Renegade: The Making Of A President By Richard Wolffe
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Posts Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Ted Widmer Given how often Barack Obama has been compared to John F. Kennedy, it makes sense that we now have a Camelot-style report on the great campaign of 08. Kennedys election was a literary as well as a political watershed, inspiring writers whose taut and sardonic style mirrored that of JFK himself. Not long after the election, Theodore White broke big with the publication of The Making of the President, 1960, a classic of political reporting that covered the campaign with a novelists sense of drama and a stenographers sense of detail. It has been imitated many times since, including by White himself, who dutifully put himself through the same paces every four years, sweating out similar books all the way through 1972 but never duplicating the caffeinated energy of the original. Despite hundreds of campaign books since then, no one else has either. More consciously than most, Richard Wolffe has now entered the Teddy White sweepstakes with Renegade: The Making of a President. The connection is right there in the title, and from the very first words there is little doubt what he is up to. Wolffe covered the Obama campaign for Newsweek, and at times he seems to be channeling White (who had been a Time reporter), referring to his protagonist as the candidate and deploying short, dramatic sentences that heighten the air of mystery about the transfer of power. Wolffes first sentence (Election day starts, in the small hours, where the candidate has spent most of his last 626 days: on a plane.), like Whites (It was invisible, as always.), comes straight out of Hemingway 101. Renegade stakes an audacious claim to its own importance and largely lives up to it. Like White, Wolffe was lucky in several ways, beginning with the fact that the campaign he chose to cover was exceptionally historic. But he was also granted unusual access to the candidate, and one of the books more interesting episodes reveals that it was Obama who came up with the idea of Wolffes project, nudging him forward with a casual remark (Why cant you write a book about it? Like Theodore White. Those are great books.) Renegade tells the whole amazing story, restating how unlikely it seemed, only two years ago, that President Obama would ever be identified as such. When the campaign started, he was 99th out of 100 senators in seniority. In 2000, he couldnt even gain admission to the Democratic convention, and his credit card was declined when he tried to rent a car in L.A. Wolffe explores all of the ups and downs of 2008, relaying anecdotes both new and familiar. There are not quite as many flashbulb revelations as I expected, beyond a horrifying glimpse into just how directionless the Bush White House was at the time of the economic collapse last fall and some provocative suggestions that the Obama marriage was in trouble around 2000, when his political ambitions were surfacing. But the book is clear, concise and well written, effectively retelling a story that still astonishes us, even after we all lived through it last year. Which is not quite to say that this is The Making of the President, 2008. Wolffe lacks the voracious appetite for detail that characterized Whites books, and he spends almost no time on the other aspirants. He also deviates from Whites model of telling the story the old-fashioned way, from beginning to end. The chapters are lively and well-informed, but some continuity is missing, and quite a few state primaries are ignored or dumbed down. White spent a great deal of attention on the power structures of each region: the urban bosses who would deliver votes in return for backroom promises, the Southern overlords of the Democratic party, the fissures within the Republican Party. This book lacks that sort of comprehensive detail, focusing instead on its protagonist, who is admittedly fascinating — but so was JFK, and White went well beyond him. No particular light is shed on the big efforts in Pennsylvania and North Carolina — and none at all in less scrutinized places like Missouri, where Obama narrowly beat Hillary Clinton with 49 percent of the vote to 48 percent, a crucial step on the way to his victory. The chief drama revolves around Obama-Clinton more than Obama-McCain, and we are shown glimpses of the agitation that Clintons perseverance was causing inside the Obama team. But we are told little of the genuine policy differences that separated them or of the random factors (the spike in gas prices) that also entered into the complex calculus of 2008. Still, the book will please the millions who lived and died with every test of the campaign and should satisfy a hunger to know more about the person at the center of these gravity-defying events. To some extent, Wolffe faces a problem that all writers about Obama have, namely, that it is difficult to write better about the man than Obama himself has already done. But he effectively explores the paradox of the quiet renegade (Obamas Secret Service handle) who rewrote all of the rules of American politics while barely breaking a sweat. Obama, the son of an anthropologist, offers gnomic observations about the political process (interestingly, he admires Ronald Reagan), keeps his head when those around him have lost theirs and retains his likeability throughout, even when complaining that all media scrutiny reminds him of a public colonoscopy. If so, this book will signal a return to the proctologist, but only for a relatively harmless check-up. Like White, Wolffe obviously favors the man he dubs the candidate. But to his credit, he points out the occasional imperfection (some fudging on the issues of campaign finance and NAFTA, for example) and reveals a politician ready to play very hard to win, even while claiming to be above the politics of anger. Wolffe flavors the book with his own opinions — including the arresting thought that the intemperate sermons of Obamas then-pastor, Jeremiah Wright, might easily have been discovered before the Iowa caucus, which would likely have boxed in Obama at the start. Near the beginning of their collaboration, Obama asked Wolffe whether there would be enough drama in a story that merely reflected a successful realization of a vision (What happens if we just had a plan and then went out and said, lets execute it?). That, in a nutshell, is exactly what happened in 2008. But, yes, there is enough drama, and then some, in Renegade. It is surely not the final word — but it is as close as we are likely to get until Obamas aides begin to write their version of an extraordinary American story that is still unfolding.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Review
“The first of the President Obama books–and a good one–insightful, thorough, and straight.”
