Changing The 'Game,' But Not For The Better

Back when Theodore White did his groundbreaking book The Making of the President 1960, it was easy to write about elections. Most Americans didn't know very much about how campaigns actually worked. These days, we're all experts on push-polling, NASCAR dads, and those oddball Iowa caucuses. For an election book to register now, it must offer something new, something hot. It has to dish. If any account of the 2008 campaign does just that it's Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, a laughably written yet highly readable book that The Economist has described as "high quality political porn." Because most of its pages rehearse yet again the campaign's greatest hits — you know, Bill Clinton's gaffes, Obama's trouble with Reverend Wright, Palin's disastrous interview with Katie Couric — its real selling point is its juicy stuff. That Harry Reid talked about Obama's lack of "Negro dialect." That McCain's aides thought Palin unfit to be Veep. And that Elizabeth Edwards behaved hideously to her husband's campaign staff.