Presidential Horse Race, the 2008 Version By MICHIKO KAKUTANI... THE BATTLE FOR AMERICA 2008 -The Story of an Extraordinary Election By Dan Balz and H

August 11, 2009
Books of The Times
Presidential Horse Race, the 2008 Version By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
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THE BATTLE FOR AMERICA 2008 -The Story of an Extraordinary Election By Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson

415 pages. Viking. $29.95.

Nine months after the presidential election of 2008, is there anything new or revealing to say about that momentous event? Can a post-mortem on the marathon campaign preceding that vote shed any new light on the participants or the process?

Given the voluminous coverage of that race, it might seem as if the obvious answer to these questions were no. But “The Battle for America 2008,” a new book by Dan Balz, the lead political reporter for The Washington Post, and his former Post colleague Haynes Johnson, actually makes for engaging reading — for both politics addicts interested in small new details and the more casual reader interested in a broad, savvy overview of the run-up to a historic election.

Yes, many of the authors’ observations — about subjects as diverse as voters’ disillusion with George W. Bush and the politics of the primary calendar — have been made many times before. Yes, many of their accounts of the ups and downs of the campaign — Barack Obama’s surge in Iowa; Hillary Rodham Clinton’s comeback in New Hampshire; the long, hard slog through states like South Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania — are very, very familiar. And yes, their discussions of the issues at stake in campaign 2008, including racial politics, the Iraq war and a dangerously faltering economy, retrace well-trodden ground.

But if the authors fail to reframe the election in any significant new way, their retrospective does prove useful in reminding us — 200-plus days into the Obama presidency, as reporters point to declining approval numbers and stubborn obstacles to overhauling health care — of the daunting odds that Mr. Obama overcame to win the White House in the first place.

The authors quote Mr. Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois, as saying that he started out in 2006 giving himself “25 percent odds, you know, maybe 30” of winning it all, and the first glimpse they give us of the candidate is a snapshot of an underdog, still very much in the shadow of the front-runner, Mrs. Clinton. He is sitting aboard his modest six-seat chartered airplane on March 4, 2007, waiting to take off from Selma, Ala., after participating in ceremonies commemorating the 42nd anniversary of the voting rights march there.

As Mr. Obama’s plane waits, Mr. Balz and Mr. Johnson write, “two motorcades of black S.U.V.’s roll onto the tarmac” and stop by “two large, sleek Gulfstream jets.” Bill Clinton, accompanied by his Secret Service detail and his aides, gets into one and promptly takes off, while Mrs. Clinton and her entourage pile into the second jet.

Mr. Obama’s plane is scheduled to depart next, but the engine won’t start: “The battery is dead. Don’t worry, the pilot tells Obama, airport crews are searching for a long extension cord. They’ll plug it into a generator in the lobby and run it from the terminal back to the plane to jump-start the engine. Still, the plane won’t start. While Obama and his aides are cramped inside the plane, sweltering in a cabin without air-conditioning, they watch as Hillary’s Gulfstream takes off. Bemused, Obama tells his young aides, ‘I guess this really is a grass-roots campaign.’ ”

The authors of “The Battle for America” remind us that “for much of 2007, it looked as if Hillary Clinton would win it all,” that her advisers tried to promote an image of strength and inevitability because they “paid lip service to the fact that voters wanted change” but were “more concerned about voter resistance to electing the first woman president.”

Promoting Mrs. Clinton as a candidate of experience in a change election was only one of her advisers’ many miscalculations, along with the early squandering of money, the failure to get an efficient Iowa operation up and running early in the game and an inability or unwillingness to mount a credible fight for the caucus states in February.

As Mr. Balz and Mr. Johnson see it, Bill Clinton also played a substantial role in derailing Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. They argue that his vociferous attacks on Mr. Obama in South Carolina ignited talk of racial politics, “damaged his wife’s candidacy” and not only cost her heavily in that state but also “redrew the landscape heading into Super Tuesday.”