—Ben Bradlee, Washington Post
“If you really want to know what happened inside the Obama campaign, this is the one book that will take you there. My jaw dropped time and time again reading details that, despite the coverage, were never revealed in the long campaign. A clear-eyed, up-close look at the campaign, Renegade is the one Obama book that should not be missed.”
—Michele Norris, All Things Considered
“A superb achievement. With an almost painterly eye, compelling insights, and extraordinary access to Barack Obama and his inner circle, Richard Wolffe’s Renegade tells the hidden, dramatic story of the 2008 campaign and also reveals much we did not know about the 44th president’s life before politics. Wolffe’s brisk, well-written narrative is fully in the tradition of Theodore White and Richard Ben Cramer, capturing a pivotal presidential contest dominated by one of the most luminous figures in modern American history.”
—Michael Beschloss, author of Presidential Courage
“Many journalist
Why Buy A Renegade: The Making Of A President By Richard Wolffe?
Before the White House and Air Force One, before the TV ads and the enormous rallies, there was the real Barack Obama: a man wrestling with the momentous decision to run for the presidency, feeling torn about leaving behind a young family, and figuring out how to win the biggest prize in politics.
This book is the previously untold and epic story of how a political newcomer with no money and an alien name grew into the world’s most powerful leader. But it is also a uniquely intimate portrait of the person behind the iconic posters and the Secret Service code name Renegade.
Drawing on a dozen unplugged interviews with the candidate and president, as well as twenty-one months covering his campaign as it traveled from coast to coast, Richard Wolffe answers the simple yet enduring question about Barack Obama: Who is he?
Based on Wolffe’s unprecedented access to Obama, Renegade reveals the making of a president, both on the campaign trail and before he ran for high office. It explains how the politician who emerged in an extraordinary election learned the personal and political skills to succeed during his youth and early career. With cool self-discipline, calculated risk taking, and simple storytelling, Obama developed the strategies he would need to survive the onslaught of the Clintons and John McCain, and build a multimillion-dollar machine to win a historic contest.
In Renegade, Richard Wolffe shares with us his front-row seat at Obama’s announcement to run for president on a frigid day in Springfield, and his victory speech on a warm night in Chicago. We fly on the candidate’s plane and ride in his bus on an odyssey across a country in crisis; stand next to him at a bar on the night he secures the nomination; and are backstage as he delivers his convention speech to a stadium crowd and a transfixed national audience. From a teacher’s office in Iowa to the Oval Office in Washington, we see and hear Barack Obama with an immediacy and honesty never witnessed before.
Renegade provides not only an account of Obama’s triumphs, but also examines his many personal and political trials. We see Obama wrestling with race and politics, as well as his former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright. We see him struggling with life as a presidential candidate, a campaign that falters for most of its first year, and his reaction to a surprise defeat in the New Hampshire primary. And we see him relying on his personal experience, as well as meticulous polling, to pass the presidential test in foreign and economic affairs.
Renegade is an essential guide to understanding President Barack Obama and his trusted inner circle of aides and friends. It is also a riveting and enlightening first draft of history and political psychology.
From the Hardcover edition.
Customer Reviews & Opinions
The Campaign BEHIND The 2008 Presidential Campaign
Having watched the events as they actually unfolded, I did not expect to be so moved by RENEGADE — but even in the era of the 24/7 news cycle, there are still nuggets which don’t surface until after the fact. They’re all here.
Exemplary reporting and graceful writing do not always walk hand-in-hand — and from my own journalistic experience, I know how difficult it is not to “fall in love” with a compelling subject. Mr. Wolffe does a superb job of placing you, the reader, in the position of the proverbial fly-on-the-wall … and succeeds mightily in answering the question on so many people’s minds: “Who Is Barack Obama?”
Great food for a political jukie
Okay before I review this book, I will state I am one of the Kool aid drinkers. I am a political junkie and I am a huge Obama supporter. So, I got what I expected when I picked this book up. I found it so interesting, the behind the scenes look at the campaign, the depth and understanding of President Obama, and the excitement of reliving the campaign that had the right ending in my perspective.
Mr. Wolffe takes the reader from the very beginning, the decision to run, the people saying he couldn’t win, all the ups and downs of the campaign, and then tries to explain how and why it was just the right person for the time and place…I don’t know, just a good book, worth the read if you are interested in politics and may teach you something about our system if you are not.
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