Product Description

Michiko Kakutani,:

"Those hungry for political news will readfor the scooplets and insidery glimpses it serves up about the two campaigns, and the clues it offers about the positioning already going on among Republicans and Democrats for 2016 ... The book testifies to its authors energetic legwork and insider access... creating a novelistic narrative that provides a you-are-there immediacy... They succeed in taking readers interested in the backstabbing and backstage maneuvering of the 2012 campaign behind the curtains, providing a tactile... sense of what it looked like from the inside."

In their runaway bestseller , Mark Halperin and John Heilemann captured the full drama of Barack Obamas improbable, dazzling victory over the Clintons, John McCain, and Sarah Palin. With the same masterly reporting, unparalleled access, and narrative skill, picks up the story in the Oval Office, where the president is beset by crises both inherited and unforeseenfacing defiance from his political foes, disenchantment from the voters, disdain from the nations powerful money machers, and dysfunction within the West Wing. As 2012 looms, leaders of the Republican Party, salivating over Obamas political fragility, see a chance to wrest back control of the White Houseand the country. So how did the Republicans screw it up? How did Obama survive the onslaught of super PACs and defy the predictions of a one-term presidency? follows the gaudy carnival of GOP contendersambitious and flawed, famous and infamous, charismatic and cartoonishas Mitt Romney, the straitlaced, can-do, gaffe-prone multimillionaire from Massachusetts, scraped and scratched his way to the nomination.

exposes blunders, scuffles, and machinations far beyond the klieg lights of the campaign trail: Obama storming out of a White House meeting with his high command after accusing them of betrayal. Romneys mind-set as he made his controversial 47 percent comments. The real reasons New Jersey governor Chris Christie was never going to be Mitts running mate. The intervention held by the presidents staff to rescue their boss from political self-destruction. The way the tense dtente between Obama and Bill Clinton morphed into political gold. And the answer to one of the campaigns great mysterieshow did Clint Eastwood end up performing Dada dinner theater at the Republican convention?

In, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann take the reader into back rooms and closed-door meetings, laying bare the secret history of the 2012 campaign for a panoramic account of an election that was as hard fought as it was lastingly consequential.