Campaign Cliff Notes

November 10, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Election 2008 

The helpful folks over at the Daily Beast have prepared a crib sheet for “Secrets of the 2008 Campaign” — Newsweek’s seven chapter 50K word epic of oxen gored, scores settled, and 2012 knives sharpened about the 2008 presidential campaign just past. (It’s much better than Newsweek’s own shorter summary.

The major scoops have already been well mined:

• Gov. Palin’s towel-clad strut in front of campaign aides
• the cyber-attack on both campaigns
• the list of all the negative commercials the McCainers decided were too ugly to air

Lest any scoop go unturned, the Beasters serve up a chapter-by-chapter account.  Here’s the concentrated skinny from  Chapter 3, “Bubba Unleashed”:

Always eager to play the victim card, Bill Clinton kept with him an 81-page list of atrocities that had been done to Hillary. Clinton told Donna Brazile, “If Barack Obama is nominated, it will be the worst denigration of public service.” Brazile responded: “Why are you so angry?”

It was with Hillary’s blessing that Bill went to South Carolina, the place where he fatefully compared the Obama campaign to Jesse Jackson’s. (The Clintons lobbied Jackson to forgive them publicly, but Jackson declined.) Caroline Kennedy would later endorse Obama in The New York Times. Newsweek reveals that despite the pleas of staffers, Hillary never called Caroline to lock up her endorsement.

A rare mistake from the disciplined Team Obama: Despite orders from Obama and Axelrod to find every speech Rev. Jeremiah Wright had delivered, no one on the staff did the job. The campaign watched “God damn America” on the news with everyone else. After Obama delivered his race speech in Philadelphia, he walked backstage to find his entire staff in tears. Obama, however, was unmoved—the speech was “solid,” he said, nothing more.

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