Double Down: Game Change 2012

Double Down: Game Change 2012

Mark Halperin, John Heilemann

Language: English

Pages: 512

ISBN: 0143126008

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times:
"Those hungry for political news will read Double Down for the scooplets and insidery glimpses it serves up about the two campaigns, and the clues it offers about the positioning already going on among Republicans and Democrats for 2016 ... The book testifies to its authors’ energetic legwork and insider access... creating a novelistic narrative that provides a you-are-there immediacy... They succeed in taking readers interested in the backstabbing and backstage maneuvering of the 2012 campaign behind the curtains, providing a tactile... sense of what it looked like from the inside."

In their runaway bestseller Game Change, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann captured the full drama of Barack Obama’s improbable, dazzling victory over the Clintons, John McCain, and Sarah Palin. With the same masterly reporting, unparalleled access, and narrative skill, Double Down picks up the story in the Oval Office, where the president is beset by crises both inherited and unforeseen—facing defiance from his political foes, disenchantment from the voters, disdain from the nation’s powerful money machers, and dysfunction within the West Wing. As 2012 looms, leaders of the Republican Party, salivating over Obama’s political fragility, see a chance to wrest back control of the White House—and the country. So how did the Republicans screw it up? How did Obama survive the onslaught of super PACs and defy the predictions of a one-term presidency? Double Down follows the gaudy carnival of GOP contenders—ambitious and flawed, famous and infamous, charismatic and cartoonish—as Mitt Romney, the straitlaced, can-do, gaffe-prone multimillionaire from Massachusetts, scraped and scratched his way to the nomination.

Double Down exposes blunders, scuffles, and machinations far beyond the klieg lights of the campaign trail: Obama storming out of a White House meeting with his high command after accusing them of betrayal. Romney’s mind-set as he made his controversial “47 percent” comments. The real reasons New Jersey governor Chris Christie was never going to be Mitt’s running mate. The intervention held by the president’s staff to rescue their boss from political self-destruction. The way the tense détente between Obama and Bill Clinton morphed into political gold. And the answer to one of the campaign’s great mysteries—how did Clint Eastwood end up performing Dada dinner theater at the Republican convention?

In Double Down, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann take the reader into back rooms and closed-door meetings, laying bare the secret history of the 2012 campaign for a panoramic account of an election that was as hard fought as it was lastingly consequential.

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Life Under the Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy

The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ryan, Rubio, Pawlenty, and Christie had all agreed by mid-May to open up their kimonos—leaving only the fifth man fully clothed. Unlike the others, Portman believed he might well be picked. But the prospect of being tapped filled him with no small degree of anguish. • • • PORTMAN’S VEEPISH VIRTUES were easy to see. A former congressman, U.S. trade representative, and head of OMB, he had as firm a grasp of fiscal issues as anyone in Washington. He was solid, stolid, and whip smart. He had won

turned to Plouffe and motioned to the door. His expression was rueful, reflective, and satisfied all at once. “I guess that’s it,” Obama said—and then strode out into the cold night air. EPILOGUE IT WAS NEARLY 2:00 a.m. on November 7 when Mitt and Ann walked into the campaign-staff suite at the Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel. Not long before, Romney had phoned President Obama to concede the election, then delivered a five-minute elegy in the ballroom downstairs. “I so wish that I had

often panicky when it came to his own political circumstances—and dark, dark, dark. The first trait sprang from his devout Mormon faith, which held doctrinally that the United States was divinely inspired—not just the ideals of freedom and self-determination, but the design of the federal government and the Constitution itself. The second outlook owed at least in part to the experiences of his father, whom Romney revered. In the sixties, George Romney had embodied the embattled strain of

stick-it-to-’em rhetoric was what drew voters to him. It’s not because they love me, he thought. They see the world as ripping us off, and they think: Trump is gonna stop it. They didn’t think that about Romney, in Trump’s opinion. He had never met the governor, best as he recalled, but his impressions from afar were unfavorable. He compared Romney to a Broadway play that opens to lackluster reviews: cursed before the curtain goes up. Trump was publicly sniffy about Romney as a capitalist,

Rhoades always offered the same verbal slap upside the head: Shut the fuck up. Don’t go into Jersey. We have plenty of time. But as winter turned to spring and spring turned to summer, with no Christie endorsement in sight, doubts crept in on Commercial Street. Although the governor continued to issue denials of any 2012 ambitions, his comments were increasingly freighted with self-regard. In late June, he appeared on Meet the Press, where David Gregory asked him who in the current field might

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