Game Change

Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime
John Heileman, Mark Halperin

I have to be just a bit suspicious because this book confirms all of my own impressions of the candidates in the 2008 Presidential election, which I garnered from watching their antics on television. Are the Clintons as strange as they appear to be? Is Sarah Palin, in real life, so much like her portrayal by Tina Fey? Is John McCain really as reckless as he seems? Is Joe Biden genuinely a lovable, stumbling pompous ass? Does Obama actually walk on water? According to Game Change, yes. After doing countless hours of interviews with campaign staff, family members, fellow media folks and such of the principles as made themselves available, Heilman and Halperin have confirmed all of the stereotypes that developed in the media about the candidates, with the addition of some juicy inside stories, never before revealed.


I usually don't read political campaign books or candidate memoirs but I made an exception for Game Change because I heard the authors being interviewed on NPR. John Heilman and Mark Halperin are engaging personalities who know how to tell a story. They make the inside dirt on the 2008 campaign sound very interesting indeed.

One of the most interesting things revealed in the book is the state of disorganization, nay chaos, within both the Clinton and the McCain campaigns. I could not have imagined that Hillary Clinton would tolerate the level of infighting, backbiting and intrigue that went on in her campaign, referred to as "Hillaryland" by the authors. According to the book she practically encouraged this self destructive behavior among her staff. McCain, on the other hand, hired seasoned advisers and then refused to listen to their advice, again, according to the authors.  The book makes a good case that McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate at the last possible moment, only because his experts finally convinced him that choosing Joe Lieberman would cause a rebellion among the Republican faithful.

Barack Obama appears to be a calm and unflappable in Game Change as he does on TV, except that he is often quoted as dropping f-bombs to emphasize many of his points. Actually, so are Hillary Clinton and John McCain. This leads me to the conclusion that the political class in America needs to read more literature in order to build a greater vocabulary of colorful language.

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Keywords: politics, 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Sarah Palin

The Age of the Unthinkable

Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It
Joshua Cooper Ramo

Joshua Cooper Ramo is Managing Director of Kissinger Associates, which makes him a high priced consultant in the field of foreign relations. He's a Nixon to China kind of guy, speaking Mandarin and promoting the idea of talking to those funny furriners, even if they do eat strange food and speak in unintelligible gibberish. I'm sure he hangs out with Henry Kissinger. He has written two books about China and one about skydiving.

In this newest book Ramo discovers that the world doesn't always do what we expect and he proposes that we all get loose and flexible as the best way to deal with crisis. Ramo seems to think that this is something new. I tend to disagree with him. The problems du jour change but the surprises have kept on coming throughout history. Every time that our peerless leaders, whether they be Nixon or Napoleon, thought they had a handle on things, all hell has broken loose.

Ramo believes that the high degree of global interconnectedness we are experiencing today, in trade, communication and travel make the world more unstable instead of less. Viruses from afar can hitch rides on airplanes and travel thousands of miles in a few hours. Trouble in the U.S. mortgage markets cause a panic in Russia and China. A bunch of highly educated Saudi's, financed with millions in oil money, can wreak havoc in New York, London or Washington D.C. It would actually be more impressive if a gang of goatherds from the Afghan mountains could do that, but without the Saudis money that still isn't possible.

The pace of things has surely speeded up, but we haven't seen anything like the 1918 flu epidemic or the black death, for some time. (Knock on wood.) Genghis Khan made a pretty hash of things for the Chinese in his day and the South Sea Bubble is still the most egregious example of financial markets gone bad. Things have not really changed all that much.

I do rather like Ramo's proposed solutions. He has invented the term "deep security," which means paying attention to the basics, like ensuring meaningful work for people and giving them universal health care as a way of cushioning the effect of financial panics, employing diplomacy, to ensure that our enemies as well as our friends know what we (talking about the U.S. here) expect from them and what we are willing to do to get it. It may be a hard sell politically but I do think that aggressively fighting AIDS and engineering clean water supplies in sub Saharan Africa will, in the long run, lead to fewer wars, fewer pirates and fewer terrorists.

It took quite while, after chapters of scary scenarios, for Ramo to get to his point about "deep security," and even then, I found him a bit vague on details. Creating "deep security" is a lot of work. Even talking about it is. It's a lot easier to make up slogans like "bomb bomb Iran," which is why politicians do so much of that sort of thing.

