The Audacity to Win

This isn't exactly a tell-all book. More like a tell-almost, for which I don't blame David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, because while honesty is a great thing, Obama still does have to work with a lot of the characters (Hillary Clinton, McCain, Biden...). On John Stewart, Plouffe said he was careful to be as honest and complete as he could because he felt that no matter how they voted, people would agree in the future that 2008 saw a historic election race and that there should be truth in the details. He says it better than I could here. So, yeah, read this for the inside scoop if you love campaign details, but not if you're looking for trash-talk about Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Reverend Wright or even Joe the Plumber. It's not that they're not in The Audacity to Win, but they're not Plouffe's focus.

So what do you get in The Audacity to Win? Well, it's a great story. Being from NH, elections are always huge for me, and this one in particular. I live literally around the corner (well, two corners, since I'm being literal) from the "coffee shop" in which Hillary cried and thus cemented her NH win in the primary. This was a devastating moment for we early Obama supporters, so I cringed a bit having to read this again, but I loved how philosophical Obama (and Plouffe) were at the unexpected loss. Plouffe quotes Obama as saying, " I actually think this is for the best...Sure, if we had won New Hampshire, we'd be in the driver's seat. But I'd be like a comet streaking across the sky. White hot. And comets eventually burn up...Now people can see how I deal with adversity, whether we can bounce back...And they want me to earn this. They don't want it to be so easy for someone like me and it probably shouldn't be."

Read this as arrogance, if you want, and some people will, but I see it more as a sign of how introspective and thoughtful Obama is. Throughout the book, this is how he comes off. Yes, he makes mistakes (flat debates in the beginning--he hated prep--some lines that came off wrong--the clinging to guns bit and the You're likeable enough, Hillary), but every time he could have gone the low road, Obama chose the high road. He never made hasty decisions. When he felt his campaign--in the heat of the action--failed his image of hope and change, he chastised them. But he also took responsibility for his own errors. He comes off as even more impressive in this book than I had already thought him.

Of course, Plouffe is a bit biased, but he does succeed in writing an "honest" book. He dances around the deep animosity between the Clinton camp and the Obama camp. He also hints strongly at their concern in picking Biden, that he would go off message too much and mangle things (as Biden himself admits he can. He was, after all, the one who first suggested Obama was a "clean" candidate, unintentionally implying this was unusual for an African-American). But Plouffe is clear that Biden and Hillary became formidable allies and he recognizes that.

There's a lot about the day-to -day stress of running a campaign and it made me more sympathetic to all those appeals for money we kept getting. This book brought back all the excitement and tension of the race, even while I read it with some sense of a 20/20 hindsight on the part of Plouffe. I liked the nitty-gritty stuff (skipped some of the numbers, though), loved the explanation of the delegate crunching the campaign did to win, and the role of the superdelegates. Lots of details, with humor occasionally thrown in (because, yeah, obviously they react to Sarah Palin). This is a great way to relive the highs (and, I suppose the lows, though who wants to relive those?) while getting interesting insight into a very unusual campaign and candidate. This would be a great gift for a political junkie on your list (um, unless he or she is wacky right- leaning and then I think you might want to go with a little book I've heard about that's coming out of Alaska).

On a completely unnecessary side note, I saw Plouffe read here in town (which was fascinating), but I was glad to find out his name is pronounced PLUFF because the way I'd been saying it in my head made the same sound as the French word for jumping into water. An apt enough metaphor for his taking on such an unorthodox candidate, but a distraction nonetheless.