By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
January 11, 2010
GAME CHANGE
Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime
By John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
448 pages. Harper. $27.99
Why another book on the 2008 campaign, a year after the inauguration of President Obama? What more is there to say about a race that was covered day in and day out by newspapers, magazines, television, radio and bloggers? Is there anything more to learn about the candidates — and does it matter to an American public now focused on unemployment and health care and terrorism?
The veteran political reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin think they do have something new to say. “What was missing” from the wall-to-wall coverage and what “might be of enduring value,” they write in their buzzy new book “Game Change,” was “an intimate portrait of the candidates and spouses who (in our judgment) stood a reasonable chance of occupying the White House.”
They proceed in these pages to serve up a spicy smorgasbord of observations, revelations and allegations — some that are based on impressive legwork and access, some that simply crystallize rumors and whispers from the campaign trail, and some that it’s hard to verify independently as more than spin or speculation on the part of unnamed sources. The authors mix savvy political analysis in these pages with detailed reconstructions of scenes and conversations they did not witness firsthand (like an exchange that Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton had on a beach in Anguilla). They employ the same sort of technique Bob Woodward has pioneered in his best-selling books: relying heavily on “deep background” interviews, along with e-mail messages, memorandums and other forms of documentation to create a novelistic narrative that often reflects the views of the authors’ most cooperative or voluble sources. Unlike Mr. Woodward’s last two books this volume has no source notes at the end.
The authors write that one of Mrs. Clinton’s “senior-most lieutenants” watched her “bitter and befuddled reaction” to her loss in Iowa, and thought for the first time, “This woman shouldn’t be president.” They write that during debate preps, some staff members assigned to Sarah Palin by the McCain campaign discussed the “threatening possibility: that Palin was mentally unstable.” They add that several of Senator John McCain’s lieutenants agreed that if it looked as if their candidate might actually win in November, they would have to discuss how to relegate Ms. Palin “to the largely ceremonial role that premodern vice presidents inhabited”: “it was inconceivable” that “if McCain fell ill or died, the country be left in the hands of a President Palin.”
In addition Mr. Heilemann, who works for New York magazine, and Mr. Halperin, for Time magazine, write that Mrs. Clinton, encouraged by her husband and aides, considered running for president in 2004 but ended up listening to her daughter, Chelsea, who argued that she needed to finish her Senate term. They write that Mr. Clinton and George W. Bush “spoke more often than almost anyone knew” — that “from time to time, when 43 was bored, he would call 42 to chew the fat.” And they assert that Mrs. Clinton blew an opportunity to win the endorsement of Caroline Kennedy, who, they say, had been “dreading a call from Hillary” asking her to go to Iowa on her behalf, knowing, the authors write, that “once she had campaigned for Clinton, siding with Obama would be off the table.” Instead of making the call herself, Mrs. Clinton had one of her staffers phone Ms. Kennedy, who ducked the call.
In another passage, which was widely reported over the weekend, Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann write that the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, encouraged Mr. Obama to run early on, arguing that “the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.’ ” Over the weekend Mr. Reid called the president to apologize for his choice of words. Other senators, including Charles E. Schumer, Byron L. Dorgan, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Barbara Boxer and Edward M. Kennedy, the authors add, were also nudging Mr. Obama, then a senator, to take the plunge, though most would “root for Obama secretly,” as they feared retribution from the Clintons should Mrs. Clinton eventually prevail.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Hillary Rodham Clinton, on the campaign trail in 2008.
Mrs. Clinton, long the front-runner in the race, was so confident of winning, Mr. Heilemann and Mr. Halperin write, that she went so far as to start thinking about her choice of a running mate in fall 2007: she “had already determined without a sliver of doubt that she was not going to choose Obama,” they say, and told her aides that Evan Bayh, Joseph R. Biden Jr., Tom Vilsack and Ted Strickland were at the top of her short list. Around the same time, they write, Mrs. Clinton asked her friend Roger Altman, deputy Treasury secretary in her husband’s administration, to lead a secret project — planning her transition to the White House based on the assumption that a year later she would win the general election.
