“A Long Time Coming”: The Inspiring, Combative 2008 Election and the Historic Election of Barack Obama.
By Evan Thomas and the staff of Newsweek magazine.
New York: Public Affairs.
256 pp. $22.95.

 
Rem Rieder, editor and senior vice president of American Journalism Review magazine, was clearly tired of hearing and/or reading for the zillionth time the now-accepted narrative about political journalists and Decision ’08: that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign got a free ride from The Boys (and Girls) On The Bus. “The truth is, the Obama campaign was well-organized, disciplined, virtually error-free. Obama was an inspiring candidate to many, a dazzling public speaker with an inspiring storyline,” Rieder wrote in AJR’s December 2008/January 2009 issue. “The McCain campaign, in contrast, was a train wreck, lurching from message to message. And McCain, who can be an immensely appealing figure, seemed angry and unfocused.”

That’s as good a summary of this book as any. Evan Thomas has crushed Newsweek’s coverage of the two-year rollercoaster into this clear, concise book that allows the reader inside the campaigns’ inner sanctums, due to the magazine’s agreement to not publish the fly-on-the-wall happenings until after Election Day. “Coming,” then, is a very slight outgrowth of the meat of Newsweek’s special post-election issue (which, coincidentally enough, was online until this book’s release).

The newsmagazine has had this arrangement with presidential campaigns since 1984, and the trust shows. The publicly displayed hubris and cluelessness of the Hillary Clinton’s would-be nomination crew pales compared with the tone and tenor of its inside fights, and it turns out the McCain-Palin campaign really didn’t know what it was doing from one day to the next. Meanwhile, as the entire world remembers, Barack Obama’s train ran smoothly down America’s track into the White House, The Big Engine That Would. “Coming” answers the how, step by step, day by day.

If you watched the evening news every night last year, this book is just detail. But it’s rich, absorbing and well-written detail, a finely crafted rough draft of history. It rightly belongs on the Obama bookshelf next to Obama’s own “Dreams From My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope” and David Mendell’s very good biography, “Obama: From Promise To Power,” all four now awaiting the scores of tomes to come.