Political Science : Elections

"This shit would be really interesting if we weren't in the middle of it."—Barack Obama, September 2008 In 2008, the presidential election became blockbuster entertainment. Everyone was watching as the race for the White House unfolded like something from the realm of fiction. The meteoric rise and historic triumph of Barack Obama. The shocking fall of the House of Clinton—and the improbable resurrection of Hillary as Obama's partner and America's face to the world. The mercurial performance of John McCain and the mesmerizing emergence of Sarah Palin. But despite the wall-to-wall media coverage of this spellbinding drama, remarkably little of the real story behind the headlines has yet been told. In Game Change, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, two of the country's leading political reporters, use their unrivaled access to pull back the curtain on the Obama, Clinton, McCain, and Palin campaigns. How did Obama convince himself that, despite the thinness of his résumé, he could somehow beat the odds to become the nation's first African American president? How did the tumultuous relationship between the Clintons shape—and warp—Hillary's supposedly unstoppable bid? What was behind her husband's furious outbursts and devastating political miscalculations? Why did McCain make the novice governor of Alaska his running mate? And was Palin merely painfully out of her depth—or troubled in more serious ways? Game Change answers those questions and more, laying bare the secret history of the 2008 campaign. Heilemann and Halperin take us inside the Obama machine, where staffers referred to the candidate as "Black Jesus." They unearth the quiet conspiracy in the U.S. Senate to prod Obama into the race, driven in part by the fears of senior Democrats that Bill Clinton's personal life might cripple Hillary's presidential prospects. They expose the twisted tale of John Edwards's affair wi more...

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When Joe Trippi signed on to manage Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, the long-shot candidate had 432 known supporters and $100,000 in the bank. Within a year the most obscure horse in the field was the front-runner, with $50 million in the campaign till, thanks to Trippi and his team. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is the incredible story of how Joe Trippi's revolutionary use of the Internet forever changed politics as we know it. Trippi's memoir cum manifesto offers a blueprint for engaging Americans in real dialogue—and is an instruction manual for how businesspeople, government leaders, and anyone else can make use of democracy. In a new afterword, Trippi reviews how these lessons have influenced the 2008 campaign, a race marked by higher voter interest than any other in recent history. more...

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The disputed presidential election of 2000 highlighted a range of flaws in the American voting system, from ballot procedures to alleged voter intimidation to questions about the fairness of the Electoral College. But as Harvard University political scientist Thomas E. more...

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The most critical election in living memory, viewed in real time through the eyes of one of our most trusted political commentators. Celebrated political analyst for The New Yorker Hendrik Hertzberg watches the long presidential campaign of 2007 and 2008 as it unfolds to reveal the transformation of the Democratic Party, the meteoric rise of Barack Obama, and other seismic shifts in our national political consciousness. Hertbzerg wrote about the events that culminated in the victory of Barack Obama in two venues, one Olympian and one immediate: his “Comments” for “The Talk of the Town” and the informal blog he began keeping on the magazine’s Web site fifteen months before the election. ¡OBÁMANOS! is adapted from both and framed by a new introductory essay. ¡OBÁMANOS! shares the context needed to truly understand the events of the general election—the first in more than a half century in which no incumbent president or vice president was on the ballot—by first examining Bush’s second term and the primary campaign. Hertzberg follows the central political players and rising stars while also looking at the issues that emerged as critical during the debates, such as health care, the Iraq war, and our economic crisis. Through his documentation and analysis of the campaign’s defining moments, we come to understand the current political landscape in a whole new way. Hertzberg’s voice combines sharp observation, historical perspective, analytic power, and often funny polemic. He brings all these qualities to his chronicle of one of the most intense, exciting, and surprising campaigns in the nation’s history, sharing how most Americans—including The New Yorker editors—came to identify a junior senator from Illinois as “a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe.” ¡OBÁMANOS! heralds a new chapter in American p more...

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The US electoral process is examined as an integrated event spanning a full year, drawing upon a data set massive in scale and novel in execution: the Annenberg 2000 Election Study. Using candidate appearances, news coverage, and campaign advertising, this provides the first integrated account of any US campaign. more...

Price: $18.00