The Candidate: What it Takes to Win - and Hold - the White House [Versión Kindle]

In an election year, everyone wants to have insight into which candidate is likely to succeed so they can be the one to predict the election. Invariably, every year pundits of all political stripes make predictions before the election, and when proven wrong afterwards, proclaim that the results were "obvious". Popkin's book serves this role from his insightful position as an adviser to Carter, McGovern, Clinton, and Gore. Despite the fact he is obviously a Democrat, the book is not a political analysis of one party versus another but rather a discussion on the nature of the political process itself.

In my mind, Popkin does not really tell you what it takes to win the White House, but more what it takes to lose the White House. To borrow a phrase from Anna Karenina, successful campaigns are all alike; every failed campaign fails in its own way. Through examining the failed campaigns of Carter, George HW Bush, Gore, and Hillary Clinton, he finds that each had their own failings and reason that they were not successful campaigners. Popkin leads us to his conclusion that should be eminently obvious - we tend to vote for the person who is the best campaigner, not the person we think will govern the best. Hillary was obviously infinitely more qualified than a freshman senator without any accomplishments of his own, but she was a worse campaigner as Popkin explains in intricate detail.

While the book is a good history, it fails in the title to explain exactly what it takes to "win and hold" the White House. It's an election year, yet I cannot look at either the Obama or Romney campaigns and proclaim I know how it will end based on Popkin's insights. In fact, Popkin reminds me of the book Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer. He analyzes why Gore lost, but had 300 people in Florida voted differently, he'd be analyzing why Bush lost. It seems hard to make sweeping generalizations on one man's failure based on a few hundred votes in a single state.

If Romney wins, Popkin's next book can discuss how it was obvious Obama would lose. If Obama wins, it will be equally obvious that Romney could never win. Either way, there will be facts that can be spun after the fact to explain why the outcome was so clear.

The history in this book was fascinating, but the conclusions are a little broadly stated. It seems the most important thing is to have the candidate stay out of day-to-day operations and leave it to professionals. Indeed, Popkin details how Obama basically acted out the campaign that Axelrod and Plouffe put together. Hillary tried to run her own campaign and failed miserably. But these professionals can't have their own aspirations of grandeur, or he says they will sink the candidate like Sununu (and although he doesn't mention it, Schmidt in 2008). I recommend you read the book to gain insight into history you won't find elsewhere, but don't expect to come out of it knowing exactly how a person goes about winning a presidential campaign.

Another political winner that is objective and not partisan.

I can't get enough of these books that explain politics without pandering, name-calling or are extremely biased.

Samuel Popkin takes us through the definitions of U.S. President candidates and how the winners win while the supposed winner loses. You won't get the party-line or the typical, "here's how that scumbag tricked us" lines you expect in political books.

The first part is abstract in just the terms while sporadically bringing in real-life examples of past candidates. He explains the different types of campaigns a candidate can run. There are only so many to choose: Challenger, Incumbant. Experience/Stability, Outsider/Reformer It's the latter part of the book that is truly excellent.

Popkin explores President George H.W. Bush's messed up re-election candidacy, Hillary Clinton's micromanaged "inevitable" campaign, and Al Gore's complete meltdown.

You'll read how George W. Bush was able to beat the successor during a time of peace and wealth; how Rudy Giuliani was the winner in all the polls until he actually started running and how a number of other candidates just could not connect, or hold on to their mojo. You'll even get to see how President Obama used the new media and bottom-up mentality to throw off Hillary Clinton's dreamteam.

In the end, Popkin points to Ronald Reagan in order to teach future candidates how to handle miscues, mistakes and misfires.

A fantastic read during this Presidential cycle.

I picked up this book because I am a political junkie, and interested in the process of becoming a President in our country. Throughout history some of the best candidates have sputtered and failed, while other lesser candidates have come along and won the White House to the surprise of many of the pundits. The book overviews some of the most memorable recent campaigns for the White House and how they either succeeded or failed to achieve the White House.

I found the book easy to read, and engaging. It was sort of like pulling back the curtain on the races that we watched from the outside on TV. The behin the scenes views of what was really going on in the campaigns was engaging and interesting and provided both context and reasons for the success or failures of different candidates.

While hindsight is 20/20 the author points out some characteristics of sucessful campaigns, and some of the pitfalls that candidates can fall into. I wondered as I read through the book if the candidates themselves were aware of these pitfalls, and could fall into the same traps that others had without realizing it.

This is a great read for anyone who is interested in the political process, or anyone who wants to go behind the scenes of some of the most recent elections to show what caused the downfall of some of the can't miss candidates in recent years.