The Mugging of Black America Book

Erm.... there are people who are really outstanding at running a groundbreaking, thrilling, smart, and decent campaign that ends up bringing to power a history-making, thoughtful, effective, and supercute candidate (and for these people I for one am so so thankful). However, the skill set needed to run a campaign, a task which sounds almost legendarily complicated and boring, is not the skill set needed to talk about it in an interesting manner. Plouffe's writing is exceptionally dull (as many loyal Dems may remember from his bazillion emails), even when he's giving us dirt, which is rarely. If he'd recruited one of Obama's speechwriters (or better yet Obama, in his copious spare time) to do the actual writing, this might actually have been an interesting account of how a new kind of campaign was built from scratch and on the fly. However, the liveliest moments of the first 50-odd pages came from Plouffe's habit of using the shorthand "MyBO" for my.barackobama.com, the campaign's social networking site, leading to some AMAZING sentences, a la "My BO affected countless numbers of potential volunteers."