Supreme Courtship

Christopher Buckley

Christopher Buckley turns out novels even faster than William F. did. In fact, since I read what I thought was his latest, Little Green Men, he has published five more. Perhaps I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have.

Generally Buckley's books revolve around the sordid side of life in Washington, DC. Usually they are funny. Mostly they hang together pretty well. This book, published in 2008, revolves around an unpopular President, (not that one) an ambitious Senator and a TV judge, appointed to the Supreme Court.

The TV judge is a wise cracking, colorful lady from Texas. She is highly entertaining until the President's handlers get a hold of her and manage to get her through the confirmation hearings. As a confirmation candidate and a Supreme Court justice she becomes a boor, not to mention a poor judge. I was hoping to hear her speak up and use some of those borrowed Ratherisms in the Senate and during oral arguments. No, she is as polite and as quiet as a church mouse. The plot takes a bunch of twists and turns, there is (shocking!) sex, alcohol consumption and a bit of intrigue. The Senator gets his own TV show. The President wins reelection, mostly because he tells the country that he doesn't want it. Naturally the election goes all the way to the Supreme Court and our TV judge must cast the deciding vote. Everything comes out right in the end.

Buckley's use of language is superb. He fills the book with clever plays on words. Don't worry, ecxept for some Latin, thrown in (with bogus translations) for legal color, he does not go in for his dad's polysyllables.

I was a bit disappointed. I liked the idea of a Judge Judy stirring things up among the Supremes. Still, although no Thank You For Smoking, it was an entertaining quick read. Give it about a 73.

What You Should Know About Politics But Don't

A Nonpartisan Guide to the Issues
Jessamyn Conrad

Let me say first, that there was not a lot of new information in this book and I found the title only slightly less offensive than the "for dummies" series of books, which I refuse to consult on principle. I've read over a couple of them, meh. It went downhill from there.

The book starts off talking about elections and explains about voting districts and political parties and the electoral college. Then it gets into voter suppression and fraud, gerrymandering campaign finance and the trouble with electronic voting machines. The following chapters take on a long list of hot button issues: recession. stagflation, the mortgage crisis, isolationism, health care, homeland security, no child left behind, all the while maintaining a neutral non partisan tone, the News Hour with Jim Lerher, on Prozac. "Some believe that torture is inherently morally repugnant and is never justifiable. Others think there may be some very restricted circumstances in which torture is morally acceptable, while still others contend that those conditions are broader."

Some people bend over backwards to not have an opinion, too, and Jessamyn Conrad is one of them. Some people think torture is sometimes OK? Let's put it out there, Jessamyn. The Bush Administration denies that it ever tortured anyone and if it did, then they must have deserved it. And besides, if the President does it, it's legal.

I became weary of the neutrality. None of the burning issues of the day have any relevance weight, meaning or value in this book, just on the one hand and on the other.
The publisher got blurbs from Barack Obama and Bob Dole for the front cover. I guess John McCain was too busy to answer the email.

Real Change

From the world that fails to the world that works.
Newt Gingrich
Regnery Publsihing
ISBN: 978-1-59698-053-2

Here's how the Newt starts his new book:

The media tell us America is a nation divided between conservative red states and liberal blue states. They tell us that red and blue are qqually divided - which is why elections are so close, why Congress seems gridlocked, and why nothing ever seems to get done in Washington.

But this is simply not true. The reality is the American people are united on almost every important issue facing our country. The real division is between red-white -and-blue America (about 85 percent of the country) and a fringe on the left (about 15 percent of the country).

Translation: I know that your, dear reader are a true patriotic American, not like those elitist lefties on your TV, telling you what to think. You are going to agree with me because I'm a true patriotic American, too. You and I know what's really going on, they can't fool us. Can I interest you in used car?

The Newt goes on to explain how a new less partisan politics is needed and how only the Republican party can bring this about because Republicans stand for truth, justice and the American way, unlike those evil Democrats, plotting their tax and spend takeover of the world by trial lawyers from Holywood. Real Change means more of the same in prettier packaging brought to you by the party of Exxon and Peabody Coal.

Real Change is a piece of excrement written by one of the architects of the current partisan, all or nothing, party loyalty before national interest, politics. Don't bother to read it. If you're a dittohead you can get the same stuff more entertainingly from that big mouth on your AM radio. If you're not it will be bad for your blood pressure. Newt is one of those politicians who is so crooked he has to screw his socks on in the morning.

