The Obama the Campaign Knew
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
NYT Book Review
THE AUDACITY TO WIN: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory
By David Plouffe
Illustrated. 390 pages. Viking. $27.95.
¡OBÁMANOS!: The Birth of a New Political Era
By Hendrik Hertzberg
341 pages. The Penguin Press. $25.95.
One year after Barack Obama was voted into the White House, does the public want to relive the marathon 21-month campaign that began long before the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire and churned on through the seemingly endless calendar of primaries and the general election? After useful campaign books by Richard Wolffe (“Renegade: The Making of a President”) and Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson (“The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election”), is there anything illuminating left to say about the long, winding road to his historic victory?
In the case of Hendrik Hertzberg’s new book, “¡Obámanos!,” the answer is a definite no. Although some of Mr. Hertzberg’s political pieces for the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker and his blog entries at the magazine’s Web site, newyorker.com, were insightful at the time, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to go back and reread them now in book form — unless you really crave some transient acid flashbacks to the campaign and the waning years of the Bush administration.
“The Audacity to Win” by the former Obama campaign manager, David Plouffe, is considerably more interesting. While Mr. Plouffe doesn’t serve up a lot of news and obviously retraces lots of familiar ground (including the by now tiresome debates about the debates, the gas tax and the disputed Florida and Michigan primaries) he gives readers a visceral sense of the campaign from an insider’s point of view.
And while reporters and political analysts have long since deconstructed the reasons for Team Obama’s win (from the candidate’s determination to bridge the red state-blue state divide; to his campaign’s mastery of the Internet; to the country’s craving for change after two terms of President George W. Bush), Mr. Plouffe provides a detailed and revealing account of exactly how he and Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, created and executed the blueprint that turned the junior senator from Illinois — this “skinny guy from the South Side with a funny name,” as the candidate once described himself — into a formidable political force who redrew the electoral map and defeated the huge, clanking Clinton and G.O.P. machines.
Mr. Plouffe chronicles how their little insurgent force — “packed in three to a desk in temporary space” — grew from a tiny start-up facing truly long-shot odds into a fully formed campaign that drew volunteers from across traditional political lines, raised record amounts of funds online from small donors and built a viral grass-roots operation. He describes the narrow pathway to success the campaign would have to trace to win. (In retrospect, many rivals would describe its execution as almost flawless.) And he recalls his team’s determination, in the face of myriad distractions, to try to stay focused on its overall strategy: win Iowa; push hard in other caucus states; build a small but insurmountable delegate lead over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton; and in the general election go on the offensive by picking a wide set of target states “so that we could lose some and still win the presidency.”
(More here.)
NYT Book Review
THE AUDACITY TO WIN: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory
By David Plouffe
Illustrated. 390 pages. Viking. $27.95.
¡OBÁMANOS!: The Birth of a New Political Era
By Hendrik Hertzberg
341 pages. The Penguin Press. $25.95.
One year after Barack Obama was voted into the White House, does the public want to relive the marathon 21-month campaign that began long before the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire and churned on through the seemingly endless calendar of primaries and the general election? After useful campaign books by Richard Wolffe (“Renegade: The Making of a President”) and Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson (“The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election”), is there anything illuminating left to say about the long, winding road to his historic victory?
In the case of Hendrik Hertzberg’s new book, “¡Obámanos!,” the answer is a definite no. Although some of Mr. Hertzberg’s political pieces for the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker and his blog entries at the magazine’s Web site, newyorker.com, were insightful at the time, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to go back and reread them now in book form — unless you really crave some transient acid flashbacks to the campaign and the waning years of the Bush administration.
“The Audacity to Win” by the former Obama campaign manager, David Plouffe, is considerably more interesting. While Mr. Plouffe doesn’t serve up a lot of news and obviously retraces lots of familiar ground (including the by now tiresome debates about the debates, the gas tax and the disputed Florida and Michigan primaries) he gives readers a visceral sense of the campaign from an insider’s point of view.
And while reporters and political analysts have long since deconstructed the reasons for Team Obama’s win (from the candidate’s determination to bridge the red state-blue state divide; to his campaign’s mastery of the Internet; to the country’s craving for change after two terms of President George W. Bush), Mr. Plouffe provides a detailed and revealing account of exactly how he and Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, created and executed the blueprint that turned the junior senator from Illinois — this “skinny guy from the South Side with a funny name,” as the candidate once described himself — into a formidable political force who redrew the electoral map and defeated the huge, clanking Clinton and G.O.P. machines.
Mr. Plouffe chronicles how their little insurgent force — “packed in three to a desk in temporary space” — grew from a tiny start-up facing truly long-shot odds into a fully formed campaign that drew volunteers from across traditional political lines, raised record amounts of funds online from small donors and built a viral grass-roots operation. He describes the narrow pathway to success the campaign would have to trace to win. (In retrospect, many rivals would describe its execution as almost flawless.) And he recalls his team’s determination, in the face of myriad distractions, to try to stay focused on its overall strategy: win Iowa; push hard in other caucus states; build a small but insurmountable delegate lead over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton; and in the general election go on the offensive by picking a wide set of target states “so that we could lose some and still win the presidency.”
(More here.)
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