Review: If You Like Politics-As-Strategy, Check Out This Series
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 8, 2013
I've really enjoyed this series. While the election has largely taken place in public, the Playbook 2012 books have been an engaging look under the water at the rest of the proverbial iceberg. Later volumes (this is the last, I should say) have been a bit more serious than the first few, which benefited from the parade of lunatics slugging it out for the GOP nomination (I'm not being broadly pejorative: Huntsman was not a lunatic, but Cain and Gingrich sure as hell were).This last entry focused on the last month of the election, and at its best, it demonstrated how the candidates' personalities and temperaments fueled their campaigns and led to such debacles as the first debate, in which a complacent Obama got destroyed by a not-quite-desperate Romney. Overall, Romney is painted as a dedicated micromanager prone to the occasional disastrous decision, whereas Obama comes off as moody--vacillating between hyper-competitiveness and outright boredom.Much is made of early gambles that did or did not work, but the narrative of the piece (and I realize it's journalism, so there's less emphasis on narrative) felt a bit deflated, not just because we know who won, but because the Obama victory was apparent as early as May. There are also some curious omissions. A lot of space went to Romney's disastrous "47 percent" gaffe, but there was no mention of his Halloween-costume inspiring "binders full of women". Thrush and Martin talk about how Romney's internal polling was flawed, but they never go into why.So in many ways this feels incomplete, but I still recommend it to anyone interested in politics-as-strategy.