Reviews for The real campaign

The average rating for The real campaign based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-05-02 00:00:00 Antoine Zahnd Clever - following the 1980 presidential election the Washington Post leapfrogged the rest of the pack with this first draft of history, not by spitting out some quickie from newsroom hacks but by splitting the work between a half-dozen or so top-shelf political reporters: David Broder, Lou Cannon, etc. I think this made it into print before Reagan's inauguration. There are lots of typos but that only underscores the sense of immediacy ... It's lazy to think that Ronald Reagan neatly overlaps with Donald Trump, but that's not going to keep 873 pundits from doing so between now and Election Day. But there are passages in this book where you can substitute The Donald's name for The Gipper's and they make perfect sense: "To draw the conclusion, however, that Reagan was just a lucky amateur would be all wrong. He understood modern politics perfectly well. His entire career lay outside the realm of the party system; his rise had been through the mechanisms of television and celebrityhood and the direct appeal to voters. He was careful to present himself more clearly than anyone else as the candidate of the disaffected taxpayer." ... Bernie Sanders' candidacy is either a rerun of Ted Kennedy, staying in the race against a long-presumptive nominee in an attempt to wear the front runner down, or could be John Anderson, presenting a third way if voters don't like the binary. That leaves Hillary as Jimmy Carter, and again the text offers a description of the 1980 Democratic nominee that fits the 2016 model: "Sometimes he seemed like Charlie Brown, the hapless hero of the 'Peanuts' comic strip, who was forever being victimized by people and forces less virtuous than himself. At other times, he seemed more like Lucy Van Pelt, the crabby little girl who angrily and defiantly shouted her philosophy of life: 'I love Mankind; it's people I can't stand.'"

Review # 2 was written on 2011-11-02 00:00:00 Eddie Bellemin An interesting account written by a long time foreign relations advisor to both Democratic and Republican administrations. This book details how the Reagan Election Campaign negotiated with Iran, in an act of treason, to undermine the democratically elected Carter Administration for political advantage. The Reagan Campaign's goal was to prevent the Carter Administration from resolving the Iranian Hostage Crisis from being resolved before the November 1980 Election. The deal put together by Casey, Reagan's Campaign Manager, was arms for hostages, and set the stage and provided the model for the Iran-Contra affair five years later. This book gives the reader a good idea on how international relations are conducted "below the radar". I enjoyed the book, although the writing could have been polished a bit more.