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Summary
Summary
"It's one of the best books on politics of any kind I've read. For entertainment value, I put it up there with Catch 22." --The Financial Times
"It transports you to a parallel universe in which everything in the National Enquirer is true....More interesting is what we learn about the candidates themselves: their frailties, egos and almost super-human stamina." --The Financial Times "I can't put down this book!" --Stephen Colbert Game Change is the New York Times bestselling story of the 2008 presidential election, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, two of the best political reporters in the country. In the spirit of Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes and Theodore H. White's The Making of the President 1960, this classic campaign trail book tells the defining story of a new era in American politics, going deeper behind the scenes of the Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin campaigns than any other account of the historic 2008 election.Author Notes
John Heilemann is the national political correspondent and columnist for New York magazine. He is a former staff writer for the New Yorker, the Economist, and Wired.
He is the author of Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime and Double Down: Game Change 2012.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Booklist Review
Even before the book was out, its juiciest bits were everywhere: Sarah Palin was serene when chosen for V.P. because it was God's plan. Hillary didn't know if she could control Bill (duh). Elizabeth Edwards was a shrew, not a saint. Overall, the men from the campaign garner less attention in these anecdote wars than the women and tend to come off better but only just: Obama, the authors note, can be conceited and windy; McCain was disengaged to the point of recklessness; and John Edwards is a cheating, egotistical blowhard. But, hey, that's politics, and it's obvious that authors Heilemann (New York Magazine) and Halperin (Time) worked their sources well all 200 of them. Some (including the sources themselves) will have trouble with the book's use of quotes (or lack thereof). The interviews, according to the authors, were conducted on deep background, and dialogue was reconstructed extensively and with extreme care. Sometimes the source of a quote is clear, as when the book gets inside someone's head, but not always. Many of the book's events were covered heavily at the time (Hillary's presumed juggernaut; Michelle Obama's initial hostility to her husband's candidacy), but some of what this volume delivers is totally behind-the-scenes and genuinely jaw-dropping, including the revelation that senators ostensibly for Clinton (New York's Chuck Schumer) pushed hard for Obama. Another? The McCain camp found Sarah Palin by doing computer searches of female Republican officeholders. A sometimes superficial but intensely readable account of a landmark campaign (librarians take note: the exceedingly flimsy binding may reflect the publisher's haste to rush the book to press).--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Behind the scenes in 2008. IN July 2006 Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, abruptly summoned Barack Obama, then a freshman senator, for a meeting. Obama, who had a cordial but not warm relationship with Reid, immediately headed for his office, remarking to his press secretary Robert Gibbs, "I wonder what we screwed up." Upon Obama's arrival, Reid didn't mince words: "You're not going to go anyplace here," he said. "I know that you don't like it, doing what you're doing." After the lecture, when Obama had returned, Gibbs asked if anything was amiss. Not at all, Obama replied. "Harry wants me to run for president." It was a telling moment. Hillary Clinton might have publicly appeared to be her party's preferred candidate, but Reid, as John Heilemann and Mark Halperin report in "Game Change," was part of a growing contingent of Democratic senators quietly urging Obama to challenge Clinton, who they worried was saddled with the vote she cast in 2002 authorizing the Iraq war, along with sky-high negative ratings, "especially outside the bluest states," and, not least, rumors about her husband's personal life: "the topic of tittering in every quadrant of the Democratic Establishment from New York to Boston to Los Angeles," but above all in Washington, the authors write. Heilemann, a columnist for New York magazine, and Halperin, the senior political analyst for Time, have conducted hundreds of interviews to provide the inside story of the 2008 campaign, longer on vignettes and backstage gossip than on analysis. But if their racy account provides little context for Obama's rise, it vividly shows how character flaws large and small caused his opponents to self-destruct. The narrative also reinforces the familiar argument that a presidential campaign provides one important test of a candidate's ability to govern. Each successive election cycle seems to have increased the stakes, and it has been going on a long time. "Formerly a candidate, unless possessed of popular gifts, did but little speaking," Lord Bryce observed in "The American Commonwealth," published in 1888. "Latterly he has been expected to take the field and stay in it fighting all the time." Hillary Clinton, however, anticipated no such ordeal, expecting instead to coast through the early primaries and build up an insurmountable lead. Unenthusiastic about the Iowa caucuses, the campaign's first battleground, she tried to avoid overnight stays there. She complained about the scruffy hotels and resisted calling local politicos, even hanging up on one who said that she was wavering between Clinton and another candidate. As for the challenge posed by Obama, "Hillary could still barely fathom that he was in the race at all," Heilemann and Halperin write. They note that in the fall of 2006, before a single vote had been cast, Clinton began contemplating possible running mates in the general election, and also asked Roger Altman, a deputy Treasury secretary in her husband's