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Election 2004: How Bush Won and What You Can Expect in the Future By Evan ThomasThe Staff of NewsweekStaff of Newsweek ( PublicAffairs )
Release Date: 2005-01-04
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Product Description
A full year before the presidential election, four Newsweek reporters are detached from the magazine to work fulltime on getting inside the campaigns of the Republican and Democratic candidates. Because Newsweek promises not to reveal any information until after the votes are cast, the reporters receive highly unusual access. They travel with the candidates, live at their headquarters, befriend their staffs. They blend into the background, where they watch and listen.
Evan Thomas has been the writer for this project for the last three elections, and each time, he has brilliantly woven together an award-winning narrative of the campaign,based on the reporting of the Newsweek team. The goal is a rich narrative, a telling, human, and personal story of the extraordinary ordeal of running for the presidency. The characters are the candidates, their families, and their top advisers. They battle uncertainty, exhaustion, a hostile media, and each other in a high-stakes contest that can produce only one winner. The 2004 election promised to be drama of a high order, a close, tense, bitter struggle in a deeply divided country caught in a strange and hard war. Newsweek's reporters were there at the critical moments, recording the scenes that decided the outcome.
Post election, the Newsweek team will now produce an expanded version of the stories that appeared in the magazine and Thomas will write an essay on the new administration, its key players and its prospects, the tone and direction it is expected to set. The book that emerges will be a first draft of history—not rough—but knowing and deeply reported.
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 OK but not great ( mediator911 )
I love the backstage info and the reports about the personalities and interactions on the campaign staff. The Newsweek folks certainly saw a lot that was not reported at the time.
My biggest disappointment is that it did not live up to the billing in the title. The subtitle says "How BC04 won and what you can expect in the future." Well, whoever wrote the title forgot to tell the authors about the second half of that subtitle.
The only mention the future in the final chapter (a mere 12 pages) and even then it isn't really about Election 2008 (the title of the chapter), its more about how Bush and Kerry reacted after the election and how second term presidents generally screw up.
Is it slanted? Yes. As another reviewer (Marc Dalesandro 031505) said, they had good access to Kerry but Bush and Co. kept them at arms length. That same reviewer had some great examples of biased terms used in describing different people and events.
Besides his examples, the most obvious to me were in that same last chapter where, for example, in discussing what Bush _could_ do as a second term president the authors suggest he take on liberal answers to Social Security (raise retirement to 70 and raise taxes on "the rich").
Bottom line: good inside detail about some of the campaign machinations, liberal bias is there but not overwhelming, nonexistent information about what the future would be like.
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Interesting but incomplete ( raynothstine )
I read this book in one night and found it to be very interesting. I did enjoy reading some of the behind the scenes stuff like John Kerry's tantrum in the back of the campaign limo when his personal assistant could not find his hair brush. However that had been in Newsweek before and as well as on Drudge's website. New inside information about the campaign is not really a quality aspect of this publication. Since I paid attention to the campaign this publication served more as a summary or a reminder of events.
Also Newsweek's publication seems to form a lot of bias opinions about why people voted the way they did, often citing minor campaign footnotes. There is virtually no information regarding the inner thoughts of the president, which I guess is not unusual considering lack of trust of the mainstream media and being a wartime president. The publication also brushes over important political divides and the importance of the war on terror.
If you are not deeply knowledgable of presidential campaigns this may be a good read for you. If you consider yourself more of an expert you might want to find a more complete or indepth account. The book is slightly liberal but overall fair. I think the authors made false claims about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth however. I feel the main reason Kerry is a loser is not because President Bush is so great, but he does have a determination and discipline to admire...The big reason is he never connected with the voters. For all of Kerry's strengths he is really an out of touch insider liberal elitist.
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 Bush and GOP stole this election just like they did the last and look where our country's heading?
Down the toilet. But don't worry. We got Howard Dean who ain't afraid to come to my state and others and help bring in real democracy to America rather than put up with Bush/Limbaughian rant of bringing fake democracy to Iraq while stealing elections here at home and doing everything they can to turn America into a corporate fascism.
