Game Change (2010)

Journalists, pundits, and bloggers have all chewed over the 2008 presidential campaign for so many months that there would seem to be little meat left on the bone. But two veteran political reporters — New York magazine's John Heilemann and Time's Mark Halperin — have found plenty of fresh dish, and they've served it up in Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime.

What makes their book different from others, and such a riveting read, is the depth of their material — some of it obtained the old-fashioned way, through dogged investigative reporting, and some of it courtesy of their innumerable sources, such as Patti Solis Doyle, Hillary Clinton's onetime campaign manager. But don't be fooled: This is no dry history. In places it's less like a campaign memoir than a Jackie Collins novel, packed with seamy details about extramarital sex and screaming arguments. Its pages brim with scandalous tidbits: John Edwards refuses to take responsibility for Rielle Hunter, demanding furiously of a young aide, ''Why didn't you come to me like a f---ing man and tell me to stop f---ing her?'' Elizabeth Edwards, livid over her husband's infidelity, dramatically rips open her shirt in an airport, and later calls a staffer in the middle of the night: ''Get me out of here! I'm not campaigning for this a--hole another day!'' John McCain hurls obscenities at his wife, Cindy, and fails to take any interest in the nuts and bolts of his campaign: ''He really just didn't give a s---. The details made his head hurt.'' Barack Obama sometimes comes off as moody and difficult, almost undone by his self-assurance. ''I'm LeBron, baby,'' he once told a reporter. ''I can play on this level. I got some game.'' Interestingly, the one person you'd expect to fare poorly here — vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin — gets a pass. Though the authors duly report that ''some in the upper echelons of McCainworld began to believe that Palin was unfit for higher office,'' they say bluntly that ''the McCain people did fail [her].... They amassed polling points and dollars off her fiery charisma, and then left her to burn up in the inferno of public opinion.'' Game Change isn't perfect. The authors obviously have sources in high places (a couple of conversations between the Clintons are recounted verbatim, including a fascinating one on a beach in Anguilla), but without a bibliography, it's hard to identify them all. (That said, there are a lot more people on the record here than in, say, a Bob Woodward book.) The tone can shift, a little disconcertingly, from elegant description to profanity-laced staccato in the space of a line or two (people are constantly going rips--- or apes---. There's a lot of s--- in

Game Change). And Heilemann and Halperin are guilty of some fairly mean-spirited caricature, even if it is dead-on. Clinton is ''resplendent in fire engine red and wearing a rictus grin'' at one event; Rudy Giuliani, when challenged, ''would bare his cartoonishly big teeth.'' But these are pretty minor quibbles. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the cutthroat hows and whys of a presidential campaign — especially this presidential campaign, filled as it was with scenestealing characters and bad behavior, and memorable for all kinds of reasons that had nothing to do with Obama's skin color and everything to do with his impeccably run grassroots organization. And it doesn't hurt that Game Change reads more bodice ripper than Beltway. A–

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