A celebrated political analyst’s exuberant and incisive coverage of the 2008 election—the longest, costliest, most surprising, and most intense presidential campaign in American history.

Hendrik Hertzberg witnessed the transformation of the Democratic Party, the meteoric rise of Barack Obama, and other seismic shifts in our national political consciousness while reporting on the 2008 presidential election for the New Yorker. ¡Obámanos!—the book title comes from a road sign Hertzberg spotted in New Mexico a few weeks after the election, a favorite example of what he calls “an artifact of Obamalove”—is adapted from Hertzberg’s “Talk of the Town” column and the informal blog he kept on his magazine’s Web site, and also includes an extensive new introductory essay by the author.

Hertzberg’s voice combines sharp observation, historical perspective, analytic power, and often funny polemic. He brings all these qualities to his chronicle of one of the most exciting and intense campaigns in the nation’s history, sharing how most Americans—including the New Yorker editors—came to identify a junior senator from Illinois as “a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe.”

Hertzberg—whose Obama coverage goes all the way back to the electrifying speech at the 2004 Democratic convention—follows the central political players and rising stars while also looking at the issues that emerged as critical during the debates: health care, the Iraq war, and our economic crisis. Through his documentation and analysis of the campaign’s defining moments, we come to understand the current political landscape in a whole new way.

Join the Discussion!

Post a comment below to join or start a discussion about ¡Obámanos!

Click here to learn more about ¡Obámanos! (includes reviews, author interview, and more).

The architect of the Obama campaign reveals how it all happened—and why its lessons are not limited to politics.

David Plouffe led not only the effort that put Barack Obama in the White House, he also changed the face of politics forever and reenergized the idea of democracy itself. The Audacity to Win is his story of that groundbreaking achievement, taking readers inside the remarkable 2008 campaign.

For two years Plouffe worked side by side with Obama, charting the course of the campaign. His is the ultimate insider’s tale, revealing both the strategies that delivered Obama to office and how the candidate and campaign handled moments of great challenge and opportunity. Moving from the deliberations about whether to run at all, through the epic primary battle with Hillary Clinton and the general election against John McCain, Plouffe showcases the high-wire gamesmanship that fascinated pundits and the drama and intrigue that captivated a nation.

The Audacity to Win chronicles the arrival of a new moment in American life as digital technology and grassroots organization converge, and the exciting possibilities revealed by a campaign that in many ways functioned as a $1 billion start-up with laserlike focus and discipline. In this extraordinary book, Plouffe unfolds one of the most important political stories of our time, one whose lessons reach to the greatest heights of what we dream about for our country and ourselves.

Join the Discussion!

Post a comment below to join or start a discussion about The Audacity to Win.

Click here to learn more about The Audacity to Win (includes reviews, author interview, and more).

How the historic presidential election of 1912—and the values of the Progressive Party and its candidate Theodore Roosevelt—led to the equally historic election of Barack Obama almost a century later.

Led by Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party made the 1912 campaign a passionate contest for the soul of the American people. Promoting an ambitious program of economic, social, and political reform that posed profound challenges to constitutional government, Roosevelt and his supporters provoked an extraordinary debate about the future of the country. Sidney M. Milkis revisits this emotionally charged contest to show how a party seemingly consumed by its leader’s ambition dominated the election and left an enduring legacy that set in motion the rise of mass democracy and the expansion of national administrative power.

Milkis depicts the Progressive Party as a collective enterprise of activists who pursued a program of reform dedicated to direct democracy, social justice, and a balance between rights and civic duty. These reformers hoped to create a new concept of citizenship that would fulfill the lofty aspirations of “we the people” in a quest for a “more perfect union”—a quest hampered by fierce infighting over civil rights and antitrust policy.

As Milkis reveals, the party’s faith in a more plebiscitary form of democracy would ultimately rob it of the very organization it needed in order to survive after Roosevelt. Yet the Progressive Party’s program of social reform and “direct democracy” has reverberated through American politics—especially in 2008, with Barack Obama appealing to similar instincts. By probing the deep historical roots of contemporary developments in American politics, Milkis shows how Progressivism continues to shape American politics.

Join the Discussion!

Post a comment below to join or start a discussion about Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy.

Click here to learn more about Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy (includes reviews, author interview, and more).

If you enjoyed our video interviews with Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, it’s a safe bet you’ll be into this one, too (from Video Nation).

In “The Pleasures of Eating,” included in Bringing it to the Table, a new collection of his essays, Wendell Berry writes that that we can only escape the trap of industrialism “by restoring one’s consciousness of what is involved in eating, by reclaiming responsibility for one’s own part in the food economy.”

He outlines what “city people” can do by eating more responsibly: “Eaters…must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used. This is a simple way of describing a relationship that is inexpressibly complex. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship. What can one do? Here is a list, probably not definitive:”

1. “Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.”
2. “Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of “quality control”: You will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat.”
3. “Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence.”
4. “Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers.”
5. “Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions?”
6. “Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.”
7. “Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.”

