Last month, both on this blog and on my Twitter feed, I defended the notion that political scientists would be uber-interested in John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's Game Change:  Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime.  I was generally sympathetic to Jack Shafer's defense of their sourcing methods in Slate.  And, in that spirit, I ordered Game Change, ready to dig deep into campaign gossip and the flawed nature of politicians. 

Well, I've finished the book -- as well as the 20-minute shower I needed to take after reading the book.  And I hereby retract any and all enthusiasm for Game Change-- because I don't know which parts of it are true and which parts are not. 

[Um... does anyone care anymore?--ed.  This is the #10 #15 book on Amazon's bestseller list, so I'm going to say yes.]

My problem is not, exactly, with the sourcing -- it's with the gullibility of Heilemann and Halperin when dealing with their sources.  So, just to be clear, the political scientist in me doesn't loathe this book because of the narrative structure -- it's because I don't trust Heilemann and Halperin's BS detector. 

It was on page 89 that I began to wonder just how much Game Change's authors double-checked their sources.  This section of the book recounts entertainment mogul David Geffen's "break" with Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign -- most publicly, in this Maureen Dowd column. 

And so, we get to this paragraph in Game Change:

The reaction to the column stunned Geffen.  Beseiged by interview requests, he put out a statement saying Dowd had quoted him accurately.  Some of Geffen's friends in Hollywood expressed disbelief.  Warren Beatty told him, She's going to be president of the United States--you must be nuts to have done this.  But many more congratulated Geffen for having the courage to say what everyone else was thinking but was too afraid to put on the record.  They said he'd made them feel safer openly supporting or donating to Obama.  Soon after, when Geffen visited New York, people in cars on Madison Avenue beeped their horns and gave him the thumbs-up as he walked down the street (emphasis added). 

I'm calling bulls**t on the bolded sentence.  David Geffen is a powerful mogul, but he's not a photogenic celebrity in his own right.  I'm pretty confident in asserting that no one driving down Madison Avenue would recognize Geffen walking down the street.  I have complete confidence that no more than one person did this. 

Furthermore, even if there was a small chance that someone did recognize Geffen on the street, how would a honking horn indicate sympathy with Geffen's political inclinations as opposed to, say, a sentiment more like, "Yo, David, will you listen to my demo?!" 

So, who is the "deep background" source of this little anecdote for Game Change?  It has to be Geffen -- he is, after all, so vain.  And so we arrive at the first key question:  what does it say about the veracity of Game Change that Geffen related a completely implausible, ego-boosting story about himself to Heilemann and Halperin and it gets printed in the book? 

This leads to the second key question:  what other "telling anecdotes" of dubious provenance got put into this book?  The Geffen anecdote is has zero impact on the juicy stories told in the rest of the book -- but how can I be certain that Heilemann and Halperin vetted those sources with greater scrutiny? 

I don't doubt that most of Game Change is accurate -- and I couldn't put the book down as I was reading it.  I just don't trust what I read.   

Ezra Klein makes an interesting point regarding the health care plan that will likely emerge from Congress:  that it pretty much matches what Obama the candidate promised in his health care plan (hat tip:   Sullivan).  

I bring this up because when you think about Barack Obama's foreign policy, you come to a very similar conclusion.   It's a useful exercise to re-read Obama's July 2007 Foreign Affairs essay, "Renewing American Leadership," and compare it to Obama's first year as foreign policymaker-in-chief.  In the essay, he emphasized the following: 

• A drawdown of forces in Iraq;
• An enhanced effort in Afghanistan;
• Close cooperation with Russia, paticularly on arms control;
• A willingness to talk to adversaries, but not just talking for talking's sake;
• Restoring America's standing in the world.

Not everything has been implemented -- his foreign aid pledges won't materialize, and the Middle East peace process remains an oxymoron.  It's nevertheless quite striking how much Obama's first year of foreign policy outputs matches the blueprint he sketched out as a candidate.  The only exception I can think of is homeland security. 

By the by, it's also the case that the issues he didn't emphasize -- like trade, for example -- have pretty much gone nowhere. 

Whether you think this is a good thing or not depends on your view of the policy content.  Still, one would be hard-pressed to argue that on foreign policy, Obama the president has deviated from what he set out to do as a candidate. 

"It's so built into my system, that it's going to be hard to stop," says Politico's Ben Smith. Smith, who started blogging about New York politics in 2005, is now seriously addicted to the pace and metabolism--a word many invoked to describe the election's rhythms--of the blogger's life. He finds himself especially energized by the intensity of his readers who, by 4 a.m. have posted dozens of comments to a 3 a.m. post and who are now some of Smith's best sources, sending him scoops and stories and snapshots of a far-roaming campaign. His family, however, is eagerly looking forward to November 5th. Smith's wife repeatedly threatens to flush his Blackberry down the toilet; his kids, jealous of his "running conversation" with his readers, regularly squirrel away the device in the off chance they find it unattended. But Smith can't bring himself to stop. Recently, he returned at 2 a.m. from a fishing trip and "couldn't not plug in after being off the grid for an entire day." He stayed up blogging and answering emails until 6 a.m.

 

"It's really pathological," he conceded.

Alan Abramowitz, a politics scholar at Emory University, has shown that summer head-to-head polls convey almost no information about the forthcoming election. (Subsequent head-to-head polls are not much better.) Instead, he has a simple “electoral barometer” that weighs together the approval rating of the incumbent president, the economy’s economic growth rate and whether the president’s party has controlled the White House for two terms (the “time for a change” factor). This laughably simple metric has correctly forecast the winner of the popular vote in 14 out of 15 postwar presidential elections. The only exception is 1968, when the barometer (calibrated to range between +100 and –100) gave Hubert Humphrey a wafer-thin advantage of +2; he lost, with a popular vote deficit of less than 1 percentage point. The barometer not only picks winners but pretty accurately points to winning margins, too. In 1980, Jimmy Carter had the biggest postwar negative reading (–66); Ronald Reagan beat him by nearly 10 percentage points. President George W. Bush’s net approval rating (favourable minus unfavourable) is currently –40; the economy grew at a 1 per cent annual rate in the first quarter; and Republicans have had two terms in the White House. Plugging the numbers into Mr Abramowitz’s formula gives the Republican candidate a score of –60, about as bad as it gets: second only to Mr Carter’s in the annals of doomed postwar candidacies. The barometer says Mr Obama is going to waltz to victory.