What Went Wrong

November 8, 2012 3:50 PM

I'm in the mood for some good political postmortems. Big races, little races, recent news, ancient history, whatever. Probably U.S. though.

It's pretty early obviously but I'm keeping up with current news on the recent election. These are the kinds of articles I like and the impetus for this question (but longer or more detailed is better): How the Secret Service Said Goodbye to Mitt Romney in GQ, and How a Race in the Balance Went to Obama in the New York Times.

On the 2008 election I watched the movie Game Change (but haven't read the book) and I read the 8 part Newsweek election overview for that race (which I guess is no longer available online). I'm usually pretty good about following traditional news sources but tend to miss long format pieces in literary magazines, etc. and books.

I'm guessing there's a lot of good writing I'm missing from down ballot races and older elections.

posted by 2bucksplus to Law & Government (6 answers total)

Best answer: The Speech. When Barack Obama launched into his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he was still an obscure state senator from Illinois. By the time he finished 17 minutes later, he had captured the nation’s attention and opened the way for a run at the presidency. A behind-the-scenes look at the politicking, plotting, and preparation that went into Obama’s breakthrough moment
posted by stopgap at 4:27 PM on November 8, 2012 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I read Game Change and saw the movie. The book has so much more material. Also, The War Room?
posted by kat518 at 6:51 PM on November 8, 2012

Echoing Game Change. Great book.
posted by salvia at 7:17 PM on November 8, 2012

Best answer: Governing Magazine's election page aggregates links to writings from various sources (mostly mainstream news media) on diverse election topics, ranging from a story from the Newark Star Ledger on a ballot question regarding judges' pension benefits to a story from the WSJ about how this election illustrated a "deep divide across the country over how to run public schools".
posted by gubenuj at 10:38 PM on November 8, 2012 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I really liked this piece about Obama's data team.

Nthing Game Change, the book. So much good dirt!
posted by lunasol at 10:56 PM on November 8, 2012

Best answer: Articles with the Politics tag on Longform.org might be of interest.
posted by RabbleRabble at 12:31 PM on November 9, 2012