An election portrait, offering detail if not big picture

September 06, 2009|Renée Loth

When Barack Obama came to the Globe in December 2007 to seek the newspaper’s endorsement, he joked that competing against Hillary Clinton’s campaign was like trying to beat Microsoft with a few kids working out of a garage. Although Obama was underplaying the sophistication of his own team, the authors of the prodigiously-researched retrospective “The Battle for America 2008’’ show how the formidable Clinton campaign ultimately was no match for the nimble start-up from Chicago.

“With the Clintons,’’ write veteran journalists Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson, “nothing comes easy, without bureaucracy, or without excessive control.’’ The comment comes during the Iowa caucuses, but it could apply at almost any point in the early going for the Democratic nomination, as Clinton’s top-heavy campaign seems overwhelmed by the burdens of “inevitability.’’ Only when Obama wins the first crucial Iowa caucus and Clinton is threatened does she find her voice - for a while - and go on to win the New Hampshire primary.

The cliché has it that history is written by the winners, so it’s not surprising that “The Battle for America’’ is complimentary to Obama and his team. What is striking is how furiously the leaks and recriminations come from the campaigns of the losers - both Clinton’s and Republican John McCain’s. It’s juicy to get the dish on the vilified Clinton adviser Mark Penn, or see the despair of McCain staffers who try to brief Sarah Palin on the issues. But all of the insider chatter in “The Battle for America’’ leaves out one crucial voice: that of the American voter.

Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has written several insightful campaign books from the point of view of the electorate, during the Reagan years in “Sleepwalking through History,’’ and through the sobering aftereffects in “Divided We Fall.’’ He has honed an unerring sense of the American mood and how to capture it by going deep with a handful of representative voters.

Early on in “The Battle for America’’ there is a promise of this, when the authors introduce Fay Citerone, 53, whom they describe as “a perfect mirror of how Americans voted - and why.’’ And yet, by my count, Citerone reappears exactly twice - and only briefly - in 415 pages. Ordinary voters are hardly heard above the din of delegate counting, exit-polling, fund-raising, and finger-pointing.

It feels a bit churlish to complain about Beltway-itis in a book clearly aimed at political junkies. Johnson and Balz, national political correspondent for the Washington Post, secured exclusive interviews with principal players in the election, and a raft of internal memos and e-mails that reveal the thinking at the highest levels of the campaigns.