Reviews for Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective

The average rating for Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-11-08 00:00:00 Bridget Thomas In The Audacity to Win, David Plouffe says of the boss he got to know so well during two years of campaigning together, "He is a chess player in a town full of checkers players." An idealist, a courageous man with a brilliant and innovative mind, Barack Obama tends to surround himself with people of like attitudes and aptitudes. That Plouffe himself is such a man is evident in this book, which is analytical but clear, high-minded but very human. Himself a chess player, Plouffe provides a fascinating insider's look at how the the two historic matches against Hillary Clinton and John McCain played out the way they did. Those who followed the campaign closely may find Plouffe's book both enlightening and nostalgic. For those still unfamiliar with the principles and goals of our current president, the book should provide a reassuring look into the heart of the man and the kind of organizations he builds. For anyone sick and tired of the constant media chatter about Palin, Beck, and the hysteria surrounding the Tea Party movement, the book offers a calm, intelligent respite. "The president believes deeply that the American people want to have an honest and complex dialogue about the direction of the country," says Plouffe. I hope the president is right. If so, this book is a valuable contribution to the national discourse.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-10-10 00:00:00 James Fox 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."