The Right Fights Back Playbook 2012 Politico Inside Election 2012

Two of America’s most perceptive political reporters join forces for an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at the race for the White House in POLITICO’s Playbook 2012, a series of four instant digital books on the 2012 presidential election. The first edition, The Right Fights Back, follows the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. The battle for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination promises to be one of the most hotly contested and closely fought in recent memory, as establishment Republicans, Tea Party favorites, and dark horse insurgents vie to take on President Obama in the November election. In The Right Fights Back, Mike Allen, chief White House correspondent for POLITICO, and Evan Thomas, the award-winning journalist and author of Robert F. Kennedy and The War Lovers, chronicle the dramatic events of this historic campaign as it unfolds. With exclusive real-time reporting from the campaign trail, The Right Fights Back provides detail, color, and in-depth analysis that take readers beyond the hourly headlines and commentary. From the role of Super PACS and conservative interest groups to the clashes of personality and policy that will define the race to capture the GOP nomination, this is a history-as-it-happens account of the resurgent American right at the crossroads.

A series of four instant eBooks on the 2012 presidential election, POLITICO’s Playbook 2012 provides an unprecedented real-time account of the race for the White House. The third edition, Obama’s Last Stand, follows the reelection campaign of President Barack Obama as it struggles to find the winning formula in a political landscape that has changed dramatically since his history-making victory in 2008. Though battered and bruised after nearly four years in office, Barack Obama remains the most competitive player on the field in American politics today. In Obama’s Last Stand, POLITICO White House correspondent Glenn Thrush chronicles the efforts of the president and his team to secure a second term in the face of a determined opposition, unfavorable economic headwinds, and a series of missteps by his own team. This is a revealing portrait of the president at the most precarious moment in his political life, with insights and anecdotes drawn straight from the notebook of one of the most perceptive reporters in America. The trash-talking schoolyard athlete in Obama is very much in evidence, especially when he speaks caustically about his Republican rivals, including the man he thinks is trying to steal his legacy, Mitt Romney. Yet apart from Romney and the uncertain economy, Obama’s greatest obstacle on the road to reelection may be Obama 2008. He and his team of talented advisers must try to reconcile their nostalgia for that once-in-a-lifetime campaign with the realities of an election fundamentally altered by the advent of super PACs and the evaporation of Obama’s superstar popularity. That challenge has led a campaign operation that once prided itself on flawless execution of strategy to commit several of the most dangerous unforced errors of Obama’s political career. Yet the game is far from over. If Obama is sometimes his own worst enemy, he also has the talent and drive to reclaim this race. Spurred on by the realistic prospect of losing, and growing ever more impatient with the foibles of his campaign staff, Obama the competitor is gearing up for the most critical fourth quarter of his career. This is the story of the last stand that will either cement his legacy forever—or consign him to a roster of once-promising one-term presidents.

Two of America’s most perceptive political reporters join forces for an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at the race for the White House in POLITICO’s Playbook 2012, a series of four instant digital books on the 2012 presidential election. The second edition, Inside the Circus, pulls back the curtain on the pursuit of the Republican nomination, as operatives jockey for position and strategists vie to fashion a message that can win over all factions of the fractious GOP. Over the course of a long winter and into the spring, the contest for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination gathered steam and bubbled over with drama. At times it seemed more like a soap opera or reality show than a political campaign. Inside the Circus, the latest real-time digital dispatch from acclaimed political correspondent Mike Allen and award-winning journalist and author Evan Thomas, chronicles each turn in this endlessly surprising race with reporting straight from the campaign war rooms of Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and the other GOP contenders. What was the thinking inside the Romney brain trust as what was once expected to be an easy ride to the nomination turned into what some have called a “long slog”? How did Newt Gingrich throw the preternaturally poised Romney off his game in South Carolina—and who convinced the former Massachusetts governor it was time to start punching back? Why were the other campaigns caught flat-footed by the rise of Rick Santorum and what does his unlikely ascent mean for the prospect of a brokered convention? From the Iowa caucuses to Super Tuesday and beyond, Allen and Thomas answer all the questions the headlines, polls, and delegate counts can’t address. The stakes are high, the plotlines are still unfolding, and Inside the Circus is your fly-on-the-wall guide to the most fascinating Republican presidential race in recent memory.

