Just a decade ago, the ascent of a little-known senator as America’s first African-American president would have been considered a plot fit only for a novel or, maybe, a TV series (one featuring a — white — woman prez has already been made). The rash of campaign histories that have appeared since the US presidential elections suggest that few journalists covering Barack Obama’s extraordinary bid for the White House were unaware of the historic significance of what they witnessed.
Heilemann and Halperin were no exceptions. In a campaign that was subjected to unprecedented levels of global media scrutiny, they offer to provide readers with “the story behind the headlines” and “the wall-to-wall coverage”. This book was written, they tell us, after conducting more than 300 interviews, plus examining reams of documents, emails and so on.
“Although no work of this kind, lacking the distance and perspective of time, can hope to be definitive, we are convinced that some answers are more readily discovered in the ground that lies between history and journalism — precisely the spot that we were aiming for and believe this book occupies,” they write.
The authors have focused on the big battles of the campaign and tried to present intimate portraits of the protagonists who, in their opinion, defined the issues for this election: Obama, Clinton, McCain and Edwards, and their spouses (the last named is a surprising inclusion because he was scarcely a leading contender though his shenanigans did provide a prurient sideshow).
Race of a Lifetime has the virtue of being written by journalists who enjoyed favoured access to all camps but managed to avoid succumbing to the breathless admiration that East Coast journalists reserved for Obama, which almost reduced him to a post-racial pin-up boy. Such objectivity is certainly welcome in a campaign that came to be fought on almost Manichean lines.
Predictably, the immediacy of the book is its weakness. Written before Obama completed a year in office, when he was still “The One” in the eyes of the world, it offers little fresh insight, either into the candidates (and their spouses) or the broad issues that defined them.
It is now pretty well established, for instance, that Bill Clinton played an unwittingly significant role in his wife’s defeat for the Democratic nomination and that McCain’s late start, bad temper and confused agenda cost him the White House as much as his party’s offbeat choice of vice president.
The familiar controversies are recounted here in detail — Obama’s “guns and religion” gaffe, his superb handling of the Reverend Wright controversy, Hillary’s “sniper fire” blunder, McCain’s alleged affair with a PR consultant and Edwards’ sexual peccadilloes. If the book busts a myth, it is that Obama’s campaign was far from the perfection that was later ascribed to it.
Heilemann and Halperin essentially fill the interstices between the events, employing the novelist’s licence and the taut, metaphor-heavy style of American journalese to grab the reader from page one. Thus the opening sentence of the prologue: “Barack Obama jerked bolt upright in bed at three in the morning. Darkness enveloped his low-rent room at the Des Moines Hampton Inn; the airport across the street was quiet in the hours before dawn.”
Omit the candidate’s name and that could have been a start of a Ludlum thriller, only there’s no killer lurking in the shadows. Instead, the authors go on to inform us that Obama finds himself wide awake, “heart pounding, consumed by thoughts at once electric and daunting: I might win this thing”. “This thing” refers to the Iowa caucus, the first of the big battles to win the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton.
Iowa was the start of several shock defeats for Clinton, after which the authors describe an encounter between her and Obama, a defining moment in the campaign. “Bug-eyed, red-faced, waving her arms, Hillary pointed at her rival’s chest. Obama tried to calm her down, putting his hand on her shoulder — but that only made Clinton angrier… .” It was after this that Obama, whom Clinton had initially bested in the debates, figured out: “You know what… We’re doing something right.”
Given the outcome of the elections and the way Obama changed the electoral map as he had promised to do, it is understandable that more than 60 per cent of the book is taken up by the Democratic nomination race. True, the Republican counterpart was largely subsumed by the sheer entertainment of the Democrat presidential competition between an African-American and a woman. But given how close McCain came to Obama in the opinion polls, the race was, for a while, perilously close and he deserved more scrutiny. The turning point, of course, was the Republican’s vice-presidential choice.
Much has been written about Sarah Palin’s patent unsuitability for the job and Heilemann and Halperin’s account only adds to the general incredulity. Among their “inside” stories is one that the party conducted less research on her than it would have for a “potential assistant secretary of agriculture”, and her chief anxiety was whether her “brand” was “hair-up”. For those who remember her stunning performance at the Republican nomination, there’s the titbit that the teleprompter stalled in places (including during the “lipstick on a bulldog” part).
Indian readers will find the book absorbing because it offers a racily authentic look at the bewildering electoral process in the world’s most powerful democracy. But for a compelling insider’s insight, Primary Colors, the wry account of Bill Clinton’s first campaign, still has no rival.
RACE OF A LIFETIME
John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
Penguin
436 pages; Rs 599
