John Heilemann and Mark Halperin talked about their best-selling book, “Game Change,” last night at the LBJ Library, at a discussion and book signing co-sponsored by the library, the LBJ School of Public Affairs, the Texas Book Festival and The Texas Tribune, and moderated by the Tribune’s Evan Smith. “Game Change” briskly captures the behind-the-scenes personal drama of the 2008 presidential campaign, a campaign that featured an extraordinary cast of characters going through a unique and riveting race for the White House. Heilemann (pictured below left with his co-author) and Halperin’s comments about their book were entertaining and insightful.
Since its publication a couple of months ago, a lot of attention has been focused on the book’s descriptions of the relationships between the candidates and their spouses. (In short: John and Cindy McCain’s marriage: hostile; John and Elizabeth Edwards’: not what it seems; Bill and Hillary Clinton’s: a puzzle, as always; and Barack and Michelle Obama’s: occasionally strained, but generally grounded and authentic.) But there is much more to “Game Change” than these juicy, marital bits. The book richly documents tensions within and between the campaigns — and within each candidate as each decides to run and then as each slogs through the long ordeal. There are terrific moments of hubris and doubt, and it’s fascinating to learn how much fears of potentially lethal revelations and pending political attacks, real and imagined, drove decisions and actions. A couple of excerpts are available here and here.
The book also documents many pivotal moments during the course of the campaign. Perhaps no moment was as dramatic or as important to the election’s outcome as the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the threat of financial collapse that followed. McCain was ahead of Obama in the polls coming out of the Republican convention. But, as Heilemann and Halperin noted last night, the financial crisis provided both candidates with a “real-time test of leadership” that Obama passed and McCain failed. Concerns about the economy changed the campaign’s evolutionary path, rendering extinct the campaign we might have had otherwise, one that perhaps would have turned on personal attacks against Obama even more fierce than they were and on Obama’s ability to effectively counter them.
Heilemann and Halperin gathered the material for their book by conducting some 300 interviews with more than 200 people. Most interviews, they said, took place after the nominating conventions and again after the general election. They wanted to talk to as many participants as possible while memories were still fresh, and some interviews lasted five or six hours. People interviewed ranged from junior-level staffers to some of the candidates and their spouses. Anonymity was granted, which has led some critics to raise questions about the book’s sourcing. Halperin said the promise of anonymity actually pushed their bar higher, and it was important to the authors that they confirm all their reporting with multiple sources. “We were as careful as you can be,” Halperin said, and both he and Heilemann pointed to the fact that no one has challenged or even seriously attempted to challenge the book’s accuracy — not even the Clintons, who are notoriously reactionary to any perceived criticism or slight.
Of course, no discussion of the 2008 campaign can occur without talking about former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Many audience members laughed when her name came up last night, prompting Halperin to jokingly note that America is divided into two kinds of places — those “where you mention Sarah Palin and everyone feels uplifted” and those “like Austin where you mention Sarah Palin and everyone laughs.”
Neither Heilemann or Halperin could say with any confidence whether Palin will run for president in 2012. She is not doing any of the traditional things someone planning a serious run for president would do, they said. She quit as governor, she joined Fox News as a pundit, she has made no serious effort to put together a national campaign staff or learn issues and policies. Then again, Palin is not a traditional politician.
“She does not seem to care” about her weaknesses, Heilemann told me Thursday morning as we chatted about “Game Change” over coffee and as Palin’s name came up toward the end of our discussion. Or it’s possible, he said, that Palin has “made a shrewd calculation that for the people who are her most devoted followers,” her weaknesses — her “substantive deficiencies” and her having written things in her book, “Going Rogue,” that “are demonstrably false” — simply don’t matter. “So much of what she’s about is the politics of resentment, the notion that liberal elites and the liberal media don’t understand average Americans,” Heilemann said. In her supporters’ view, any attack on Palin is an “attack of the elites on average Americans. And that makes her more of a heroic figure” to them.
I asked Heilemann whether he thought Gov. Rick Perry would run in 2012, a question that also came up during last night’s talk at the LBJ Library. “I believe two things,” Heilemann told me. “I believe that at this moment the people who are around Gov. Perry are not thinking about 2012. At the same time, I believe that if Gov. Perry wins re-election in November, people around him will start thinking very seriously about him running for president.” I asked whether he thought voters outside Texas would support another Texan for the White House so soon after George W. Bush. Heilemann said an equally large, if not larger, problem for Perry to overcome was his having flirted with the specter of secession, and that if he were to become the Republican nominee in 2012, “secession would be a big thing that would get hung around his neck.
“Someone who talks about secession cannot be president of the United States, almost by definition,” Heilemann said. “There are some things in politics that are pretty hard to flip flop your way out of. That’s a pretty tough one.”