Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime
Even before the book was out, its juiciest bits were everywhere: Sarah Palin was serene when chosen for V.P. because it was &#x201C;God&#x2019;s plan.&#x201D; Hillary didn&#x2019;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&#x2014;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&#x2019;s politics, and it&#x2019;s obvious that authors Heilemann (New York Magazine) and Halperin (Time) worked their sources well&#x2014;all 200 of them. Some (including the sources themselves) will have trouble with the book&#x2019;s use of quotes (or lack thereof). The interviews, according to the authors, were conducted &#x201C;on deep background,&#x201D; and dialogue was &#x201C;reconstructed extensively&#x201D; and with &#x201C;extreme care.&#x201D; Sometimes the source of a quote is clear, as when the book gets inside someone&#x2019;s head, but not always. Many of the book&#x2019;s events were covered heavily at the time (Hillary&#x2019;s presumed juggernaut; Michelle Obama&#x2019;s initial hostility to her husband&#x2019;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&#x2019;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&#x2019;s haste to rush the book to press). --Ilene Cooper--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.