Mr. Heilemann wrote incisively about Mrs. Clinton in the pages of New York magazine — chunks of his reportage and analysis, taken directly from his articles, appear in this book — and there is more revealing material about her and Mr. Clinton in this volume than the other candidates and their wives. The authors not only dissect the dysfunctional, conflict-ridden Clinton campaign — something that has already been done in detail by many other reporters — but they also emphasize that communication difficulties between the Clintons exacerbated that campaign’s problems.
They write that Mrs. Clinton “couldn’t bear to confront her husband directly” after his heated words about Mr. Obama caused an uproar in South Carolina, and asked aides “to implore him either to leave the state or to pipe down.” They write that Patti Solis Doyle, Cheryl Mills and Howard Wolfson “formed a war room within a war room inside Hillaryland, dedicated to managing the threat posed by Bill’s libido.” And they quote one “old Clinton hand” who suggests that Mrs. Clinton stayed in the primary race to the bitter end, because Mr. Clinton’s approval mattered a lot to her, and “throwing in the towel would mark her as a failure in his eyes.”
In a fascinating account about Mrs. Clinton’s initial decision to decline the post of secretary of state, Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann paraphrase a conversation between the two former rivals in which, they contend, Mrs. Clinton brought up the Bill issue: “You know my husband, she said. You’ve seen what happens. We’re going to be explaining something that he said every other day. You know I can’t control him, and at some point he’ll be a problem.”
The authors describe the Obamas’ marriage as a model one (“Obama adored his wife” and “didn’t even bother to pretend that he enjoyed anyone else’s company remotely as much as he relished being with her and their daughters”), but their portraits of the other candidates’ contentious spousal relationships actually make the Clintons’ partnership seem like a happy one in comparison.
Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann write, for instance, that the strategist John Weaver suspected the rumor Cindy McCain had a “long-term boyfriend” in Arizona “was rooted in truth,” and that the McCains “fought in front of others, during small meetings and before large events, to the amazement and discomfort of the staff.” The authors say that Mrs. McCain accused the senator of ruining her life, that she never wanted him to run again for president, and that “when it came time to film campaign videos of the couple, the camera crews had to roll for hours to capture a few minutes of warmth.”
As for John and Elizabeth Edwards, the authors are even harsher. They describe in detail Mr. Edwards’s infatuation with the video maker Rielle Hunter — whose behavior they call “freaky, wildly inappropriate, and all too visible,” and they write that he continued to nurse delusional hopes of being named attorney general in an Obama administration even after the National Enquirer ran a photograph of him holding Ms. Hunter’s new baby. In the wake of the first Enquirer story about Mr. Edwards’s affair, the authors write, Mrs. Edwards “was sobbing, out of control, incoherent,” and vented her fury on the “very aides who had kept the matter from mushrooming” further.
Edwards aides, Mr. Heilemann and Mr. Halperin write, felt that their boss had become increasingly megalomaniacal and narcissistic over the years, and that while the aides had sympathy for Mrs. Edwards’s struggle with cancer, they regarded her as a badgering, often irrational presence on the campaign. “The nearly universal assessment among them,” Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann write of the Edwards aides, “was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing. What the world saw in Elizabeth: a valiant, determined, heroic everywoman. What the Edwards insiders saw: an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazywoman.”
Though this book focuses on personal matters, not policy concerns, and though some of what will be its most talked about passages fall into the realm of gossip and reflect the views of chatty and, in some cases, bitter, regretful or spin-conscious aides, the volume does leave the reader with a vivid, visceral sense of the campaign and a keen understanding of the paradoxes and contingencies of history. The authors note, for instance, that had Mrs. Clinton decided to run for president in 2004, John Kerry might not have become the Democratic nominee that year and would not have had the opportunity to choose as the convention’s keynote speaker a young and then largely unknown Illinois state legislator by the name of Barack Obama.
No comments:
Post a Comment