Suicide Bomber Attacks U.N. in Pakistan

“This is a heinous crime committed against those who have been working tirelessly to assist the poor and vulnerable on the front lines of hunger and other human suffering in Pakistan.”

- U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, commenting on the suicide bomb attack that killed five people at the U.N. food agency’s Pakistan headquarters in Islamabad. He added that the U.N. would continue to provide humanitarian assistance to the Pakistani people. (AP)

*Related Title: Chasing the Flame, by Samantha Power

Supreme Court to Weigh in on Obama’s “New Deal”

“There will be major ways in which these interventions will produce legal and constitutional issues.”

- Michael W. McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge who is now director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center. As the new Supreme Court term begins today, the cases reviewed could signal the justices’ attitude toward regulating business at a time of significant government intervention in the economy. (New York Times)

*Related Title: The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin

National Security Advisor (Indirectly) Rebukes McChrystal

“It is better for military advice to come up through the chain of command.”

- National security adviser James L. Jones, suggesting that the public campaign conducted by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, on behalf of his war strategy is hurting the internal White House review of the war in Afghanistan. (Washington Post)

*Related Title: The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, by Andrew J. Bacevich

3 U.S. Scientists Share Nobel Prize in Medicine

“There’s always some small chance that something like this might happen, so when the phone rang, I thought maybe, ‘This is it,’ so . . . sure enough.”

- Jack W. Szostak of Harvard Medical School, on winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, along with Elizabeth Blackburn of UC San Francisco and Carol W. Greider of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, for discovering key aspects of how cells and animals age and how cancer cells become immortal. (Los Angeles Times)

*Related Title: Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum

Health Reform Approaches the Next Hurdle

“There is no model for success that exists, there isn’t one and if you do it you’re going to have to create the first model for success. Congress doesn’t know how to do things it hasn’t done before.”

- Lawrence O’Donnell, who was chief of staff for the Finance Committee during the Clinton effort to reform health care, on the process of finalizing the health care bill in the Senate. (AP)

*Related Title: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform, by Howard Dean, with Faiz Shakir and Igor Volsky

Edward M. Kennedy, who died on August 25 this year, was widely regarded as one of the great senators in the nation’s history. He was also the patriarch of America’s most heralded family. As readers of his poignant, searching memoir, True Compass, will discover in greater detail than ever before, his life was marked by tragedy and perseverance, sorrow and joy, reversal and redemption, loss and love. Here, as an introduction to True Compass, is a timeline of Kennedy’s life, with quotes from the book.

February 22, 1932

Edward Moore Kennedy is born, the youngest of Joseph and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy’s nine children.

“I looked up to my older brothers. “Hero worship wouldn’t be too far off the mark. As long as I can remember, I wanted a boat so I could sail the way they did. They were my earliest sailing instructors, and they encouraged me more than they knew. I did my first solo sailing under their watchful eyes. “You can go as far as that boat anchored over there, Teddy, and then sail back to us…Stay inside the breakwater…Let me see you tack…now gybe.”

“No observation by Joseph Kennedy Sr. had as much lasting influence as [his] dictum: “There’ll be no crying in this house.” … To understand the profound authority of this charge to us is to understand much about my family.”

January, 1938

The Kennedys are in England, living in the 36-room U.S. embassy in London, where Joseph Kennedy is the first Irish-American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.

“For Bobby and me, the pageantry grew familiar in time, along with the peculiar diesel smell of London’s streets and the accents and the left-side driving. The demands of schoolwork took hold; and for me at least, a certain loneliness as well.

“The Gibbs School on Sloane Street near the square inaugurated my long and somewhat unhappy years of school life in Britain and then America; an endless succession of institutions, each of which had its own rules, cliques, standards, and punishment systems (I was to become something of an expert in punishment systems), and obstacles to being liked. I liked to be liked, and up until my school years I’d taken my likability for granted. After all, I was the youngest, used to being doted on by everyone. I am by nature and disposition a happy person. I like to laugh and have people laugh with me. If my siblings found themselves in trouble with Dad, they would sometimes send me into his room ahead of them to “soften him up” Read More

A suicide bomber dressed in military clothing hit the United Nations World Food Programme offices in Islamabad Pakistan today killing four Pakistanis and one Iraqi. The United Nations, which has remained–sometimes critically–nonviolent during the world’s bloodbaths, has increasingly drawn ire when it sets up missions in conflicted parts of the world.

A little over six years ago, on August 19, 2003, a suicide bomber drove a truck loaded with explosives into Baghdad’s Canal hotel, which was then serving as the United Nations Assistance Mission. The blast tore apart the building and killed more than 20 people including Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who was specifically targeted in the bombing.

A career humanitarian with a predilection for philosophy, Sergio joined the UN as a young man for lack of another job. He quickly climbed the ranks of the UNHCR, becoming a guiding force in the agency. His thoughtfulness is well chronicled in Chasing the Flame, by Pulitzer Prize winning author Samantha Power who shows us how the lessons he left us with could save countless lives if implemented by world leaders.