In these impassioned, powerful essays, an award-winning journalist deals forthrightly with what it means to be Black in an America that still supports Trump. South Carolina–based journalist Issac J. Bailey reflects on a wide range of complex, divisive topics—from police brutality and Confederate symbols to respectability politics and white discomfort—which have taken on a fresh urgency with the protest movement sparked by George Floyd’s killing. Bailey has been honing his views on these issues for the past quarter of a century in his professional and private life, which included an eighteen-year stint as a member of a mostly white Evangelical Christian church. Why Didn’t We Riot? speaks to and for the millions of Black and Brown people throughout the United States who were effectively pushed back to the back of the bus in the Trump era by a media that prioritized the concerns and feelings of the white working class and an administration that made white supremacists giddy, and explains why the country’s fate in 2020 and beyond is largely in their hands. It will be an invaluable resource for the everyday reader, as well as political analysts, college professors and students, and political consultants and campaigns vying for high office.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the most successful Republican political operative of his generation, a searing, unflinching, and deeply personal exposé of how his party became what it is today “A blistering tell-all history. In his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses [that] the entire apparatus of his Republican Party is built on a pack of lies." —The New York Times Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass. This is not a book about how Donald J. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and changed it into something else. Stevens shows how Trump is in fact the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Stevens shows how racism has always lurked in the modern GOP's DNA, from Goldwater's opposition to desegregation to Ronald Reagan's welfare queens and states' rights rhetoric. He gives an insider's account of the rank hypocrisy of the party's claims to embody "family values," and shows how the party's vaunted commitment to fiscal responsibility has been a charade since the 1980s. When a party stands for nothing, he argues, it is only natural that it will be taken over by the loudest and angriest voices in the room.

In this important and timely volume, Dennis W. Johnson has assembled an outstanding team of political scientists and political professionals to examine one of the fiercest and most closely fought presidential elections of our time. Like its predecessor, Campaigning for President 2008, Campaigning for President 2012: Strategy and Tactics focuses on political management. It is written by both elections/campaign scholars and practitioners, who highlight the role of political consultants and campaigns while also emphasizing the strategy and tactics employed by the candidates, the national political parties, and outside interests. The contributors explore the general mood of the electorate in the 2012 election, the challenges Obama faced after his first term, the primaries, money, communication, the important issues of the election, and finally the election itself.

This authoritative and comprehensive survey of political communication draws together a team of the world′s leading scholars to provide a state-of-the-art review that sets the agenda for future study. It is divided into five sections: Part One: explores the macro-level influences on political communication such as the media industry, new media, technology, and political systems Part Two: takes a grassroots perspective of the influences of social networks - real and online - on political communication Part Three: discusses methodological advances in political communication research Part Four: focuses on power and how it is conceptualized in political communication Part Five: provides an international, regional, and comparative understanding of political communication in its various contexts The SAGE Handbook of Political Communication is an essential benchmark publication for advanced students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of politics, media and communication, sociology and research methods.

The fourth and final eBook in POLITICO’s Playbook 2012 series once again provides an unprecedented minute-by-minute account of the race for the presidency. The End of the Line follows President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney as their campaign teams go all-in to win in the critical final weeks of the 2012 election. From Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” video to Clint Eastwood’s speech to an empty chair, the 2012 presidential campaign did not lack for memorable moments. In The End of the Line, POLITICO senior White House reporter Glenn Thrush and senior political reporter Jonathan Martin chronicle every hairpin turn in a race that defied the predictions of pundits and prognosticators. While some political observers considered Barack Obama’s reelection far from a sure thing, the president and his team remained resolute in their belief that they would prevail. In Boston, Mitt Romney’s advisers were just as confident that their man was headed for a smashing victory. In the end, only one of those views would be validated by events. The outcome of this election was never foreordained, however, and would ultimately be determined by two candidates, three debates, and a thousand small but critical strategic decisions. With an eye toward writing a “first draft of history,” Thrush and Martin report on the intense internal debates over ad strategy that defined the parameters of the fall campaign—including a crucial late-May decision by the Obama campaign that may have tipped the scales in the president’s favor. They provide a behind-the-scenes look at the candidates’ debate preparation sessions, and they reveal why Romney’s campaign was so confident they were going to win. The action climaxes on election night, as the opposing camps huddle nervously in their hotel suites to await the verdict of the voters. The End of the Line reveals for the first time what the Obama brain trust really thought about the agonizingly long wait for Romney’s official concession—and what happened after Obama put the telephone to his ear and heard the words “Hello, Mr. President, it’s Mitt Romney.” No one could have predicted all the twists and turns of the 2012 election—and no one was better equipped to chronicle them than the POLITICO team. The End of the Line is frontline campaign reporting at its finest, meticulously reported and compulsively readable.