Obama Reads - How Barack Obama Won

This is a periodic series I will be writing on books I recommend for President Obama.


Please note that these are one reader's opinions, so if you have any other takes on the books I rate, please comment so everyone can see how you feel.


How Barack Obama Won by Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser is the first book I'll discuss. I was excited to purchase this book, since I followed Chuck Todd's analysis of the electoral breakdown during the primaries and general election.

The book begins with an introduction, which serves as a thorough overview of last year's elections. I found many points made here quite interesting, especially the observation that Barack Obama gave a speech to start his campaign, but Hillary Clinton and John McCain did not. The authors seem to intimate that the Clinton and McCain campaigns suffered from this oversight right from the outset. I'm not certain I agree with this analysis, but it's an interesting observation nonetheless.

Four sections follow: "Battleground states," "Receding Battleground States," "Emerging Battleground States," and "Red and Blue States." I appreciate these categories, particularly since they go beyond the traditional, simplistic red/blue paradigm. Although not completely new, this structure allows for both an understanding of what took place in '08 and a better flow as we follow the shifts the electorate may take in the future.

Charts give a numeric, quantitative breakdown for the individual states within each section. Explanation and expansion of these numbers is also the part of each state's chapter. The authors, in so doing, hang flesh on these bones. They also highlight areas that were most meaningful for each state, such as the dynamic that occurred in specific counties that tipped that state's election one way or another.

For those readers who are number crunchers, there are numbers aplenty to chew on. For those of us who are not as quantitatively driven, there is still a lot of good reading. I must put forth the warning that sometimes the text is dense, filled with percentages and trends. The going can be somewhat tough at those moments.

The authors are best when they are concise. When they begin to expound without pausing for the reader to reflect, they run into trouble:

"In just about every red state Obama flipped or every blue state he won substantially, it was a flip in the suburban counties that led the way, whether one looks at the northern Virginia suburbs, which powered Obama's victory in the Old Dominion to the Research Triangle in North Carolina to county flips in the I-4 corridor in Florida and the surrounding suburban counties in Denver, Colorado." (p. 37)

Maybe that's an easily read "sentence-paragraph" for some people, but I needed to re-read it three times before I followed exactly what they were getting at. I think the authors did well by moving beyond pure number crunching, but when they expand their prose too much, they risk confusing the reader.

Overall, this is an interesting, useful book that does a very good job making a difficult topic comprehensible to the general public. I especially recommend it to those "electionholics" who want to see the full set of numbers behind the '08 election. Indeed, it will also be a useful resource four years from now for studying how the trends will have changed by the time we deconstruct the election returns of 2012.