Given how often Barack Obama has been compared to John F. Kennedy, it makes sense that we now have a Camelot-style report on the great campaign of ’08. Not long after Kennedy’s election, Theodore White broke big with the publication of “The Making of the President, 1960,” a classic of political reporting that covered the campaign with a novelist’s sense of drama and a stenographer’s sense of detail.
It has been imitated many times since.
More consciously than most, Richard Wolffe has now entered the Teddy White sweepstakes with “Renegade: The Making of a President.” The connection is right there in the title, and from the very first words there is little doubt what he is up to.
Wolffe covered the Obama campaign for Newsweek magazine, and at times he seems to be channeling White (who had been a Time reporter), referring to his protagonist as “the candidate” and deploying short, dramatic sentences that heighten the air of mystery about the transfer of power.
“Renegade” stakes an audacious claim to its own importance and largely lives up to it. Like White, Wolffe was lucky in several ways, beginning with the fact that the campaign he chose to cover was exceptionally historic. But he was also granted unusual access to the candidate, and one of the book’s more interesting episodes reveals that it was Obama who came up with the idea of Wolffe’s project, nudging him forward with a casual remark (“Why can’t you write a book about it? Like Theodore White. Those are great books.”)
“Renegade” tells the whole amazing story, restating how unlikely it seemed, only two years ago, that President Obama would ever be identified as such.
When the campaign started, he was 99th out of 100 senators in seniority. In 2000, he couldn’t even gain admission to the Democratic convention, and his credit card was declined when he tried to rent a car in L.A.
Wolffe explores all of the ups and downs of 2008, relaying anecdotes new and familiar. There are not quite as many flashbulb revelations as could be expected, beyond a horrifying glimpse into just how directionless the Bush White House was at the time of the economic collapse last fall and some provocative suggestions that the Obamas’ marriage was in trouble around 2000, when his political ambitions were surfacing.
But the book is clear, concise and well-written, effectively retelling a story that still astonishes us, even after we all lived through it last year.
Which is not quite to say that this is “The Making of the President, 2008.” The chapters are lively and well-informed, but some continuity is missing, and quite a few state primaries are ignored or dumbed down.
No particular light is shed on the big efforts in Pennsylvania and North Carolina — and none at all in less-scrutinized places like Missouri, where Obama narrowly beat Hillary Clinton with 49 percent of the vote to 48 percent, a crucial step on the way to his victory.
The chief drama revolves around Obama- Clinton more than Obama-McCain, and we are shown glimpses of the agitation that Clinton’s perseverance was causing inside the Obama team.
But we are told little of the genuine policy differences that separated them or of the random factors (the spike in gas prices) that also entered into the complex calculus of 2008.
Still, the book will please the millions who lived and died with every test of the campaign and should satisfy a hunger to know more about the person at the center of these gravity-defying events.
Like White, Wolffe obviously favors the man he dubs “the candidate.” But to his credit, he points out the occasional imperfection (some fudging on the issues of campaign finance and NAFTA, for example) and reveals a politician ready to play very hard to win, even while claiming to be above the politics of anger.
Near the beginning of their collaboration, Obama asked Wolffe whether there would be enough drama in a story that merely reflected a successful realization of a vision (“What happens if we just had a plan and then went out and said, ‘let’s execute it?’ “). That, in a nutshell, is exactly what happened in 2008.
But, yes, there is enough drama, and then some, in “Renegade.” It is surely not the final word, but it is as close as we are likely to get until Obama’s aides begin to write their version of an extraordinary American story that is still unfolding.
NONFICTION
Renegade: The Making of a President
by Richard Wolffe
$26.