administration, to initiate the planning for her transition to the White House. There were other difficulties, too. Bill Clinton's aides, Heilemann and Halperin report, had been startled to discover that within days of his settling into a new house in Chappaqua, N.Y., in 2001, he was hanging out at a local deli, "chatting up the stay-at-home mothers" who came in after their yoga sessions. Hillary deputized two advisers to form "a war room within a war room" that was "dedicated to managing the threat posed by Bill's libido," though it was actually his clumsy attempts during the primaries to depict Obama's campaign as a "fairy tale" that would prove most damaging to his wife's efforts. John Edwards, the third leading contender, pulled off the feat of eclipsing the former president by embarking upon a clandestine affair with Rielle Hunter, a producer of Web videos who had been the model for the "sexually voracious" 20-year-old Alison Poole in Jay McInerney's novel "Story of My Life," published in 1988. Heilemann and Halperin attribute the implosion of Edwards's campaign in part to the screaming matches he had with his wife, Elizabeth, whose cancer had been diagnosed in November 2004. She too was a difficult case, deeply admired for her valiant response to her illness, but to campaign insiders "an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazy woman." Not that her husband was any better. The authors depict him as a delusional megalomaniac. Heilemann and Halperin are no less unsparing of the McCains, another warring couple: "The McCains fought in front of others, during small meetings and before large events, to the amazement and discomfort of the staff." By the spring of 2007, reports were circulating that Cindy McCain had a long-term boyfriend who accompanied her publicly in Arizona. And there was speculation about the candidate's relationship with Vicki Iseman, a Washington lobbyist. Heilemann and Halperin devote much attention to the story, noting that some of McCain's "advisers were living in terror" because "at least a half-dozen new delvings into McCain's personal life had been undertaken by news organizations," including The New York Times. Its article, published Feb. 21, 2008, in fact helped McCain where he was weakest, among conservatives who had doubted his ideological bona fides. A perceived assault on him by The Times redounded to his benefit, exactly as McCain's canny chief operative, Steve Schmidt, had predicted. Even Schmidt, however, was unable to prevent McCain from impulsively choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate. "Unlike Obama and his methodical process, McCain was flying by the seat of his pants," the authors observe. "In judging Palin, he was relying on a vetting so hasty and haphazard it barely merited the name." Initially eager to bone up on foreign policy - a subject on which she betrayed thorough ignorance - Palin attentively sat for an all-day tutorial with McCain's advisers that ran from the Spanish Civil War up to the present. But after her disastrous interview with Katie Couric, Palin told her handler, Nicolle Wallace, "I want to do what I want to do." Palin was not an isolated example of McCain's fecklessness. "Not today," was his automatic response to being advised to practice for debates with Obama, who, by contrast, prepared extensively. Out of his depth on economic issues, McCain allowed Obama essentially to direct a special bipartisan White House meeting in September that McCain had himself insisted George W. Bush hold. Just before McCain entered the White House, he stared blankly at a young Treasury aide and inquired, "What do I need to know about this meeting?" IN "Game Change," Obama emerges as the most incisive, most disciplined and, in important ways, most conservative of all the contenders. He assembled a crack team that did not engage in the internecine warfare that afflicted his opponents. And his evidently spotless personal history helped insulate him from the buffetings his counterparts suffered as their tumultuous uves came under forensic scrutiny. Even the crisis of his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright faded against the image of the faithful, even uxorious, husband and devoted father of two young daughters. No doubt Obama, as Heilemann and Halperin emphasize, could also be a ruthless practitioner of political hardball and often benefited from a bedazzled press corps. But none of that fully explains his remarkable ascent. An incredulous Hillary Clinton, observing the political advantage Obama reaped from the financial meltdown in September 2008, was left to surmise, "God wants him to win." Jacob Heilbrunn is a regular contributor to the Book Review and a senior editor at The National Interest.
Choice Review
This bestselling journalistic account of the 2008 presidential election supplies few previously-unknown details. But it organizes personalities, organizations, events, and strategies into a coherent chronicle of what it is like to run for office at a time when candidates are media celebrities, or at least reality-show contestants. It is especially revealing when it discusses the complex relationships between the candidates and their professional staffs; staff that each candidate must create, finance, work with, and, ultimately, control. Readers see the candidates float themselves before the voters by means of carefully-constructed images that are inevitably torpedoed by the attacks of their rivals, burned up by the unceasing glare of the media, or wrecked on the reefs of public inattention or misunderstanding. Despite their careful preparation and hard paddling, candidates were blown along "by big events, startling revelations, and unexpected episodes that again and again threatened to turn everything on its head." Game Change is a good example of the thorough research and clear writing that can be produced by capable journalists; it is soon to be a movie, and is valuable source material for student projects comparing election campaigns over time. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers and undergraduate students. P. Lermack Bradley University
