It’s a small irony, but by no means an uncommon one, given the primacy of money (somebody has to pay for all those TV ads and focus groups), even likely rivals have to play the stump-for-me game, as long as they’re in the same party. From this prologue, the book hops back in time to 2004, when Hilary Clinton was one of the most powerful members of the Democratic establishment, helping to raise money for Obama’s Senate seat.

In a hyperbolically described scene, Obama lies in a Des Moines hotel bed, heart racing and sleepless at the prospect that he might actually win this election. Game Change begins, as it ends, with Barack Obama. The deep-background, don’t-worry-I-won’t-name-you approach certainly gives the book what its authors crave, but it also lends the finished product an unshakeable sort of nagging doubt, leaving you wondering exactly how much of all this is true. In case you are wondering, “a book of this sort” is author-speak for juicy tell-all with lots of easily quotable, “He said what?!” moments, those tidbits that perennial buzz-seekers like Heilemann and Halperin live on. Heilemann and Halperin state up front that all of their interviews were conducted on deep background, as “this was essential to eliciting the level of candor on which a book of this sort depends”. The creepy-crawly feeling you get after reading about yet another war room session where image and sell points are focus-grouped and retriangulated six ways to Sunday has more to do with this simple, plaintive question: These were the options for who we were going to choose as leader of the free world? To paraphrase Lewis Black, if this is evolution, then by 2016 we’re going to be voting for plants. It also has little to do with the authors’ dire, irritating need to pretend they can get inside the candidates’ heads, though that certainly doesn’t help matters any. It isn’t so much the mind-numbing cavalcade of staged events and all the back-room wheeler-dealing - that’s par for the course with this kind of forensic pundit reportage.

An unpleasant sensation comes across you while reading Game Change, journalist John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s breathless account of the seemingly endless 2008 election.

John heilemann book