“His professional journey led him to believe the world’s leaders needed to do three big things. First, they had to invest far greater resources in trying to ensure that people enjoyed law and order. Second, they had to engage even the most unsavory militants. Even if they did not find ground with rogue states or rebels, at least they might acquire a better sense of how to9 outmaneuver them. And third, they would be wise to orient their activities less around democracy than around individual dignity.”

The Living Shore: Rediscovering a Lost World

By Rowan Jacobsen

Chapter 2

First Contact

In the early 1990s, a young Canadian marine biologist named Brian Kingzett scored an ecologist’s dream job. The province of British Columbia wanted to know how much of its Swiss-cheese coastline had the potential for shellfish aquaculture. Most shellfish live in estuaries—bays or inlets sheltered from the open ocean—and BC was rich in such areas. Shellfish aquaculture is a form of intertidal farming. You obtain “seed”—baby shellfish resembling grains of sand—from a hatchery, plant it on beaches or mudflats, then harvest the shellfish when they mature in two to three years. Shellfish aquaculture has become a huge worldwide industry, as well as an important restoration tool—because shellfish feed by filtering algae out of water, they are an estuary’s way of keeping itself clean and healthy. Always eager to utilize its natural resources, whether logging, mining, or seafood, and with vast stretches of wild coastline under provincial control, BC embraced shellfish farming in the early nineties.

British Columbia has a staggering 16,780 miles of filigreed coastline, thanks to the glaciers that whittled fjords out of its ridges during the last ice age. Much of this coastline is on Vancouver Island, the largest island on the west coast of North America. A 450-mile-long outrider kissing the coast of Canada, Vancouver Island was not originally part of North America, nor even of Pangaea, the übercontinent formed by all seven of today’s continents. Instead, the earth’s mantle burped Vancouver Island into the South Pacific 400 million years ago. The island began a jaunt across the Pacific, slamming into North America 100 million years ago. But, like an immigrant holding onto her culture, it never quite assimilated with the rest of North America. By staying a few miles offshore, it provided the BC mainland with an epic breakwater sheltering a sailor’s paradise of blue waters, snowy peaks, and protected inlets.

Vancouver Island was full of beaches and mudflats that might be suitable for both shellfish and the farmers who would be harvesting them, but many were hidden amid long stretches of fjord too steep for aquaculture. BC couldn’t exactly convince shellfish farmers to head out into the wilderness if it couldn’t tell them where to go. It needed the equivalent of a real estate catalog for shellfish farms. So in the early 1990s the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food put out a Request for Proposal on a contract to catalog the entire coast. Read More

“There are no more important votes that a senator makes than on issues of war and peace,” writes the late Edward M. Kennedy in his memoir True Compass. In the fall of 2002, Kennedy had to make just such a vote–on a resolution granting President Bush the authority to invade Iraq. Congress approved the resolution, but Kennedy was one of only 23 senators to vote against. In True Compass, Kennedy offers insight into his decision making process, writing, “My views on war drew upon the teachings of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. A distillation of their philosophies has yielded six principles that guide the determination of a ‘just’ war, and these principles were my guiding arguments.”

1. A war must have a just cause, confronting a danger that is beyond question;
2. It must be declared by a legitimate authority acting on behalf of the people;
3. It must be driven by the right intention, not ulterior, self-interested motives;
4. It must be a last resort;
5. It must be proportional, so that the harm inflicted does not outweigh the good achieved; and
6. It must have a reasonable chance of success.

Below are the reasons Kennedy gives for concluding that Iraq failed to meet the definition of a just war:

• “There was no just cause for the invasion of Iraq, I declared time and again. Iraq posed no threat that justified immediate, preemptive war, and there was no convincing pattern of relationships between Saddam and Al Qaeda.”
• “The “legitimate authority,” the Congress, indeed approved authorization for the use of force in Iraq in October 2002, but it acted in haste and under pressure from the White House, which intentionally politicized the vote by scheduling it before midterm elections.”
• “As for “motives,” those stated by the Bush administration itself were unacceptable on their face…The war, I charged on the Senate floor in July 2004, was “a fraud, cooked up in Texas” to advance the president’s political standing.”
• “The war failed the “last resort” principle for reasons too obvious to dwell on here.”
• “On the question of proportionality—did the harm inflicted outweigh the good achieved?—I pointed, again, to the loss of American and Iraqi lives, the collapse of Iraqi society, the self-fulfilling prophecy of terrorists flooding into the ravaged country and using it as a base, the heightened tensions with the entire Islamic world, and our loss of international prestige generally.”
• “As for “a reasonable chance of success,” there never was a question that we would win the military phase of the Iraq war. The more significant success—ending terrorism, promoting regional stability, sustaining America’s reputation as a just nation and a model for enlightenment—has yet to be achieved.”