Game Change

What struck me about the new tawdry Heilemann-Halperin tome on the 2008 election was not necessarily what was picked up by the media, such as further chronicles of Bill Clinton's tantrums, the Reid "dialect" comment, or the poignantly voyeuristic Edwards spiral into political and personal disaster. This is politics as personal saga.

The book does a very good job of chronicling the relationships among and around the Clintons in a way that few books have yet achieved, although, as may be expected in a book of this nature, the winner -- Obama -- is presented nearly in the best light possible, excepting some moments of hubris. The book chronicles the Democratic nomination race grandly, but to the near exclusion of the Republican nomination race and to the extreme de-emphasis of the general election. I learned significantly nothing new about Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and very little about John McCain; certainly nothing to provide a window into the 2012 nomination fight. I also learned significantly little about the Bush administration's final year in power or even its view on the unfolding of the various events of the 2008 campaign. The Palin anecdotes have largely already flown through public discourse -- many flagged by Palin herself in her own book.

Two scenes, not covered by the initial media reviews, stand out.

The first is a window into that terribly lonely and exclusive club of ex-presidents:

Some days later, Bill received a phone call from George W. Bush. The current and former presidents spoke more often than almost anyone knew; from time to time, when 43 was bored, he would call 42 to chew the fat. In this case, Bush, tucked away at Camp David... wanted to reassure his predecessor that HE didn't think Clinton was a racist.

The irony of the situation tickled Bush, but he also felt sympathy for Bill. Hey, buddy, Bush said, I know you're coming under attack; you just gotta keep your chin up. Clinton thanked Bush - then treated him to a 15-minute tirade about the injustices that had befallen him and the sources of his suffering.

The second is the September 2008 meeting, called by Senator McCain upon the "suspension" of his campaign to return to Washington to hammer out a deal with respect to the bailout, then vigorously opposed by House Republicans. During the meeting, a laconic Bush deferred to Hank Paulson (the Bush sources refer to him as their David Petraeus on the economy), the Democrats deferred to Obama, and McCain sat almost completely silent as Obama took over:

One Republican in the room mused silently, "If you closed your eyes and changed everyone's voices, you would have thought Obama was the president of the United States."

At one point, Obama is even said to have told Paulson point-blank, "I'm going to be president, and I don't want to inherit a financial system that's collapsed."

Amusingly, Ben Bernanke and Paulson are reportedly "flabbergasted" as McCain tries to draw a comparison between the financial panic and some recent management troubles at Home Depot.

Altogether, it's an engaging campaign wrap, but nowhere near the iconic Making of the President by Ted White (1960 election), the exhaustive What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer (1988 election), Hunter Thompson's hilariously wild Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1972 election) or the split-screen autobiographical All's Fair: Love, War and Running for President by James Carville and Mary Matalin (1992 election).

Dare I say this takes its place alongside Michael Lewis's eccentrically delightful -- and certainly less well-known that that other Lewis book -- Losers (1996 election) and its fixation on the ill-fated Republican nomination fight waged by businessman Morry Taylor.

Chile Turns Rightward

It is striking to consider that the 20-year reign of the center-left Concertación in Chile lasted longer than the 17-year regime of Augusto Pinochet, given that one of the key tasks of the past 20 years in Chilean public life has been to put to rest the ghosts and demons of the Pinochet era.

After defeating former president (and son of yet another former president) Eduardo Frei in today's election, Sebastián Piñera will take the reins of government as the first center-right president of Chile since the fall of the Pinochet regime and as the first duly-elected president of the center-right since Jorge Allesandri in 1958.

Remarkably, in a fact pattern that looks to repeat itself later this year in Brazil, a moderate leftist -- in Chile, Michelle Bachelet -- left office with high popularity but remained unable to carry a successor to victory. In many ways, Bachelet's popularity is somewhat of a second act in itself, coming after a horrible first year that saw the trashing of Chile's education system and of Transantiago, the public transit project in Santiago, the Chilean capital.

Presidents may not run for reelection in Chile (but can run after an interval out of office, as Frei did). It is certain that Bachelet may yet have another act in Chilean politics if she wants it.

Meanwhile, Chile has weathered the global economic crisis as well as any other nation, is generally regarded as the most dependable and stable of Latin America's economies, has escaped the boom-and-bust trap, given its dependence on commodities, especially copper, and has been fiscally prudent over the past two decades. Chile is is poised to benefit from good relations with the U.S., China and Brazil, and is set, this month, to become the first South American nation to join the OECD (although the real mystery may perhaps be why it took so long).

Piñera's campaign - LGBT-friendly and otherwise inclusive, remained socially progressive in a country where abortion is still illegal, pledged commitment to the social framework established by two decades of the Concertación and took pains to show that his election would not mark a return to the demons of the Pinochet era.

Elements with ties to the Pinochet era remain part of the Chilean right and in the Chilean aristocracy, as vividly portrayed in Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits, but if Piñera has even a mediocre term as president, he will nonetheless have successfully pushed Chile into a true two-party democracy.