"Double Down" Was Written for Morning Joe—Not Posterity
Ouch! 
http://prospect.org/article/double-down-was-written-morning-joe%E2%80%94not-posterity
"Double Down" Was Written for Morning Joe—Not Posterity
Walter Shapiro
November 15, 2013
The campaign books of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann are not designed to be read. They are written as fodder for cable TV news.
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Double Down, in truth, peddles bite-sized dramatic nuggets rather than a nerd’s-eye view of how contemporary politics really works. The authors’ guiding philosophy seems evident: If it can’t be hawked on a talk show then it doesn’t belong in the book.
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The character leaping off the page in Double Down is not (no surprise) the buttoned-down Romney or the self-contained Obama. Channeling their frustrations about a campaign that never was, Halperin and Heilemann invoke Chris Christie at every opportunity. They deliver one scoop late in the book: Romney had justifiable problems with the gaps in the materials that Christie provided as part of his vice-presidential vetting.
Double Down lavishes an over-written 17-page chapter (“Big Boy”) on Christie’s 2011 decision not to run. Tim Pawlenty, who actually sought the nomination and who, on paper, should have been Romney’s toughest challenger, is kissed off in four flat pages. But much of the Christie material in Double Down—complete with italicized thought bubbles about Christie’s internal deliberations—is not as original as it might seem to most readers. Many of the same Christie anecdotes appear in the far superior campaign book, Collision 2012 by Dan Balz. But Balz entirely skips the over-wrought drama and delivers the anecdotes in the form of a revealing on-the-record interview with Christie himself.
Bob Woodward’s White House books should be paired with a companion volume of commentary by an analyst who understands what it all means. The same technique would work with Double Down. The standard interpretation of Jeb Bush’s decision not to challenge Romney is that the former Florida governor thought it was too soon after his brother’s failed presidency. As Balz puts it, “Had his name been Jeb Smith, he might have become the Republican nominee.” But Double Down offers an alternative and far more dispiriting explanation: Jeb Bush wanted to buck-rake for four years before he ran for president. As Halperin and Heilemann write, channeling the inner Jeb, “If, God forbid, I’m in an accident tomorrow—I’m in a wheelchair drooling, saliva coming out of my mouth—who’s going to take care of me?” Double Down presents this wail from the scion of a financial as well as political dynasty without any sense of cocked-eyebrow skepticism as if it were plausible that Jeb Bush might end up having to pay for his nursing-home care through Medicaid.
In another throw-away anecdote, the authors report that Michelle Obama devours Morning Joe during her workout routine and then dashes off frenzied emails to Valerie Jarrett “about what this or that talking head had said.” This transmission belt (Morning Joe to Michelle to Jarrett to the president’s top advisers) might explain some of the win-the-news-cycle short-term thinking that has so marred the Obama presidency. (Maybe constant testing of the health-care website before it was launched might have been worth the risk of a few negative media leaks).
But it is probably unfair to fault Double Down for not putting Michelle Obama’s morning cable TV regimen into a larger context. Expecting Halperin and Heilemann to acknowledge the short-attention-span limitations of Morning Joe is akin to asking sharks to critique the waters off Martha’s Vineyard. Like Romney gulled by his own internal polling, the authors of Double Down are too much inside the media-political bubble to grasp any larger truths. And that is why Double Down is better fed to talking heads than read.
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