“It seemed for a time,” the authors write, “that his once certain political touch and instincts eluded him and the rest of the Clinton campaign.” In addition, they detail a series of phone calls between Mr. Clinton and Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts in which, they say, the former president tried to win an endorsement for his wife but seemed to further alienate Mr. Kennedy — who, they report, was concerned that “the campaign was sliding into divisiveness, and held the Clintons principally responsible.”

The vicious infighting and bureaucratic gridlock of the Clinton campaign have already been chronicled at length by other reporters — most notably, in articles by Joshua Green in The Atlantic and Gail Sheehy in Vanity Fair — but Mr. Johnson and Mr. Balz do a nimble job here of contrasting its often spectacular dysfunction with the agility and enthusiastic innovation of the Obama campaign.

Senator John McCain’s campaign also emerges in these pages as being “under severe stress internally,” suffering from early fund-raising problems and a bitter culture clash between McCain 2000 and Bush 2004 staff members.

In the course of this book the authors reveal that David Plouffe, who oversaw the blueprint for Mr. Obama’s winning Iowa strategy and who helped construct a game plan based around the building of a new electorate, told Mr. Obama in April 2008 that “he wanted to step down after the primaries”: he was, the authors say, “worn out, having managed the campaign from the first day and on through the most rigorous nomination battle ever,” and his wife was “due to deliver their second child days before the election.”

Mr. Balz and Mr. Johnson report that Mr. Obama “implored him to stay” and that Mr. Plouffe eventually decided he couldn’t leave because the campaign, after the long primary battle, was behind schedule in both the vice-presidential selection process and convention planning.

Given the outcome of the Democratic nomination battle and the general election, this book’s descriptions of each campaign’s initial strategies are illuminating. Perhaps fatefully, Mr. McCain — who had been savaged by the Bush machine in 2000 and who would suffer in 2008 from being linked to the unpopular president — would end up authorizing “a campaign apparatus patterned after Bush’s 2004 re-election committee, a huge operation that was in sharp contrast to the lean campaign he ran in 2000” and that was ill suited to his temperament and strengths as a candidate.

Whereas some of Mrs. Clinton’s advisers, the authors say, wanted to reintroduce her and refute some voters’ impression of her as chilly and distant, the strategist Mark Penn — who comes across in this volume as a pugnacious and highly divisive figure — argued that “former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher should be Hillary’s role model.” An 11-page memorandum he sent her shortly before Christmas 2006 played down the threat posed by Mr. Obama, while indulging in what the authors call “pure flattery” of his client.

“We have incredible image strengths,” the memo boasted, adding that “people don’t just like Hillary Clinton, they love her.”

In contrast, Mr. Balz and Mr. Johnson observe, a November 2006 memo sent to Mr. Obama by his chief adviser, David Axelrod, “was notable for its unsparing critique of his client.”

Mr. Axelrod warned Mr. Obama that if he decided to run for president, he would have to address his own “willingness and ability to put up with something” he had “never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism.” The memo went on: “I don’t know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much what is written and said about you. You don’t relish combat when it becomes personal and nasty.”

The Axelrod memo also pointed out that an outgoing president nearly always defines the next election, that people rarely seek someone in the mold of the outgoing executive (certainly not after the presidency of George W. Bush) and that in 2008 voters were going to be looking for an alternative to the qualities of stubbornness, hyper-partisanship and ideological certainty that Democrats, independents and disaffected Republicans associated with Mr. Bush.

Mr. Axelrod went on to argue, presciently it turned out, that Mr. Obama’s profile — his embodiment of change, along with his eagerness to challenge old dogmas of right and left — fit this historical moment better than Mrs. Clinton’s and that if he were right, Mr. Obama could catalyze a political movement and prevail against substantial odds.

“You will never be hotter than you are right now,” the memo concluded, adding that “there are many reasons to believe that if you are ever to run for the presidency, this is the time.”