Here's an apt quote from the NYT Review of Books, who say what I'm getting at with more aplomb than I can: Why say 'there was a great distance between the two' when you can say 'there was a chasmal distance between the two.' Chasmal? Really? Throughout the book, these words are all over the place, and for no good reason. If you take that language is there for communication, this book fails its very basic task: make oneself easily understood. And I had to read this book with a dictionary at hand.

I'm a man with a fairly expansive vocabulary.

I'm a bit of a politics junkie, and followed the campaign in considerable depth as it happened, and there was plenty I didn't already know crammed into this book.īut the writing? It's about as pompous, full-of-itself, ridiculously verbose tripe out there. The research was impeccable, the stories compelling. So how did the Republicans screw it up? How did Obama survive the onslaught and defy the predictions of a one-term presidency? Double Down follows the gaudy carnival of Republican 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, while Obama is seen storming out of a White House meeting with his high command after accusing them of betrayal, and gradually transforming a tense d�tente with Bill Clinton into political gold.ĭouble Down takes you into back rooms and closed-door meetings, laying bare the secret history of the 2012 campaign in a panoramic account of an election that was as hard fought as it was lastingly consequential. As 2012 looms, leaders of the Republican Party, salivating over Obama's political fragility, see a chance to wrestle back control of the White House - and the country. 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 voters, disdain from the nation's powerful finance figures and dysfunction within the West Wing. In their runaway bestseller Game Change / Race of a Lifetime, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann captured the full drama of Barack Obama's improbable, dazzling victory over the Clintons, John McCain and Sarah Palin. 'What am I supposed to do when he starts spewing his bullshit?' Barack Obama preparing for his first debate with Mitt Romney

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