The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

A narrative thriller about the battle royale surrounding Barack Obama’s quest for a second term amid widespread joblessness and one of the most poisonous political climates in American history.

In this sequel to his bestselling The Promise, Jonathan Alter digs into the back story of the campaign and Obama’s performance as president. This is the most penetrating account of how Obama won the election and how he confronted the implacable forces arrayed against him—a sluggish economy, vicious partisan opposition, his own failures as a politician and communicator.

The book brings to life today’s climactic clash over the fate of the middle class and the future of the American Dream. On the ground and in the air, the 2012 election pitted Obama’s still-formidable citizens’ army versus Mitt Romney’s Super PAC moneyed elite.

Alter takes readers deep inside Obama’s Chicago headquarters and Romney’s Boston-based campaign, as the candidates battle over jobs, their records, and who is more out of touch.

Alter explains why the 2012 election will be long remembered as a pivotal contest. At stake, he writes, is not just the presidency but the role of government and our definition of what we owe each other.

Obama has always believed he could hit the three-point shot at the buzzer. Alter takes us on the court with the president as he tries to nail the last big shot of his political career.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, Presidents, Biography, Us Presidents, American History

448 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Jonathan Alter is an award-winning author, political analyst, documentary filmmaker, columnist, television producer and radio host. His new book, published in 2020, is "His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life." He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: “The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies”(2013), “The Promise: President Obama, Year One” (2010) and “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope”(2006), also one of the Times’ “Notable Books” of the year. Since 1996, Alter has been a contributing correspondent and political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. In 2019, he co-produced and co-directed the HBO documentary, “Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists.”
After 28 years as a columnist and senior editor at Newsweek, where he wrote more than 50 cover stories, Alter is now a columnist for the Daily Beast and the co-host, with his wife, Emily Lazar, and their three children, Charlotte Alter, Tommy Alter, and Molly Alter, of “Alter Family Politics,” which airs Thursdays at 10:00 a.m. on RadioAndy on SiriusXM, 102. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the National Headliner Award for his coverage of 9/11, the Gerald Loeb Award, and the Book Award from the New Jersey Council of the Humanities. In 2019, he was one of the inaugural inductees into the New Jersey Journalism Hall of Fame.

A Chicago native, Harvard graduate and resident of Montclair, New Jersey, Alter has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, Esquire, Bloomberg View and other publications. In the 2013-2014 season, he served as an executive producer of “Alpha House,” a 21-episode half-hour political comedy available on Amazon.

Reviews

[Mlg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a must read for the political junkies out there. Alter has incredible access to both the inner workings of the Obama and Romney campaigns. He dishes a lot of interesting tidbits of information about who doesn't like who in the campaigns and how they were structured. OFA (Obama for America) really did an incredible job with their digital and tech savvy campaign. For those who volunteered, there is a lot of information that explains their targeted approach to phone banking, and which doors got knocked on. Alter covers Obama's strengths as well as his weaknesses (selling his programs, not being a great negotiator, etc.). Republicans may not like what he has to say, but he's spot on about their Obama Derangement Syndrome which caused them to be seen as "the stupid party". There is a reason Obama won college educated voters, and it wasn't that they were looking for handouts. After finishing this book, you will feel like you know the President a lot better.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you were a Romney supporter, skip this one ... just walk on by. Alter admits his bias at the outset, though he promises to be factual in his presentations. He's largely successful in that regard, if not completely.

I had thought it'd be more of an overview of the 2012 race; however, as it's about Obama, the Republican primaries as largely ignored, going from pre-race background almost straight into the summer pre-convention period. Some highlights I found particularly interesting were that the age gap between the parties means that Republicans have a rather small pool of savvy young geeks to choose from (Romney's "tech team" turned out to be a net minus for them), as well as the origins of that "47%" video.

