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Summary
Summary
In the four years that passed after the Party's leaders, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, fell away, 'the damaging cycle of rot and convulsion that Democrats seem unable to break out of' continued to plague the party in the face of the rise of Trumpism, even after a historic midterm win. Never before had it had presidential candidates as disparate as Sanders, Biden, Buttigieg, Warren, and Bloomberg. Never before had the standard campaign playbook been thrown quite so far out the window, especially after the appearance of COVID in the winter of 2020. Behind Edward-Isaac Dovere's fly-on-the-wall account of this period is a critical look at Democrats' search for a message and an identity, the energy gathering for more progressive policies, shifting geographic and demographic voting trends, and the recalibration of what the party stands for.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Atlantic staff writer Dovere debuts with an incisive and deeply reported portrait of the Democratic Party in exile during the Trump presidency, and the confluence of events that brought Joe Biden to victory in 2020. Opening with election night 2016, Dovere discusses various factors contributing to Hillary Clinton's defeat, including her flaws as a campaigner and Obama's "negligence" of Democratic Party infrastructure during his presidency, and describes initial discussions about how best to organize the resistance to Trump. Turning to the 2020 primaries, Dovere offers sharp assessments of each candidate ("At his best, could appear to be working his way through the primaries as if he were solving a Rubik's Cube"); sheds light on how Bernie Sanders's push to get others to commit to Medicare for All set a ceiling on how far a progressive could go in the race; and documents how the Biden campaign navigated Tara Reade's sexual assault allegation and the "October surprise" of Hunter Biden's laptop. But in Dovere's estimation, none of that would have mattered if the Covid-19 pandemic hadn't masked Biden's weaknesses and made him the best "fit" for the moment. Though somewhat baggy, Dovere's narrative is littered with rich characterizations, wry humor, and impressive insider access. Political junkies will savor this satisfying deep dive. (May)
Kirkus Review
A carefully structured account of the many moving parts that turned the Democratic Party into a resistance movement against Trump. Barack Obama, writes Atlantic lead political correspondent Dovere, "never understood why people disliked [Hillary] Clinton so much. He could also never get over how bad a campaigner she was." He didn't do much to help in her campaign until it was too late. Somehow Trump managed to squeak by her even as Obama finally told aides, "do you really want a psychopath sitting at that desk?" and ordered them to do something to get that message through to voters. Yet, Dovere writes, there was a certain continuity to a vote for Obama in 2008 and a vote for Trump in 2016: Both were outsiders running a populist campaign, if of very different dispositions. Obama tried to guide Trump to effectiveness after the election, suggesting that he "make a few patches to Obamacare and call it Trumpcare" and warning him not to hire Michael Flynn, whose Russian connections were already well known. Trump ignored the advice. His intransigence emerged early, moving Nancy Pelosi to challenge his claim that he had won the popular vote. Trump was great for Obama, Dovere notes, retrospectively erasing the errors he made in office, while resistance to Trump soon became marching orders for party stalwarts. Some of the newsworthy items in this book: Clinton contemplated running again in 2020 only to conclude that if she did, Bernie Sanders would be the guaranteed candidate. She hoped instead for a deadlocked convention by which the Democrats would call her back by acclaim. It was to the Democrats' good fortune, Dovere suggests, that Trump was so inept, especially with respect to the pandemic, and that the Republican Party "was defining itself as the check against America's changing." That America was changing seems to have eluded them all, leaving Trump a loser "on the biggest stage of his life." A wide-ranging history of a tangled campaign--catnip for politics junkies. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| Prologue | p. 1 |
| 1 Benign Neglect | p. 9 |
| 2 Breaking the Glass | p. 29 |
| 3 I Hope | p. 47 |
| 4 Fate and Planning | p. 74 |
| 5 Not Friends | p. 92 |
| 6 The Spark | p. 109 |
| 7 Democrat X | p. 131 |
| 8 Why Not? | p. 145 |
| 9 Launched into a Void | p. 159 |
| 10 "God Knows How Rusty Joe Is" | p. 171 |
| 11 That Little Girl | p. 186 |
| 12 How Much Fun | p. 198 |
| 13 The Line from Kyiv | p. 207 |
| 14 Heart Trouble | p. 232 |
| 15 This System Is Crazy | p. 258 |
| 16 What Was the Plan? | p. 281 |
| 17 A Billion Dollars for Samoa | p. 302 |
| 18 Seventy-Two Hours That Changed History | p. 320 |
| 19 Take Him Seriously | p. 339 |
| 20 Tic Toc | p. 353 |
| 21 A Knee on the Neck | p. 369 |
| 22 A Horrible, Horrible Process | p. 382 |
| 23 You Have Got to Be Kidding | p. 406 |
| 24 White House Petri Dish | p. 424 |
| 25 The Other Side of the Desk | p. 433 |
| 26 What if It Wasn't? | p. 450 |
| 27 The Dog That Caught the Bus | p. 481 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 499 |
| Note on Sources | p. 503 |
| Index | p. 505 |