When authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann published “Game Change” in 2010, they proved that, despite an unprecedented level of coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign, there was much of the story remaining to be told.
At the time, Halperin told me this was because “people aren’t going to cooperate at the level we had during the campaign, when too much was at stake.” Instead, he said, “the key was to talk to sources immediately after the nomination fight and immediately when the election was over.” And for having done so in more than 300 lengthy interviews with more than 200 people, Halperin and Heilemann were richly rewarded.
The authors reported that:
• Hillary Rodham Clinton might have run in 2004 had daughter Chelsea not talked her out of it.
• By 2006, Sens. Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer were encouraging Barack Obama to run against Clinton in 2008.
• Bill Clinton once irritated Ted Kennedy by suggesting that Obama would have been fetching them coffee in the not-too-distant past, which Kennedy interpreted as racial.
• Reid saw appeal in Obama, whom he described as a “light-skinned” African-American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
• A rift developed between Obama and Joe Biden after the vice-presidential candidate claimed he was more qualified to be president.
Perhaps the most explosive tidbits concerned John and Elizabeth Edwards (derided by staff as “St. Elizabeth and the Ego Monster”). John Edwards was so reckless and brazen that, on the night he lost the Iowa caucus to Obama, he made an overture to the Obama campaign to be the VP, overlooking that his paramour was then pregnant and his wife had cancer.
No wonder Halperin told me that “anonymity is required to do a book like this. … To get the kind of cooperation we got requires giving people trust and confidence that they can speak freely.”
With so much to choose from, the question became, how would HBO condense “Game Change’s” 464 pages into two hours? Having seen an advance of the movie, which debuts Saturday night, I can answer in one word: Palin. More specifically, Sarah Palin (uncannily portrayed by Julianne Moore) as viewed through the eyes of Steve Schmidt, McCain’s senior campaign strategist (Woody Harrelson).
Palin, who has already said the adaptation is based on a “false narrative,” has reason to be concerned about her portrayal. It is devastating. She comes across as ill-equipped, unintelligent and obstinate.
It was Schmidt who recognized during the summer of 2008 that the McCain campaign was destined to lose unless it came up with a game-changer. Enter the Alaska governor, who fit that bill but was insufficiently vetted and nevertheless embraced by self-described risk-taker McCain.
After a series of self-inflicted campaign setbacks, Palin is depicted as emotionally unstable and described by staff as being in a “catatonic” state. A panicked Schmidt is shown calling McCain and advising that she “could be on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown.”
The job of preparing Palin for her media interaction fell to Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain adviser who had been the White House communications director for George W. Bush. After interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric went poorly, Moore’s Palin implodes, telling Wallace, “You have ruined me.” At the end of the campaign, HBO has Wallace confiding to Schmidt that she could not bring herself to vote.
Heilemann and Halperin told me that they think there is balance in their portrayal of Palin. Heilemann used words such as poise, magnetism, strength and humanizing to describe the former governor.
I told them that my 15-year-old son walked into the room while I screened the movie. After watching the Palin portrayal for 10 minutes, he said: “This can’t be real.”
That’s what Sarah Palin is already saying.
