Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Game Change

I'm no literary critic, but the new book, "Game Change" is a tough one to put down. I think I had the bags under my eyes today to prove it. I interviewed the two authors, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. I just got the book yesterday, so I had to do some heavy-duty, late-night reading to try to get ready.

The highlights of their work with Iowa references...

Hillary Clinton wasn't much for Iowa and she thinks even less of it now (and I'm being REALLY kind). Clinton and Barack Obama had a heck of a fight before they boarded their respective campaign planes out of D.C. for Des Moines. A heck of a fight! And both claimed to win the fight. John Edwards lied to the faces over dinner to two of his dedicated campaign workers who had come to Des Moines to help. And they knew he was lying. Oh, and he liked to go out of dates in Des Moines, not with his wife, of course. The Obamas were dining on caucus night at Fleming's, one of our favorite restaurants in the metro. The Clintons counted on former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to know the numbers for caucus night in Iowa. He terribly miscalculated the numbers.

Yes, these comments were mostly about the Democrats. That seems to be the bulk of what I've read so far. I'll have to see if there are interesting insights and juicy tidbits about the Republicans, too.

Here's our interview from today:


1 comment:

desmoinesdem said...

In fairness to Vilsack, just about every old hand in Iowa politics got the numbers totally wrong. David Yepsen expressed skepticism about his own newspaper's poll because of the high turnout projection.