How Barack Obama Won: A State-By-State Guide To The Historic Presidential Election.

By Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser.

Vintage. 272 pp. $12.95.

In this Google-Wiki-youtube Age, it’s easy to dismiss this quickie. What a dumb idea! Everybody knows how Obama won! Didn’t he just win the other day? And didn’t Chuck Todd explain to me in detail on television every damn night for almost a whole year why Obama was going to win?!?  Regardless, this book is still important because of the state-by-state breakdown and the overview. The instant history of this election is on display here, tone-wise, and it not only brings back the excitement of the horse-race, including all the major the spills, false-starts, and hurtles, but crunches all available numbers, showing us the present and future of Donkey and Elephant America, bit by bit.

The things Todd, NBC News’ political director and newly named chief White House correspondent, and Sheldon Gawiser, the network news division’s elections director, want you to know are common knowledge to hard-core political junkies: Obama’s 50-state strategy (thanks to Hillary Clinton’s stubbornness), John McCain not having a message, Sarah Palin, well, being Palin. 🙂 But the numbers in states red, blue and purple are interesting to have all in one handy place. For example, “Obama did better among North Carolina white voters than either Kerry or Gore did. Four years ago Kerry got just 27% of the white vote in North Carolina while Bush got 73%. Obama did a good deal better as more than one in three white voters, 35%, voted for him. However, the white proportion of the state dropped from 83% in 1992 to 72% in 2008.”  Mmm….good. 🙂

This book is snappy, peppy and bursting with numbers and charts—in a good way. It’s highly readable for those who hate numbers, which is a great compliment. This book is required reading—for the Republican Party. 🙂 If Michael Steele ever gets his hands on it, the nation may stay in exciting times.

Put this on your children’s bookshelf so they can use it one day to chart how the America of today became their America.

IN A NOT-COMPLETELY-UNRELATED-NOTE: Enjoyed hearing this on both “Democracy Now!”‘s inauguration coverage and on 88.5 WAMU, my local NPR affiliate.