Book on ’08 election breaks news

By MICHAEL SMERCONISH

“Game Change” is so hot that many bookstores were sold out last week. Sales for the recap of the 2008 campaign written by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann were no doubt fueled by Harry Reid’s analysis of Barack Obama’s skin tone and dialect.

But I don’t think that’s the big news from the book, and nor does one of the authors.

Time magazine’s Halperin told me that the commotion caused by Reid’s observation was unexpected. Indeed, the Senate majority leader’s words weren’t even among the dozens of nuggets highlighted in the publicity material distributed in support of the book. Halperin insisted it’s not even the most significant anecdote involving Reid.

“As far as we’re concerned, there’s a story about Harry Reid and his role in getting Obama to run for president that’s even bigger than the story people have been talking about,” Halperin said when we spoke last week. “We did not think this was the biggest news in the book.”

Instead he pointed to what he called a “chilling” and “fascinating” private discussion between Hillary Clinton and Mark Penn, her chief strategist. “It’s a four-page conversation, verbatim dialogue, where she talks about Barack Obama cheating to win the election,” Halperin told me. “She says that the choice the country faces — this is after Obama’s become the nominee — between Obama and McCain is a horrible choice for the nation. It’s an extraordinary insight into Hillary Clinton, how she talks in private to a single adviser.”

Such “extraordinary insights” are plentiful: Hillary Clinton might have run in 2004 had Chelsea not talked her out of it. By 2006, Sens. Reid and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., were encouraging Obama to run against her in 2008. Bill Clinton irritated Ted Kennedy by suggesting that Obama would have been fetching them coffee in the not-too-distant past.

A rift developed between Obama and Biden after the VP candidate claimed he was more qualified to be president, causing Biden to be denied access to a daily campaign briefing. Another Biden gaffe ... resulted in a confrontation between the two soon thereafter.

Palin vetting

The McCain campaign struggled to vet Sarah Palin in a matter of days — after Palin herself spent only a few hours completing the vetting material. Dick Cheney reportedly believed that selecting Palin was a “reckless choice.” Though Michael Steele, now head of the Republican National Committee, had studied all summer to play Obama throughout the McCain campaign’s debate prep, the GOP nominee never engaged in the exercise for fear it would be perceived as racially insensitive. Steele is black.

John Edwards met his paramour in the Regency Hotel bar. His inner staff knew of his infidelity and noted his insatiable desire for power (which included an overture to Obama for the vice-presidential slot on the very night he lost the Iowa caucus). Also, the book’s portrayal of Elizabeth Edwards is decidedly negative and bears no resemblance to what the authors describe as the “myth of Elizabeth the Great.”

It reads like fiction. Indeed, many of those above claim that it is.

But what’s the lesson if it is accurate?

That a 464-page tome about the most-watched election in history could break so much news a full 14 months after it ended surely is an indictment of how the campaign was covered. While the book is generating headlines for its prurient content, some of which would never have been worthy of the attention of the mainstream media, there’s much in the manuscript that was front-page news. Which begs the question: How was so much missed by so many?

We live in a 24/7 news bubble. The cable TV beasts, talk-radio pundits and blogosphere never rest and need to be fed. But what are they swallowing? A regurgitation of what a diminishing cadre of real political reporters are uncovering.

This is what happens when newsrooms get cut and replacements work in pajamas. The news cycle overflows with anchors and armchair quarterbacks, producers and pundits. An untold number of media outlets pounce on any morsel of news and whisper down the lane. But largely missing is the kind of old-school, dogged, big-picture-focused investigative journalism that brought us to Watergate and introduced us to Deep Throat.

Instead, we waited years to learn that John Edwards and Rielle Hunter had been parading through the early election cycle so carelessly that their relationship caused several senior aides to quit just weeks before Edwards officially announced his candidacy. Or to find the candidate frantically trying to cut a deal with Tom Daschle to become Obama’s running mate (and later his attorney general) — despite knowing his wife’s cancer had returned and his mistress was pregnant.

That so many meaningful anecdotes and observations were left off the front pages and out of the newscasts of 2008 is in many ways an indictment of our new era of electronic journalism.

X Michael Smerconish writes a weekly column for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.