Correction to this article

Reuters

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime. By John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Harper; 464 pages; $27.99. Published in Britain as “Race of a Lifetime: How Obama Won the White House”.Viking; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

“GAME CHANGE”, the account by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin of the 2008 American presidential race, is high-quality political porn. It is sleazy, personal, intrusive, shocking—and, let’s be honest, horribly compulsive. It is also a thoroughly researched, well-paced and occasionally very amusing read.

The book has already landed Harry Reid, the majority leader of the Senate, in the soup for privately referring to Barack Obama as “light-skinned” and devoid of “Negro dialect”. It deals some heavy blows to the reputations of most of the characters (although Mr Obama comes out of it pretty much unscathed). And on January 11th, the day it went on sale after being serialised in both New York magazine and the Times in London, the book shot straight to the top of the bestseller list at Amazon.com. Anyone who follows American politics will want to read it.

Mr Heilemann (who once worked for The Economist and is now at New York) and Mr Halperin (of Time) have been diligent with their tape-recorders. They claim to have conducted more than 300 interviews with over 200 people, though, since they were all on “deep background”, it is often hard to know exactly how much credence to give to any particular anecdote or indeed to know who it is they talked to at all. But the result is something that conveys the feel, or perhaps more accurately the smell, of one of recent history’s most thrilling elections, and it does so better than any of the other books already on the market.

There is a central weakness, though, and one that is common to election accounts in general. It is the losers, not the winners who write this particular version of history. The staff of a losing campaign are a lot more ready and able to speak frankly than the staff of the victor. In part, that is surely because there is more dirt to dish: the loser lost, after all, suggesting that things did not run that well in his camp. But it is also because in the various losing camps, the participants, most of them professional political operatives with careers to think of, have an interest in getting their side of the story out before any former colleague has a chance to dump the blame on them. The winners, meanwhile, have got down to running the country.

What this means is that the chapters on the campaigns of the principal failures (John McCain and his extraordinary would-be vice-president from Alaska, Sarah Palin; Hillary Clinton; and last but, in terms of sheer jaw-dropping bizarreness, by no means least, John Edwards) are a lot more interesting than the sections about Mr Obama.

It is the damage wrought to Mrs Clinton that is probably the most consequential. She is America’s secretary of state, after all, the person charged with one of the toughest and most visible jobs in the world. By contrast, the career of Mr Edwards is over and Mr McCain is highly unlikely to try again. (Mrs Palin, of course, may rise once more, though, if this account is anything to go by, her chances of success are likely to be slimmer than ever.)

That Mrs Clinton ran a bad campaign is well known. Just how spendthrift it was, though, how disorganised, how riven with backbiting and indecision, and how thoroughly hamstrung by the enduring psychodrama of the Clinton marriage and its bimbo eruptions, is astounding. Equally astonishing is the treachery and duplicity of much of the Democratic establishment, which purported to be backing the front-runner, while all the time encouraging Mr Obama to run for fear that the compromised former first lady was unelectable. On the night of Mrs Clinton’s defeat in Iowa, in retrospect the moment when her campaign was holed below the waterline, the account of her impotent fury is, to put it mildly, unsettling. According to the authors, one of her most senior lieutenants said: “This woman shouldn’t be president.” By the time readers have finished this book, they may well think so too.

Mrs Clinton, however, emerges as a political colossus compared with the punishment the authors mete out to Mrs Palin and Mr Edwards. “You guys have a lot of work to do,” notes one operative to his colleagues after trying to coach Mrs Palin on the basics of policy. “She doesn’t know anything.” The image of the governor of Alaska, slumped and dishevelled, surrounded by hundreds of scattered index cards and unresponsive almost to the point of catatonia, is not one that will easily be shrugged off. Nor will her claim that her selection was “God’s plan”, which might, of course, be true, though not in the sense that Mrs Palin intended. As for Mr Edwards, his brazen infidelity with a political hanger-on and videographer, who rambled on about reincarnation and who introduced herself as a witch, only serves to demonstrate that America dodged a bullet in 2004 when Mr Edwards was the vice-presidential nominee.

The minor candidates get their say, though they are, not surprisingly, covered more sketchily. Most enjoyable is the scene when all but one of the Republican candidates are lined up at the urinals just before one of the debates, discussing how much they all despise Mitt Romney, when in walks the supremely well-coiffed political chameleon himself. One weakness of the book is that the candidacy of Mike Huckabee gets very short shrift. This is unfortunate, given that his folksy blend of religion and politics struck a particularly resonant note—and might do so again.

Mr McCain comes off badly too, but the book’s account is tinged with sadness, as The Economist’s own reporting of the maverick politician’s tragic final act was also inclined to be. The transformation of the lion of the Senate into the baffled old man who, all too obviously, had little idea how to respond to the collapse of America’s financial system in mid-September is painful indeed to read. The candidate had to be warned by his staff to stop telling everyone that he didn’t understand economics. One refreshing thing about Mr McCain was always the healthy contempt in which he held the nastier sort of Republican (“Why would I want to be the leader of a party of such assholes?” he is quoted as saying). But in the end he gave them what they wanted by plumping for Mrs Palin.

Mr Obama gets off pretty much scot free, as he has in the half-dozen campaign accounts already published. About the most damaging thing Messrs Heilemann and Halperin can turn up is that he very occasionally wondered whether he might in fact lose, and that some of his old Chicago friends sometimes resented “the suits”—the white male triumvirate of David Axelrod, David Plouffe and Robert Gibbs who surrounded him from the start. For the most part, the Obama sections of the book are a bit of a star-struck recitation of flawless planning and superb attention to detail, from an early Facebook strategy to buying up all the best tickets for the crucial Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa. But that was probably just how it was.