Washington Notebook

Call me blasé if you will, but of all the clapped-out forms of instant publishing, I had concluded that the ‘campaign book’ was the most dire.

Call me blasé if you will, but of all the clapped-out forms of instant publishing, I had concluded that the ‘campaign book’ was the most dire. I also generally think that any use of sporting metaphors to describe politics is an infallible sign of an exhausted hack. But Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin is so invigoratingly revealing — in the best and nastiest sense of that word — that it gripped me and held me tight.

Senator John McCain shouts the f-word nine times into his wife’s face in front of the staff, while raising both middle fingers. Senator John Edwards bribes another man to say that he is the father of the Senator’s ‘love child’, while Mrs Edwards shriekingly bares her breast cancer scars in an airport parking lot, crying, ‘Look at me!’ Sarah Palin’s staffers conclude that she is a hopeless nut-job who is at war with the father of her daughter’s out-of-wedlock child. The Clintons, barely on speaking terms, peddle cheap racist smears and yell at the help. Amid all this collapsing scenery of operatic dysfunction, the only family that sets any kind of standard is the one headed by a dignified father with Kenyan ancestry.

The question of where babies come from also remains surprisingly unsettled. The paternity of the off-the-record Edwards bundle — its existence in utero still a secret while the real father was bargaining with Obama for the job of Attorney General — was only fully admitted last month. An astonishing number of well-informed people tell me that Sarah Palin is not in fact the mother of baby Trig, but that she is ‘covering up’ for another family member whose child he really is.