in Iraq, nor what, even generally the Federal Reserve did. She couldn't even get through a softball interview with Katie Couric, who never asked her a hard question, and like McCain, was undisciplined. She was sometimes moody and isolated during the campaign, more concerned with her poll numbers in Alaska. It was not just that she had but twenty months as Governor of Alaska. Sadly for this conservative, it is beyond debate, there is no there there. She is fine on Fox News. In the Oval Office, she would have been a calamity. None of that really mattered however. Nobody votes for a vice-president. And God, if he come down to join McCain on the ticket, could not have made him win that November.Once the financial meltdown hit in September, it was all over but the shouting. McCain, not well versed in economics, suspended his campaign to no good purpose, and simply did not, or could not lead the Republicans on that issue. On the other hand, Obama looked commanding, and again, cool, because he consulted important and knowledgeable people on the problem. McCain was just bored.But truth be told, it was a virtual certainty that a Democrat, any Democrat, would have won in 2008. Any time an unpopular incumbent is leaving office, the candidate of the other party wins. Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson gave rise to Warren Harding, Dwight Eisenhower and Nixon. George W.Bush never even appeared in person at the GOP Convention.Heilemann and Halperin have done a good job of getting the inside story of the campaign, in the tradition of Theodore White, who started in all in 1960. But they never got a handle on the real Obama, even though they sometimes point out his arrogance and churlishness. They look at him as a pragmatic liberal, although he is not liberal at all, but studiously dictatorial and a true radical. Hillary, just as activist as he but for what she perceives as the betterment of the country, plainly doesn't like him, although she served as his Secretary of State. McCain, who likes Bill and Hillary both, apostasy for a Republican, detests him. People in Congress during the campaign were enamored of him and his power with the spoken word. Now he has no friends there, and fewer and fewer lapdogs. Like Wilson,another terrible and dictatorial president, Obama, as is plainly evident by now, thinks there are two kinds of people, superior beings who should run the government, and a lesser class of citizens, who should not think independently and should heel without dissent. We do not know what kind of a president Hillary or McCain would have been, but they, in the Senate, both reached across the aisle. Two things are certain. Obama won. The rest of us lost, and are still losing.

We always wonder what's going on behind the scenes of an election and in the lives of the Washington elite. Most of us know, or eventually learn, that politicians are typically loathsome characters of few morals and mammoth egos who think nothing of lying, cheating and, in general, being insufferable human beings. And, we get a chance to see it all, up close, in this new book by political reporters Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. We get the opportunity to look behind the scenes and see these people as they really are. It's both fun and frightening. It's quite revealing. To wit . . .Bill Clinton wanted Ted Kennedy to endorse Hillary. But instead, he angered Kennedy so badly that Kennedy went all out for Obama. Here's how it happened according to the book . . ."As Hillary bungled Caroline, Bill's handling of Ted was even worse. The day after Iowa, he phoned Kennedy and pressed for an endorsement, making the case for his wife. But Bill then went on, belittling Obama in a manner that deeply offended Kennedy. Recounting the conversation later to a friend, Teddy fumed that Clinton had said,' A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.' "Of course, we have to wonder if Kennedy was telling the truth or perhaps colorizing it to fit his own agenda since Kennedy was not a moral or virtuous man or one known for telling the truth. So, in reality, this story is secondhand. It could be false or it could be taken out of context. Or, it could be true.On another matter the Clintons wanted to go after Obama's drug use. Can you imagine alleged coke sniffer Bill going after alleged dope smoker Obama? Well, that was going to be the way it went down if the Clintons had their way.And . . .Before BHO decided to run for president, the Obamas flew to Nashville, TN to get Al Gore's assurance that he would not run.Among the things we learn . . .When Obama asked Hillary Clinton to be secretary of state, she initially turned him down. Why? Bill's penchant for controversy. She felt it would interfere with her efforts in the job.When President-elect Obama called her again to convince her to be his secretary of state, Clinton told him there was a problem. That great big mouthy problem was her husband. "You've seen what this is like; it will be a circus if I take this job," she said to Obama.Clinton almost never admits this to anyone. And, Obama who seldom shows his vulnerable side, admits to Hillary that he needs her. He seems overwhelmed with the economy and all that's going on, all that faces him.The McCain-Palin camp was afraid that Sarah Palin would screw things up because of the tremendous amount of information she needed to debate Biden. "The debate was going to be a debacle of historic and epic proportions...she was not focused...not engaged." She was not really participating in the prep, the authors add.Sidebar:In a recent news article Palin's spokeswoman, Meghan Stapleton, said in a statement: "The Governor's descriptions of these events are found in her book, 'Going Rogue.' Her descriptions are accurate. She was there. These reporters were not." Stapleton was talking about what was said about Palin in this book by the authors.and then . . .McCain aides confront Cindy McCain over reports that she had an extramarital affair.The authors tell us that Hillary Clinton was so confident she would get the Democratic nomination that she had two top advisers planning her transition for after she won the general election.They also point out that up until only days before the Republican Convention, Sen. John McCain was still thinking Sen. Joe Lieberman would be his running mate, until the "blowback" was so strong, they feared Lieberman would be rejected by the party, forcing the last-minute choice of Palin for the role.Steve Schmidt, John McCain's former chief campaign strategist believes the Obama-Biden victory would have been even more lopsided without Palin on the Republican ticket, according to the book.On John Edwards . . .John Edwards went from being typically conceited to having megalomania. Women were always after him. He loved it and it fed his enormous ego. But it was also a problem for the campaign.Edwards thought the contest would be between him and Hillary. The Clinton camp thought the same thing.Edwards was normally warm to his staff. But he turned disdainful. He ignored and dismissed them. He even mistreated both staff and supporters. "You can't talk to people that way, "an aid told him after one of his displays. "People didn't like the new John Edwards."Surprisingly, Elizabeth Edwards was fast to show John that she was his intellectual superior. She called him a "hick" in front of people and derided him for having "redneck parents." She called some staffers idiots. Her illness mellowed her in the early months of 2005 - but not for long.While John's wife may have made him feel small, his new gal pal made him feel like a king. She told him that he had "the power to change the world," that "the people will follow you." She told him that he could be as great a leader as Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. She told him, "You're so real. You just need to get your staff out of your way." She reinforced everything he already believed about himself. She told him exactly what he wanted and needed to hear.No one gets off free in the book. The authors tell us that Senate Majority Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had referred privately to Barack Obama early in his campaign as a "light-skinned" African American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."Ladies and gentlemen . . . meet America's elite.This book makes Lady Chatterley's Lover as sexy as a high school algebra text book. It makes Madame Bovary look positively saintly. If even half of what this book reports is true, I've got higher forms of life on the bottom of my shoe than we've got running our country.What a read. Gustave Flaubert couldn't have written it any better.- Susanna K. Hutcheson

