Intimate portrait of drama and actors in Obama's surge to the White House

BOOK OF THE DAY: Race of a LifetimeBy John Heilemann and Mark Halprin Viking, Penguin 436pp, £25

IRISH PEOPLE, more than most other Europeans, love the spectacle of American politics. Perhaps it is because so many Irish-Americans are very political and that we at home can follow the intricacies and intrigues of the United States.

For those who watched The West Wingor who followed the last US presidential election campaign, Race of a Lifetimeis a great read. It is written by two experienced journalists who explain that the material was taken from more than 300 in-depth interviews with more than 200 people between July 2008 and September 2009. These discussions are combined with memos, documents and e-mails which provide the source for the authors. The thread of a live dialogue running through the book's descriptive passages makes it feel more like a film script.

The story starts with Barack Obama waking up in a motel bedroom in Iowa a few days before that state’s famous caucuses at the start of the presidential election campaign. Obama, a first-term US senator from Illinois, swept the field, blowing Hillary Clinton into third place, and those contests in the Obama, John Edwards and Clinton camps are described with the immediacy and intimacy of a ringside seat.

The story then steps back and outlines the tale of how all of the contestants, Democrat and Republican alike, got into the race, how they behaved and what happened to them. Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama, John and Elizabeth Edwards, along with John and Cindy McCain and Todd and Sarah Palin, are the dominant characters. But there are many others – some familiar household names such as the late Ted Kennedy and political strategists and pollsters – who make up the army of professional non-elected full-time political campaigners in the US.

The surge of support for Palin, after she was triumphantly announced by McCain right after Obama’s convention in Colorado, is brilliantly described. So too is the unravelling of the “hockey mom’s” campaign.

Soon Palin mania and the becalmed Obama campaign would be eclipsed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers. America now faced its greatest economic crisis since the 1929 Wall Street crash.

McCain’s rudderless and amateur response to the crisis was in direct contrast to Obama’s measured, thoughtful and researched reaction. He was in contact with the main economic players, Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke, together with senior Clinton office holders and Democratic advisers such as Bob Rubin and Paul Volcker. On the basis of what many conservative Wall Street bankers knew and saw of both candidates’ performances, Obama would have got all their votes there and then, long before November 4th.

As the election moved closer to polling day, Obama’s team were confident, professional and well-funded. He was attracting enormous crowds. McCain was left behind.

This book is hard to put down. You get a glimpse of Hillary’s secret surveillance on Bill’s romancing and Sarah Palins tutorials on world geography, not to mention politics.

The hero, of course, is Obama. Not since Bobby Kennedy were so many people enthused and mobilised by a candidate, according to a senior Democrat.

Sitting in the immense football stadium in Colorado on a warm evening in August 2008, I got a real sense of the enormous magnetism of Obama and the clamour for change.

One year on in the White House, the new president in the West Wing is finding life very different from those heady days. As governor Mario Cuomo said, “in American politics you campaign in poetry and govern in prose”.

Ruairí Quinn is Labour Party TD for Dublin South East. He is a former party leader and has close links with the US Democratic Party