Other reviewers have thought the book bogged down at times, and I agree, though not so much that I actually fast-forwarded though those sections. I wasn't sure about Alter's reading his own work, but either he got into the groove as he went along, or I became used to him. By the final chapters I was dreading that it was ending ... and I had thought at first that it would take me a long time to get through an 18-hour audiobook.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well written, thoroughly researched election history of 2012. What is intriguing in retrospect: How close the election felt to internal players. The revolving door of Republican candidates appeared to this reader like a kind of Republican speed dating, the Right knowing they were already, reluctantly, wed to Romney. In short, an arranged marriage that they didn't seem thrilled with, but one the Right couldn't break out of. Also notable and most disturbing is the now historic rise and party legitimization of racist, anti-Obama sentiments coming out of the Right in the form of Donald Trump and others. Five or six years later, these crude comments read as disturbingly reflective of the rise in white-supremacist sympathies now fully -- and then more subtly -- enabled by Republicans. This is an excellent title to better contextualize America's crisis of identity now.

[Douglas Graney · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a valuable book. It's both a history of the last two years of Obama's first term and a history of the 2012 presidential election.

The chapter on voter suppression should make Republicans embarassed.

This is not however, a love-letter to Obama. The chapters on his communications skills (or lack thereof) and his dismissive character trait are disconcerting.

If you like reading recent history, pick up this book. Jonathan Alter follows in the path of Teddy White and Jack Germond/Jules Witcover in his reporting.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one's a good read for the political junkie. Alter dissects the 2012 political campaign the detail. He's clearly an Obama fan, but he reports on the inner workings of both campaigns in a pretty objective fashion. He's particularly good on the contrast between the Obama and Romney "ground games" - the use of data and technology and door-to-door follow-up on their findings. His demographic analysis, while not new given post-election reporting, is also detailed and interesting.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

The anecdote that has stayed with me from Alter's THE PROMISE--which I read and reviewed three years ago--was a quote from Barack Obama to the effect that he'd be damned to see Mitt Romney become president in 2013 and take credit for the recovery after he'd had to do all the dirty work back in 2009-10. So of course I wanted to read Alter's account of how Obama and his team prevented that very scenario from playing out. Like the earlier work, this one teeters on the edge of being an insta-book, a format of which I'm instinctively skeptical, and I'd say at least on some counts this one is less successful than THE PROMISE in offering genuinely new insights into events from the past two years. In particular, I read very little here about the latter months of the reelection campaign that I hadn't encountered previously, and Alter didn't offer any convincing new evidence that this was in fact the most important election of our lifetimes, a claim he admits is made of nearly every election. The best material concerned the earlier part of the period covered, including the most coherent account I've seen of the debt ceiling crisis and some fascinating details about the inner workings of the Obama campaign (particularly regarding "the Cave" and the analytics experts). But this pattern is not surprising, since Alter had plenty of time to research and write these pieces without the pressure to push the book out the door ahead of several others on the 2012 election due out later in 2013. I doubt this will be the definitive account of that election, but it's a good overview of the second half of Obama's first term.

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good bit of this is a retread. If you kept track of the 2012 election, or the course of US politics after the 2010 election, you will see a lot you already know. However, it does give some interesting details of the inside of the Obama and Romney campaigns. Granted, the author is biased toward Obama, but it is clear that the Obama campaign was even better organized and effective than it seemed at the time, while the Romney campaign was even more of a clumsy mess. The details of how the Obama campaign won gives one a good sense of how elections will be fought in the years to come, and that alone makes this a valuable book that is worth a person's while.

[Bonnie Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read The Promise and was looking forward to a follow-up effort after Obama's first term was over. This volume fills the bill. It's written in a narrative style that's easy to read and hits all the highlights of Obama's re-election campaign. It's really a nice contrast to all the anti-Obama books that fill the shelves. Re-visiting all the events of the 2012 election cycle, we really see how the highly organized, data-driven Obama campaign contrasted with the slap-dash Romney version and how this made all the difference to the final result.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read. As painful as it was reliving some of Obama's missteps, it was even scarier to be reminded what it would have been like if Romney had won.

[Justin Tapp · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want an extremely detailed account of the 2012 Presidential election, including the context of political news from 2011, from the slight slant of an Obama supporter, this is your book. I tackled this book after David Axelrod's Believer, so this review should be read in the context of the review of both books. This book offers more details than Axelrod's highly-praised work; it's hard to believe his book was about the same period and campaign at times. (I am an American who lived overseas for the entirety of 2012 and was pretty disengaged from the campaign.)

