It isn't the duty of election books to leave readers feeling uplifted.
Newsweek recently canceled a series of election books that it had been producing since 1984, partly because the associated travel costs had become untenable.
Theodore White's "The Making of the President 1960" — he published similar treatments of the 1964, 1968 and 1972 elections — won the Pulitzer Prize, and is widely credited with creating the modern blow-by-blow form of election books, but practitioners haven't precisely followed his lead.
First, on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," she got in a testy exchange over police body cameras with Mark Halperin, co-author of the election books "Game Change" and "Double Down" and now co-managing-editor of Bloomberg Politics.
The trouble started early Monday with an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" in which Rawlings-Blake was asked about her position on police body cameras by Mark Halperin, co-author of the election books "Game Change" and "Double Down" and now co-managing-editor of Bloomberg Politics.
"We must face up to the truth," he wrote in "Témoignage", his pre-election book.
In his pre-election book, Changer de destin, he eloquently interweaves the two, arguing that, beyond balancing the books, the country's future prosperity depends on a "productivity pact harnessing all resources: businesses, social partners, state, community bodies and the financial sector".
I wrote articles on campaign finance and congressional elections, book chapters, and ran for Congress myself as a progressive Democrat endorsed by Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition in my home state of Nebraska in 1984, where I was dutifully and expectedly clobbered by the incumbent Republican.
If that helps the party, fine, and if not, that's fine too!" For the next volley, there are Florida-election books to hash over.
On the other are the pragmatists, for whom politics is all about swings, seats and opinion polls, about policy detail and interest-group trade-offs, underpinned by a general presumption that the "system" works.The practical approach has been gaining ground for a century or more, not least among political analysts, as several of these general-election books attest.
