The World

Game Change, a new book on the last US presidential election, is causing waves. It is not published until tomorrow, but excerpts and edited highlights are appearing all over the place.

The authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann have done a very effective and entertaining job of dishing the dirt. As far as I can see, just about the only major figure who comes out with any credit is Barack Obama himself. Hillary Clinton is portrayed as scheming to get stories about Obama and drugs into the media , as foul-mouthed – and as stunned and paralysed in a most unpresidential fashion, afer her defeat in Iowa. Sarah Palin comes across as even more of a moron than you might have thought. John McCain’s campaign worried that both the candidate and his wife could be having affairs. Bill Clinton was definitely having an affair – and is self-pitying and hysterical into the bargain. Perhaps the most tawdry episode of all is the story of John Edwards’s affair (yes, they’re all at it), which is re-told in this long excerpt. As you might expect, Edwards come across a narcissistic and ego-maniacal. What is more unexpected is that his wife, Elizabeth, also comes in for a pasting. It takes a certain twisted courage to take a “wronged woman” and cancer victim and to portray her as a monster.

Some critics think “Game Change” is just a little bit too tawdry and too obsessed with the sleazy side of the campaign. I haven’t yet had the chance to read the whole book – so it’s difficult to judge. But what is clearly true is that the way in which journalists write about American presidential elections has changed radically.

I first got hooked on American politics by reading Theodore White’s “Making of the President” series – the first of which was about the 1960 campaign, won by John F. Kennedy. White was a pioneer in the way in which he took the reader inside the campaigns – and got across the excitement of the race and its game-like qualities. But the way in which White portrayed politicians was largely sympathetic – and sometimes heroic. It was White who later used the phrase “Camelot” to describe the Kennedy White House.

Even when a more aggressive school of writers started following presidential-elections, the sleaze was still generally swept under the carpet. I adored Norman Mailer’s “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” about the the 1968 campaign – and nobody can accuse Mailer of being a softie. But he was still able to see presidential candidates are heroes: Eugene McCarthy is portrayed as thoughtul, funny and poetic – almost too good for presidential politics. Bobby Kennedy is all charisma.

Compare that to the dysfunctional creeps who seem to populate the pages of “Game Change”. I have little doubt that Halperin and Heilemann’s work is broadly accurate. So the question is, have politicians changed or have journalists?