Race of a Lifetime: How Obama Won the White House by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (Penguin, £9.99)
From the first sentence—“Barack Obama jerked bolt upright in bed at three o’clock in the morning”—this account of the 2008 presidential election grips with the intensity of a John Grisham thriller. The plots are up there with Grisham, too, particularly in the case of John Edwards. In a desperate bid to stay in the race, the candidate persuaded one of his campaign staff to claim he had fathered Edwards’s love-child. “Why didn’t you come to me like a fucking man and tell me to stop fucking her?” Edwards screams at an aide as it all falls apart. “They were both yelling now at the top of their lungs, red-faced and teary-eyed.” And that’s long before Sarah Palin enters stage right, with more screaming and hysterics.
Then there’s the main Obama vs Clinton plot—interloper vs establishment; black vs white; youth vs age; man vs woman. The nail-bitingly close primary campaign unfolded over months criss-crossing America in pursuit of the most important prize in politics. After the final battle comes the final reunion: “On the brink of great power and awesome responsibility, he and Clinton were on the same team.” The human drama is inseparable from the political drama and, in showing this, Heilemann and Halperin have performed an artistic feat.
This article originally appeared in the August 2010 edition of Prospect.