Part 1: 2010-early 2011
Alter begins in 2010, with the Tea Party putting Congress in conservative hands and derailing the Obama agenda. His purpose is to show the last two years of Obama's first term including the epic campaign. "History has a point of view," he writes and his is from the Left. I suppose this book repeats much of his 2010 book The Promise, which I have not read. With these books, it is hard to tell what is actual detective-style reporting (interviewing people and getting inside sources) and what is just painstakingly compiling every major news story, article, and media interview over the course of two years. As such, this deadpan NY Times review from 2013 is probably worth reading over my own if you want the gist of the book.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/boo...

One political interest of Alter's is the campaign of Republican-led governments in various states to gerrymander districts and pass more restrictve voter ID laws, ostensibly to ensure victory in the 2012 election. Alter quotes one estimate that efforts could possibly have "subtracted five million votes nationwide," enough to have an electoral college impact. Alter revisits these laws and their court challenges throughout the book, including the final critical days of 2012. That is one particularly useful aspect of this book. Ohio is a particularly critical battleground for voter suppression. States pass laws that make it harder for voter registration groups to exist, massive (possibly unconstitutional) penalties for consequences if a voter they registered later commits fraud, unconstitutional laws forbidding taking groups of people to polls, etc. In many cases, courts overtuned the restrictions, polls were allowed to remain open during early voting periods in which there were long lines, etc. But this was still a great concern in the post-2012 era. Alter points out that many of the efforts actually hurt Republican voters more than Democratic. White elderly people in Pennsylvania suburbs were just as unlikely to have drivers licenses or other ID as an inner-city minority might.

While the Left blames the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision as a threat to democracy, Alter points out that the decision did not actually change much (and I would add that elections since have illustrated that the amount of money spent on a campaign does not correlate well with outcome.) Super PACs were already legal. Other legal tools for partisans just grew as people worked the system, even without a Citizens United case. Advertising dollars for cable news outlets and websites already mattered as much as any corporate donation. For example, Alter writes that an angry Steve Jobs personally ordered the company that handles their advertising placement to remove all ads from Fox News "immediately," over the course of a weekend and other advertisers followed suit as Sean Hannity and other Fox hosts pushed right-wing myths on-air. Networks' decisions of what news to show and what headlines to promote are driven by advertising dollars. (Jobs' decision came to mind when Kelloggs pulled advertising from Fox News in 2016 and got a Breitbart-led boycott movement).

Alter gives a pretty fair analysis of the roots and forms of psychology of the Tea Party movement. He rightly compares it to the same loosely-affiliated, internet-connected movement that helped raise money and bring Obama to power. The message was roughly the same: "We're angry at the government and we want change!" While the Left liked to cry "astroturf," some of it was truly grass roots. Voter dissafection in 2010 was similar to that of 2008 (and repeated again in 2016).

The point of interest most directly relevant to the 2016 race is the growth of "Obama derangement syndrome." Donald Trump makes appearances in the book spreading theories about Obama's birth certificate, and taking full credit when it is completely released. Alter points out all the stories that floated in the 2010-2012 period: A large number of Republican voters believe that Obama was born in Kenya, that neither of his parents were Americans, that he's a Communist, part of a left-wing plot, etc. Alter points out passion and rhetoric are not new to American politics. FDR was a "Jewish bloodsucker" in his day. JFK, LBJ were "Commies," Bill Clinton was signing US sovereignty over to the UN, etc. Some voters truly believe that Homeland Security was stockpiling enough ammo to kill Americans in mass gun-confiscation efforts under Obama. By the time you get through the "clown car" of the GOP primary, the seeds of the "post-truth election" of 2016 are sown. Alter is fair in pointing out that much of the criticism was not racist, but the "birther" movement had unmistakeable overtones (that would echo into 2016).

The 2010-2011 period of Obama failing to negotiate with House Republicans is interesting. While GOP loyalists scoff at the notion even today, Obama saw himself as a centrist and constantly returned to what he believed got him elected in 2008-- being a candidate that was above and against the partisan gridlock in Washington. (I remember the liberal critique of Obama around this period from leftish wonks like Paul Krugman was that he should have used the same no-holds-barred approach that Republicans don't hesitate to use when they're in charge, rather than try to negotiate and compromise with them.) In 2011, Obama proposed "centrist" packages that were too unpopular to be tried: an infrastructure package "to help the middle class," more housing relief, etc. Obama's faith in maintaining centrist unity and working for bipartisan cooperation was held to his detriment, David Axelrod's memoir also leans toward this. As I write this in December 2016, Obama maintains that he could have beaten Trump by maintaining the broad unified American appeal that won 2012, and Ta-Nehisi Coates has written an article on Obama's misplaced faith in the optimistic, centrist nature of the American electorate.

