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“Game Change,” the long-awaited and very gossipy chronicle of the 2008 campaign by journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, is chock full of revelations that are bound to stir the folks who live within ten miles of the Beltway — and perhaps even reverberate beyond Washington.

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. 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?
• 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. Game Change take’s us inside the Obama machine, where staffers referred to him as “Black Jesus.”

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime

They unearth the quiet conspiracy in the U.S. Senate to prod Obama into the race. They expose the twisted tale of John Edwards’s affair with Rielle Hunter, the truth behind the downfall of Rudy Giuliani, and the doubts of those responsible for vetting Palin about her readiness for the Republican ticket. And they reveal how, in an emotional late-night phone call, Obama succeeded in wooing Clinton, despite her staunch resistance, to become his secretary of state.

The war room within a war room dismissed or discredited much of the gossip floating around, but not all of it. The stories about one woman were more concrete, and after some discreet fact-finding, the group concluded that they were true: that BIll was indeed having an affair — and not a frivolous one-night stand but a sustained romantic relationship. …. For months, thereafter, the war room within a war room braced for the explosion, which her aides knew could come at any moment.

“This shit would be really interesting if we weren’t in the middle of it.”
—Barack Obama, September 2008

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