The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election by Dan Balz, Haynes Johnson

The Barnes & Noble Review

Political junkies who've had to get by lately on stories of stalled health care reform, used car trade-ins, and beer at the White House will find the fix they crave in The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election. Veteran Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Haynes Johnson team up for this exhaustively researched, objective, and lively account of the journey from the New Hampshire primary to Inauguration Day. Focusing on the campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain, the authors show how the unlikely, inspiring, and downright annoying pieces of the marathon contest came together. Don't look for newsmaking revelations. This book is about perspective. The authors -- who in addition to quoting all the key players draw on unnamed sources and leaked memos and emails -- do succeed in exposing some private, telling moments. They show Clinton informing her campaign manager (and longtime friend) Patti Solis Doyle by email that she's being pushed aside. In another email, Sarah Palin gleefully agrees to give a speech accusing Obama of hanging out with terrorists. "Yes, yes, yes," she writes. "Pls let me say this!!!" For the most part, Obama and his team come off looking focused and cohesive (a portrayal consistent with that in Richard Wolff's election book, Renegade). Meanwhile, infighting and strategic blunders continually trip up his more experienced rivals. The authors even give a plausible answer to the question many have asked since McCain tapped Palin as his running mate: "What was he thinking?" --Karen Holt

From the Publisher

The definitive account of the landmark election from two of America's best known political reporters

The election of 2008 shattered political barriers, illuminated undercurrents of race, gender, and class, and ignited an extraordinary battle among some of the most formidable political rivals ever to seek the presidency in Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain. It was an election that played out against a backdrop of wars, a shattered economy, and deep pessimism about the future.

Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson followed this campaign from the candidates' first forays into Iowa and New Hampshire to the historic night of Obama's victory celebration. They take readers on a gripping journey through the epic battle for Iowa, Clinton's dramatic comeback in New Hampshire, the racially tinged primary in South Carolina, the stunning endorsement of Obama by Senator Edward M. Kennedy over the Clintons' objections. They reveal the strategic mistakes of the Clinton campaign and the story behind Obama's breakthrough organization. They cover McCain's struggle for survival in the Republican primaries, Sarah Palin, and the economic meltdown that ensured Obama's victory.

Exclusive interviews with the candidates and their top strategists produce intimate portraits of Obama, Clinton, and McCain under stress throughout the longest and most expensive presidential campaign in American history. Balz and Johnson also move far off the campaign trail to listen to voters in battleground states express their deep anxieties about the darkening economic climate and the challenges facing the United States. This book is a riveting account of how this election not only marked a new erain American politics but also offered a test of historic proportions at a watershed moment for our nation.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

…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…if the authors fail to reframe the election in any significant new way, their retrospective does prove useful in reminding us…of the daunting odds that Mr. Obama overcame to win the White House in the first place.

The Washington Post - Ted Widmer

…an impressive effort delivered by two seasoned Washington reporters…The Battle for America boldly asserts its own importance in its title, and unlike many such pronouncements, it largely delivers. Through a judicious blend of facts, anecdotes, close-ups and wide-angle shots, it retells the story of the rise of a politician who was by no means foreordained to win the presidency…thanks to this book, we have a pretty good sense of where we are and how we got here.

Publishers Weekly

Balz and Johnson offer an incredibly detailed but concise account of the 2008 presidential election, landing on every highlight of the campaign—the debates, Sarah Palin's blunders and the Obama victory celebration in Grant Park. The authors present clear and unbiased interviews with each of the prime candidates as well as behind the scenes accounts of the ups, downs and incessant bickering that made the election so riveting. Dick Hill brings an investigative and theatrical tone to the work; his focused and authoritative delivery draws listeners into the story and earns their trust. A Viking hardcover (Reviews, Aug. 3). (Aug.)

Kirkus Reviews

A superior piece of political reportage and interpretation by Washington Post writer Balz (co-author: Storming the Gates: Protest Politics and the Republican Revival, 1996) and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Johnson (Journalism/Univ. of Maryland; The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism, 2005, etc.). By this account, the 2008 presidential campaign began in 2005 "Though George W. Bush no longer was on the ballot," write the authors, "his shadow hovered over all that followed." One of the things that undid Republican candidate John McCain, they note, was his firm support for the deeply unpopular Iraq War, support that he acknowledged as a political liability. It didn't help that McCain had gotten ever closer to Bush, and that his campaign had adopted Rovian tactics that were nasty and often unfair, both to primary opponents such as Mitt Romney and to his Democratic foe, Barack Obama. Meanwhile, the likely Democratic frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, made several critical errors during the campaign, many of which would seem to fall under the rubric of underestimating both Obama and the mood of the electorate, which wanted real change. There are a few surprises here, among them the authors' careful exposition of how McCain came to choose Sarah Palin. One motivation was youth, another folksiness in the wake of McCain's inability to remember how many residences he had-which ruled out Romney as running mate, since, in a time of economic turmoil, "Republicans could not present voters with nominees who between them owned nearly a dozen homes." Though Balz and Johnson do not write with the intimacies of Timothy Crouse or the lunacies of Hunter Thompson, their account is engrossingall the same. Although we all know how things turned out, the authors know how to work a cliffhanger, and, as they effectively demonstrate, things could have turned out differently at any number of turns. Essential for watchers of politics and a model for similar electoral analyses in the future. Agent: Flip Brophy/Sterling Lord Literistic

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