Game Change - Book Review

"Game Change" by John Heileman & Mark Halperin

This book makes the 2008 election vibrant and new. It's a warts-and-all account of the most exciting presidential election in a generation. (Bush vs. Gore wound up being a nailbiter, but Bradley was never a threat to Gore, and Bush had McCain torpedoed after his people's slimy South Carolina whisper campaign against McCain's adoptive daughter).

The first two-thirds are where the action was. The Democratic Primary.

Hillary Clinton

Hillary had the experience, the name recognition, the money, the polling, everything, to the point she was looking into who should populate her transition team before Iowa ever happened. This book also points out that while publicly she had the support of many of her fellow Democratic senators, privately there were several, most importantly Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid, who were desperately trying to find someone who could stop her. Like a good novel, it switches to be sympathetic to whoever it's focussed on, and there were points in the book where I sympathized with Hillary. The MSM ignored the first fifteen debates where she beat Obama, but once she had a gaffe, oh baby, it exploded.

The sad thing is, if Hillary had ignored Iowa and just focussed on New Hampshire and beyond, she probably would have won the nomination. But a third place finish in Iowa where she'd spent so much money was a first-round punch to the jaw she never recovered from. The book highlights the missteps of her staff, primarily that of Mark Penn, who comes across as an odious leech by the end. The book also makes clear that Bill continues to cheat on Hillary, and that both deeply resented the media not being fair. To this day, I'd wager Bill doesn't care much for Barack.

There were elements I remember from the campaign that the book didn't cover, like the fuss over Michigan and Florida not having their delegates counted, or only half-counted, when Hillary took victory laps anyway. (Giving so much power to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina has always seemed one of the least democratic ways to select party nominees, but I could digress on that for a while...) When she was upset about something, her staffers took her wrath. (Then again, I'm assuming most of the anonymous sources were staffers disillusioned by the process.) In the end, Hillary's campaign would have been better if she could have cloned herself rather than hire other people.

Barack Obama

Ironic that a guy from such a humble background came across as someone born with a silver spoon in his mouth. We don't really get that much from before 2004, but Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 convention was his rock-star moment. Reid and others encouraged him to run for president, but a talk with Reid seemed to be what cemented for Obama to run. I don't know that he would have run if he didn't have the encouragement of so many insiders to "do it now."

It's easy to forget how behind Obama was just a couple months before the Iowa vote. Hillary really did look like a juggernaut, but a gaffe or two later, and the field was wide open.

Even in the book, Obama always comes across as cool, collected, furrowing his brow on occasion, or displaying the same potty-mouth all these people apparently have. (I would love my older kids to read this book if it weren't for all the profanity in it.)

John Edwards

The book is not kind to Elizabeth Edwards, but it would be hard to be unfair to a sociopath like John Edwards. I should say all the candidates have a little sociopathy to them - you'd have to be crazy to want to go through the rigors of running for and being president these days - but John's a shallow, callow, vainglorious weenie. When it's become obvious to his staffers that he's the father of Rielle Hunter's baby, they gather and wonder for the good of the country what they should do to get this stuff leaked. And still John is deluded enough to think he can get Obama to make him vice-president or attorney general.

The rest of the players barely warrant a peep.

Then we have the Republican primary. Since it was decided upon much sooner, John McCain's is the only story told there. We have some mention of Rudy Giuliani and how nutty his Florida-or-bust strategy was, especially after he thinks he has Charlie Crist's endorsement only to have Crist back out. Mitt Romney gets a page or two, mostly about how much his opponents disliked him and how none of them took him seriously because of "the Mormon thing," and Mike Huckabee gets a little shout-out for tag-teaming with McCain to block others, only to have his own campaign end on a futile note. I would've liked more behind-the-scenes insight on Romney and Huckabee, especially since those two seemed destined for a mud-wrestling rematch in a year or so.

McCain, it seems, wasn't sure if he was going to run for president or not. He enjoys the Senate, and he really was starting to feel his age. I forget how dead his campaign appeared to be in the summer of 2007, before it even got off the ground. But once his juices got flowing, his juice got flowing. And yet there are times when all the old-man jokes applied. There are scenes in the book where McCain might as well be shuffling about in a bathrobe muttering about kids these days.

McCain and Hillary also genuinely like each other. If Hillary's not popular with Democratic senators when she's not there, McCain is equally scorned by GOP leaders. Toward the end, it's as though McCain has Lindsay Graham, Joe Lieberman, and no one else. And McCain was very, very close to selecting Joe Lieberman for VP.

McCain and Obama, though, did not like each other, and that made their debates quite interesting.

The VP picks are whole chapters unto themselves of fascination. Joe Biden's gum-flapping and Sarah Palin's vetting (where the aides learned too late that she tended to provide "sanitized" versions of the truth) are eye-opening, but I felt for both of them in their situations. Palin clearly wasn't ready then, but her convention speech made her the biggest star in the sky. For a week or so. And things got so tense between Barack and Joe before the election they had to meet and make up.

Did you remember the race was statistically even in September?

Then the economy collapsed, and then McCain halted his campaign to go to Washington to get some sort of TARP deal done. Obama went too, and in Bush's cameo in the book, it seems clear Obama's more of a leader, a "decider", than McCain. And we know how things split from there.

It reads like a trashy romance novel at times, but that's partly what makes it gripping. These were the real people, and based on reactions from the players, they pretty much got it right.