Forget “Double Down.” Here’s the real story of the 2012 election

[DonViejo]

The takeaway from Obama-Romney is not debates or golf games. It's a tale about the surveillance state and 1 percent

ELIAS ISQUITH

It fueled a couple days’ worth of chatter on “Morning Joe,” and it no doubt lined the pockets of its authors quite handsomely. But all in all, “Double Down: Game Change 2012” didn’t leave much of a mark. To be fair, with Sarah Palin on the sidelines and a presidential antagonist as dull as Mitt Romney front-and-center, the drop-off from the first “Game Change” to the second was probably inevitable. But let’s not be too fair — Halperin and Heilemann’s book also just kind of sucked.

There are two possible explanations why. The first, voiced by Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum, is that 2012 was simply and fundamentally a boring election. “The truth is that the 2012 campaign just wasn’t very interesting,” Drum recently wrote at his blog. “[T]here were no novel issues in the campaign, just an endless re-litigation of the same themes that had been occupying us for the past three years.” Drum grants that Obama’s historically bad first debate performance injected a little uncertainty into an otherwise rote proceeding, “but even that,” he writes, “wasn’t much.”

But I think Drum lets Halperin and Heilemann off the hook too easily, which brings us to the second explanation for the failures of “Double Down”: its relentless focus on gossip and anecdote and its indifference to analysis and data. Halperin and Heilemann will purport to tell you everything David Axelrod was thinking on the night of the second presidential debate, but when it comes to the larger social and economic forces that shaped 2012, they got nothin’. When the personalities involved are as big as Sarah Palin or John McCain, that’s a forgivable sin. But when the patently dull Romney and the secretly boring Obama are your main characters? Well, there’s a reason the authors devote a chapter to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who didn’t even run.

It’s a shame, too, because as a recent working paper from the Roosevelt Institute shows, a more analytical view of the 2012 election actually makes the contest, in retrospect, far more compelling than Halperin and Heilemann’s limited telling would suggest. Titled “Party Competition and Industrial Structure in the 2012 Elections: Who’s Really Driving the Taxi to the Dark Side?,” the paper, by Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen takes a long, hard look at where the money that fueled 2012 actually came from. Their findings reveal not only the depths of plutocracy to which we’ve sunk, but also shed some much-needed light on the burgeoning surveillance state (the dark side) and its activities in the political sphere.

full article
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/30/forget_double_down_heres_the_real_story_of_the_2012_election/

[Scuba]

1. Meanwhile, the media was breathlessly reporting the results of the latest polls.

'Cause that's "journalism".

[redstateblues]

2. Halperin

He is a right wing hack. A poor excuse for a journalist.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. I think it's a real stretch to say "tech=surveillance"

Yes, Obama is popular among those in the tech industry. But they are typically less conservative than others. And they don't make their big money from the surveillance state - sure, someone is selling hardware to the NSA, but the tech industry is more interested in pushing the latest handset or tablet, getting people to sign up to their call plan, or using their websites so they can be advertised at.

[Enrique]

4. great article

here's an interview with the author:

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10909

[jonjensen]

5. Romney's self deportation

While many factors influcenced 2012 election Romney's self deportation remark and republican anti-immigration propaganda swayed many states minority votes to obama asians and latinos swung the states of nevada colorado new mexico virginia florida and may have tipped ohio and iowa. Every month 100,000 minority kids turn 18 and they all hate republicans! Thats 5,000,000 more votes in 2016!

[hrmjustin]

6. K&R!

[CTyankee]

7. A reviewer slammed it in the NYT Book Review a week ago last Sunday...

Not a good sign coming out of the gate, so to speak...

[davidpdx]

8. I'm reading Double Down

But to be clear I didn't buy the copy. I was just interested to see if it was any good. I agree with what someone else up thread said about Halperin being a partisan hack.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

9. I am reading it as well. How did the two split the writing - I haven't heard ?

One thing I have noticed is the insertion of obscure words. It's almost like the author chose a word and then for each couple pages said - hmmm....let me look up synonyms that no one has ever heard of.

I think the book (I am half way through) is vaguely interesting. It was sad to read that people in Obama's inner circle betrayed him and leaked to press.

Game Change was so much more exciting - but it was because a lot of it had to do with people we care about. This book is about schmucks we don't. No shock to know they are crazier than we thought.

[davidpdx]

10. I agree with you Game Change was more interesting

mainly because of Palin's involvement in the campaign. I'm not near as far through the book as you are. I think I'm on chapter 3. I have the book on my new android phone (my first) and it's good to have when I get stuck somewhere or late at night to read a 1/2 chapter. The real thing that was interesting about this election is that Romney actually believed he was going to win. How they could have been that wrong I think is the real story.

[Filibuster Harry]

11. Well I think 4 factors (sure there were many more) but here IMO (and not in any particular

order)

-- self deportation

-- the mother jones tape

-- Romney's inexplicable tax code change (just pick a number)

-- Paul Ryan and his budget scares people