`Game Change’: What’s All the Fuss?

I’m a little surprised by the wave of acclaim that has buoyed Game Change onto the top of the bestsellers’ list. The book was written by Mark Halperin, whose excellent work a few years ago on ABC News’s The Note revolutionized political coverage, and by John Heileman. Halperin now writes for Time; Heilemann, for New York magazine, and much has been made of the amount of shoe leather reporting these two undertook in interviewing 300 or so people for this book about the 2008 elections. It’s true that they uncovered lots of inside stuff, but I am not sure that it amounts to much. The much-discussed Harry Reid comment about Obama being light-skinned and speaking without a Negro dialect comes and goes in the story with so little consequence that I rather suspect that without the aid of tub-thumping publicist, the remark would have passed virtually unnoticed. What else? We learn that everyone in politics says fuck a lot. We get chapter and verse on the rivalries inside Hillary Clinton’s high command, but the number of people who care about the antics of these high school student council nerds (with one exception, to come) could fit in the palm of Chris Matthews’ hand. We learn that Elizabeth Edwards isn’t really nice and that John Edwards really isn’t decent, but the woman is dying and the guy is destroyed, and so there’s only so much pleasure to be gained from watching their immolation. There may be much that is new, as in not previously reported, but there is little that changes our views about people.

What’s most weird is that the writers fail to extract a sense of drama from the most dramatic election in years. Obama moves through book unchanged, an amazingly composed and charismatic figure who rises to every occasion. The country’s plunge into a desperate financial crisis just weeks before the election becomes just another plot point. Obama aces the test, McCain chokes, but for all their interviews, the authors never deliver what was going on inside the heads of the candidates at this crucial moment.

Perhaps the writers should have spent some time reading Theodore White Jr., who invented the campaign chronicle with The Making of the President 1960. The book, written with a bit too much awe and breathlessness, is dated. But White at least made an effort to place the campaign in a context, to describe the moment in which Kennedy and Nixon were vying to assume command. There’s not enough of that in Game Change.