Call me blasé if you will, but of all the clapped-out forms of instant publishing, I had concluded that the ‘campaign book’ was the most dire.
Call me blasé if you will, but of all the clapped-out forms of instant publishing, I had concluded that the ‘campaign book’ was the most dire. I also generally think that any use of sporting metaphors to describe politics is an infallible sign of an exhausted hack. But Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin is so invigoratingly revealing — in the best and nastiest sense of that word — that it gripped me and held me tight.
Senator John McCain shouts the f-word nine times into his wife’s face in front of the staff, while raising both middle fingers. Senator John Edwards bribes another man to say that he is the father of the Senator’s ‘love child’, while Mrs Edwards shriekingly bares her breast cancer scars in an airport parking lot, crying, ‘Look at me!’ Sarah Palin’s staffers conclude that she is a hopeless nut-job who is at war with the father of her daughter’s out-of-wedlock child.
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