Homo Politicus

The Strange and Scary Tribes That Run Our Government
Dana Milbank
Doubleday
ISBN978-0-385-51750-8

The premise of this tome is that Dana Milbank, Washington Post columnist, is an anthropologist studying the primitive tries found along the banks of the Potomac and writing them up for publication, possibly achieving tenure in the process. It only works up to a point. After the fifth or sixth chapter the joke is pretty stale.

Politicians, lobbyists, journalists, staffers and various hangers on in Washington D.C. have their quirks and peccadilloes and Milbank is here to tell us all about them. Since it is on the eleven o'clock news every stinking night right after he drive by shootings, the carjackings and the baby alligators in the toilet, we are all pretty familiar already. If I hear one more blue dress joke I am going to scream.

The glossary of Potomac speak is useful and interesting, though. Here are a few examples:

You're doing a heck of a job.
You will be fired in ten days.

I don't pay attention to the polls.
My approval rating is 32 percent.

Frankly . . .
The following statement is false.

Since it's the quadrennial silly season I thought a bit of political reading might be in order. This is plenty, though. I'm going to return Newt's bogus diatribe and check out a nice Laura Lippman novel or something to cleanse my palate.

Day of Reckoning

How Hubris, Ideology and Greed Are Tearing America Apart
Patrick J. Buchanan
ISBN-13: 978-0-12-37696-3
ISBN-10: 0-312-37696-0

When I saw this book by Pat Buchanan on the new book shelf at the library I knew I had something to really chew on. Here was my chance to give that paleocoservative cave man one right between the eyes. Who can forget how Buchanan single handedly torpedoed George H. W. Bush's second term candidacy at the 1992 Republican convention in Dallas? Who is not still angry about the things he said to Michael Kinsly week after week on Crossfire? Well, Pat Buchanan is pretty tame compared to the conservatives we have running the show today. Buchanan calls the the Bush II administration a failure because of it's hubris and ideological policymaking. In a chapter he calls "The Gospel of George Bush," he lambastes the notion that America can or should "end tyranny in our world," or spread democracy to every nation. He calls the invasion of Iraq the greatest mistake in American history. I'm with you Pat. Oh, it's hard to write that. How can I be agreeing with this guy?

Domestically Buchanan sees America drifting toward a union with Canada and Mexico, where we will lose our national identity - or the division of America where we will lose the southwest to the Mexicans, he's not sure which. Now we're talking! That's the Pat Buchanan I remember! He hits all the high notes, except that he never mentions the Trilateral Commission. Usually the Trilateral Commission is behind all these world government plots.

Buchanan feels the we need to close our borders to immigrants from Latin America, who speak another language, don't look like us and refuse to assimilate. He says, "Yet were an American to propose an immigration policy to keep the United States predominantly Christian and European -the rational behind the immigration act of 1924 - he or she would be denounced as a racist, a xenophobe, and un-American." Well, yeah, Pat. That would cover the bill.

What he fails to remember is the history of immigration in this country. Millions of people came here from China, Italy, Eastern Europe, Germany, Scandinavia in successive waves. Each time there were Pat Buchanans there eager to nail the gate shut and each time, in about three generations, the immigrants assimilated, made our country culturally richer and joined the Buchanans of the world to decry the coming of the next wave. Of course the Scandinavians brought lutefisk, which nearly poisoned the entire upper midwest, or at least made it smell bad. I'm allowed to say that, just like Buchanan is allowed to sing "No Irish Need Apply." If he remembers the words.

The Conscience of a Liberal

Paul Krugman
W. W. Norton & Co. Ltd.
ISBN: 13-978-0-393-06069-0

Deriving it's title from the 1960 classic ghostwritten for Barry Goldwater, this book blasts what Krugman calls "movement conservatism" for being anti democratic, elitist, self serving, untenable, false, misleading and packed with lies. He goes on for several chapters in this vein before he gets down to his own proposal for a liberal, a progressive, agenda which is centered around universal, single payer, health care. Krugman gives some simple, easily verified, easily understood numbers which show, in his opinion, that a single payer system would provide better health care to more people for less money than the nightmare system of health care by accountants that we have today. Simple put, he proposes to extend Medicare to everyone. Of course the insurance industry and the pharmas will fight tooth and nail to prevent this happening and doctors are always complaining about the level of payment from Medicare. I always feel sorry for my doctor whenever I see him pull out of the driveway of his McMansion in his Mercedes. I know he really wants a Bentley and who can blame him.

I never did figure out why Krugman's conscience is bothering him, though.