Not only do staffers turn on candidates in this book, but candidates turn on staffers. At times you get the impression people were wearing wires. But the overwhelming fact the book communicates is that our candidates for president are emotionally volatile, extreme personalities. They spend a lot of time being enraged. They don’t trust those around them. They desperately want power and want to be celebrated, but they don’t know what they want to do with power beyond wield it, and they seem incapable of reflection about why they need to be admired. Most seriously, they show little interest in, or even awareness of, the central crises of their time.
Hillary Clinton, made wild by her snake-bit campaign, has temper tantrums, fires staffers, weeps, rehires them. “Let’s talk turkey,” she says to one. “Let’s talk ham. Let’s talk tortillas.” She considered her husband’s administration “soft.” Her presidential operation would be staffed by the “hardheaded and hard boiled” who “embraced her conception of politics as total war.” When she won the New Hampshire primary, she declared in a victory speech, “I come tonight with a very, very full heart. . . . I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice.” Minutes later, with a “puffed out chest,” she high-fives her staffers and explains her victory: “I get really tough when people f— with me.” When offered the vice presidential nomination, she is ambivalent. “I’ve already done that job,” she told her pollster, Mark Penn. She had already been vice president, in her husband’s presidency…
Barack Obama, who interestingly gets the best treatment in the book—protect those sources!—is not immune. He is smart, “and he not only knew it but wanted to make sure that everyone else knew it.” In meetings with aides, he controlled the conversation by interrupting whoever was talking. He is boastful, gaudily confident. Before his 2004 convention speech, a reporter asked him if he was nervous: “I’m LeBron, baby,” he answers. “I got some game.”
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