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Feels incomplete ( seanzik )
Certainly the privileged access that Thomas and his team makes for an insightful account of the 2004 election, drawing back to the nomination process. Pity for Kerry's plight, a hint of disdain for Bush and his coterie, are peppered throughout the narrative. Throughout, a lot of very interesting inside information is revealed in the book as well. Ultimately, I walked away feeling that the election was more lost by Kerry than won by Bush. Kerry's situation is blamed on his indecisiveness, his lack of trust in his his team, his poor people management skills, and his wife's attitude. There is not as much of the inside-scoop on the BC04 side perhaps, from an emotional perspective, as Kerry. And while Howard Dean takes a beating by the authors, we learn very little about John Edwards, who may in fact be the nominee in 2008.
What was most disappointing is the fractured prose. There is nothing really holding the book together, except for the theme of the book itself. The structure is there but the information and opinions often feel disjointed. Events and reports are presented in chronological order, but there is no flow, and the authors tend to jump from one nugget to the next without any bridge. Once in a while, interesting sub-themes are left hanging and incomplete. Perhaps the publisher rushed the book to print or simply didn't recognize the value added of adding this important finishing touch. Other career reporters have assembled excellent books on presidental elections 2000, 1996, 1992 (see Roger Simon) and I feel that Thomas and his team could have done a lot better than just throwing together their reports and conclusions on E04.
In the end, I appreciated the book for its detail and information, but found it poorly pieced together, which detracted from my enjoying the experience as much as I would have liked.
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Adequate ( cazador_ )
Election 2004, works as a good primer to one of the most important presidential campaigns in US history. Yet Newsweek did a less than fair job in its reporting from both camps.
E-04 could have used a bit more editorial help as well as a bias check; it doesn't flow very well and overlooks important things, ignoring some downright. I do think that the criticisms directed against Kerry were slanted; I was so un-happy with Newsweek's coverage that I actually dropped my subscription. It is no coincidence either that most of the books recommended in this website along with this one are favorable to the right. To be fair, this book does report on Kerry's own unfavorable response to Newsweek' coverage; a gesture of intellectual honesty Thomas should be given credit for.
More would have been appreciated about Kerry's ill-conceived campaign and lack of message and Rove's focused, dirty and eventually successful, tricks. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; an obvious re-visitation of veterans against McCain in 2000 don't get the right coverage. Neither does Kerry's refusal to go against Bush's personal attacks, and failure to address the plethora of Bush's mistakes in the last two months, which decidedly cost him the election. We get very little on these points from the book. In one of the mildly insightful moments, Thomas reports that the electorate had a hard-time distinguishing Kerry's position on the war from Bush's, and consequently voted for the more stable looking candidate. This I thought was a very accurate point.
As a pet peeve, I always bought the whole Kerry's "Come-Back Kid" attitude, I even heard some of his former opponents on the right praise him for it. This book debunks it, and informs us this was just a campaign myth his people were trying to promote, which looking back on, makes sense.
One of the conclusions in E-04 was that Kerry lost partly as a result of his comments on Mary Cheney on the third debate (this is suggested and not said outright). This is just not true; although Kerry's comment was un-called for and served no purpose (I winced when he said it), I don't think that so much of the electorate was so turned off by it that they ended up voting for Bush, who ran on an anti-gay marriage platform. How much sense does that make? This assessment shows a lack of touch with the real issues on the part of Newsweek. In the following weeks the Republican camp did a lot to discredit Kerry on this point, but it is not pointed out by E-04 that Alan Keyes, a conservative republican running for the senate seat against Obama in Illinois had called Mary Cheney a "selfish hedonist" and received nary a comment from the now -conveniently- outraged Cheneys. This should have been noted in the book. I don't need Newsweek to editorialize, but I do want perspective.
Then there's Ohio. Although I'm not one for conspiracy theories there was obvious foul play in the weeks preceding and on election day; from Secretary of State Blackwell's flip-flapping on voting regulations, to the Rove people calling people in strong democratic precincts by phone and advising them to vote at the wrong places, to the lack of a voting records paper trail. Yes, there are irregularities on every election, but when all the irregularities favor the same candidate, I get a bit skeptical. Alas, this subject seemed too controversial for Newsweek.
Newsweek's coverage fails for one of these counts; they were either so engrossed in the process of reporting that they overlooked what for them, and not the electorate, was obvious, or they got so close to the campaigns they were covering that their judgment was impaired. I felt I was better informed by other sources during the election.
Campaign 2004 is at best an ok primer and at worst, a slightly biased account in need of some editorial cohesion.
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