Heilemann, a staff writer for New York magazine, and Halperin, formerly at ABC and now at Time, are consummate insiders, and the roll-out of the book reflects that - a veritable drumbeat of blog items and newspaper stories that culminated Sunday night with a segment on “60 Minutes” in which Anderson Cooper interviewed not only them but also Steve Schmidt, the former McCain campaign strategist and an obvious source, who described many of the incidents recounted in the books.įor anybody who dislikes establishment journalism - its coziness with sources and its obsession with process - this book takes it to new levels.
“But the tawdry psycho-drama of the Edwards’s and a racist crack by Harry Reid will.” “A long analysis of the demographics of the electorate is not going to get you an HBO movie,” Fineman said. In today’s media world, Fineman added, the “tweetable nugget” is the type of thing that quick gets the attention of reporters, and subsequently, readers. And once having such juicy, insider material, Fineman noted that the authors - both residing in New York, the television and publishing capital - are savvy enough to effectively market the material.
Given the reams of real-time coverage of the 2008 race, followed by Newsweek’s lengthy post-election tick-tock and “The Battle for America,” a Dan Balz-Haynes Johnson book on the election that came out last fall, it might be expected that the political press corps had picked the campaign carcass clean long ago.īut Fineman said Halperin and Heilemann “very smartly went after stuff that was undercovered,” such as John and Elizabeth Edwards. political media world we live in now with ‘The Note.’”Īs founder and editor of ABC’s “The Note,” which began targeting the influential Gang of 500 in 2002, Halperin pioneered the transmission of real-time political news, earning a New Yorker profile in 2004, and later distilling what he know about the viral nature of political news in “The Way to Win,” a book he co-wrote in 2006 with POLITICO Editor-in-Chief John Harris. The book’s successful launch was no surprise to Howard Fineman, Newsweek’s chief political writer, given that Halperin, in his opinion, “more or less created the world that we now live in: the 24-7, always-on, hyperlinked, Web-based, D.C.
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