Renegade by Richard Wolffe

I bought Renegade: The Making of a President by Richard Wolffe over the weekend and I’m finding it quite fascinating thus far (I’m on page 105.) It’s a close-up look at the 2008 Presidential campaign from the perspective of Barack Obama and his team and as someone who followed the 2008 election extremely closely (I have a blog devoted to the topic) it’s really interesting to read what was going on “behind the scenes” of all of these things that I remember clearly (but from another perspective, of course.)

Beyond the campaign talk, there’s also some interesting background on Obama that makes me feel like I know who he is a bit more and where he’s coming from. I think a lot of us on the left (I am very liberal, far to the left of where Obama presents himself politically) get upset with the President not pushing harder for big changes but I really do believe that he is on our side, it’s just that he’s also very much a pragmatist and that he believes what matters most are results (not ideological purity.)

I think we should try to be a bit patient with him while simultaneously pushing as hard as we can for the changes we believe in. Many times in the book the point is made that Obama believes that change really comes from the “bottom up.” In other words, that we have to push for change if we want it to happen, we can’t just sit back and expect the politicians to do what’s right on their own. Corruption is very deep in Washington and I think we’re all living in a fantasy land if we expect Obama to be able to just change everything with a wave of his wand.

This book was released on June 2 but there are a couple of new books focused on the 2008 election coming out this week: David Plouffe’s The Audacity to Win (Plouffe was Obama’s campaign manager) comes out on November 3 and, of course, Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, which will likely be the first book many Palin fans have ever read, comes out on November 17th.