Despite its heft this book is a page-turner, even if we all know what happens at the end. There's a good degree of detail about life in Hillaryland and Obamania that will appeal mostly to those interested in the machinations of the US political machine, yet this doesn't descend into policy wonkery (indeed, some would say neither did the Democrat campaign). It's the story of the personalities, the deep rivalries, the egos - oh, the egos! - and the media's capacity to surprise. Who now remembers the times when Wright, Ayers, guns and religion were threatening to derail Obama's candidacy? John Edwards? Giuliani?This is, for sure, a story of the Democratic campaign: only a quarter of the book refers to the GOP although the widely trailed tidbits about Palin are both interesting to read and quite terrifying. I disagree with the reviewer who suggests that the authors are in awe of Obama: these are two very experienced journalists who understand what made him a standout candidate and the right man at the right time. There has also been criticism of the lack of sources for the work but if this is read as a piece of journalism rather than an academic history then this is not a big deal. If anyone disagreed with the narrative then you'd be sure to have heard about it.If you're looking for a readable, enlightening reminder of the 2008 campaign then you'll find much to enjoy in this book. Recommended.

Race of a Lifetime is the insider account of Barak Obama's stunning rise to the presidency of the United States. Co-authored by two of the country's top political journalists, it relies upon some 200 hundred off-the-record interviews with campaign insiders (we're never told which ones) and moves along with the pace of a novel.Although Obama is the central character, the narrative revolves around other key players, principally Hillary Clinton, but also John Edwards, John McCain and Sarah Palin. It altered my opinion about Clinton - who comes across as thoroughly decent, diligent and admirable character - but reinforces what I knew about the others.Those who saw and loved the last two brilliant series of the much-missed West Wing are in for a real treat. The powerful characters and breakneck narrative seem more in tune with a fictional creation than the staid world of politics.Yet truth is stranger than fiction, and had that programme's creators devised characters such as Sarah Palin, they would have been accused of parody.Palin - with the egomanic and sleazy John Edwards - comes off worst in this book, although it is her ignorance rather than cynicism or ego that is her worst sin. It remains a terrifying thought that she could have been a missed heartbeat away from being the most powerful person in the world.One of the books' best episodes recounts her cramming sessions on forign affairs. During a lengthy primer on twentieth century history, of which she knew nothing, one ofe her aides suggests a break. "No, no, no, let's keep going," said Palin with the apparent wonderment of a child. "This is awesome."The book should be read with a few reservations. It's certainly not (thankfully) political science, yet not even a work of journalism - which would be properly sourced - rather a piece narrative non-fiction. We have to trust the authors' integrity to faithfully and even handedly deal with their off the record sources, and for some readers that will invariably be a leap of faith too far.Yet in my view, the book is richer and more candid for being off the record and gossipy. It's well-written, fascinating and a rare thing among books of its genre - a real page turner.

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I am only halfway through this book but am thoroughly engrossed. The pace is excellent, the writing style a perfect combination of factual detail, insight and intrigue. Anyone with even only a passing interest in the '08 elections will love it.Thoroughly recommended. Am already not looking forward to finishing it!

Brilliant book with immense amounts of detail on the 2008 Presidential election. It's helped by the fact that the stories are so compelling (something the sequel to this book Double Down suffers from). The HBO film Game Change is solely based on the last few chapters of the book on Palin.