Obama's Simpson-Bowles commission on tax reform is illustrative of Obama's faith in centrist policy and also his shortcomings as a politician:
The original bipartisan commission was designed to draft legislation that would balance the budget in the long-term and be subject to a yea/nay vote in Congress. But several Republican Senators who publicly endorsed creation of the commission later voted against its creation ine arly 2010. President Obama then created it by executive order, which would not require Congress to do anything. There were public meetings through 2010 and a bipartisan mixture of proposals, but as the midterm election approached pressure on Republicans got more conservative and Commission members like Paul Ryan would not support it. Grover Norquist's groups' pledge to never raise taxes, that Republicans sign to get a major endorsement and money, holds many in its grips to the frustration of many. Simpson-Bowles included some ideas that are criticized on the Left, like lowering corporate tax rates and adjusting the COLA adjustment on entitlements and tax rates by using chained CPI. Obama himself did not campaign loudly for Simpson-Bowles, and Alter reports that after the Commission published its final report in December, after the Tea Party took Congress and swept centrist Republicans from their seats, Obama did not even bother to call Simpson or Bowles to thank them for their work-- a perceived snub apparently not forgotten.

There are many details on the 2010-2011 battles over the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the debt ceiling debacle, Republican "hostage-taking" and the fiscal cliff are relived in detail in this book. Axelrod makes the point better in his memoir-- Reagan had Tip O'Neill to negotiate with, Obama had Boehner and an increasingly-conservative GOP that saw negotiation on any issue as an anathema "compromise." The President's disappointment with the 2010 election comes through clearly as he moves up David Axelrod's departure back to Chicago and basically dismisses other staff like Larry Summers (who Axelrod wrote had been promised to be appointed Fed Chair) as a disappointment. Obama's shakeup included hiring Bill Daley as the new Chief of Staff, over strong objections from Valerie Jarrett. Alter details the Obamas' "cold relationship" with the Daley family in Chicago and how this move was unlikely to work, Daley departed a year later.

Jarrett is an interesting character that Alter spends a few paragraphs criticizing before pointing out her possible virtues. She has a power behind the throne that no one completely understands and is almost universally disliked. The first problem is that having Jarrett at tables on critical policy discussions takes a seat away from experts on that policy. Second, she allegedly says nothing at those meetings, only listens, and then says things to Obama later, and only privately. That infuriates many who dislike not knowing her opinions and her often having the last word on the matter with the President. When corporate CEOs complained that Obama did not understand business and did not have any advisers who had business experience, Obama often points to Jarrett's experience as CEO of the Chicago Habitat Company. Alter notes her experience was limited in time and scope, and either dismisses or downplays her chairmanship of the Chicago Stock Exchange. Her relationship with Obama did not help his own with anyone outside his own family. Jarrett's positives are the fact that she insisted on keeping to his personal schedule, which includes a 6:30pm dinner with his family every night. She was essentially his enforcer and had the ability to remind him where he came from, as did his wife.

Jarrett was part of an inner-circle of Chicago friends that Obama kept close. Alter writes that one of Obama's failings as a politician was his inability to make friends outside that circle, his dislike of picking up a telephone, and flat rejection of the butt-kissing that goes with politics. He lacked the "schmooze gene," as Alter puts it. Republicans used such complaints against him painting him as a partisan uninterested in talking, but many Democrats had the same complaint-- Obama just wouldn't pick up the phone and reach out. It strikes me as admirable that much of this stemmed around Obama's desire for family and personal time with his teenage daughters-- attending their school events and insisting on evening dinners together as a family. (This is part of why Romney's character credentials weren't remarkable to me next to Obama-- we already had a super family man in the White House.) Disturbingly, however, Alter writes that Obama did not communicate at all with some members of his cabinet for YEARS, and never had Bill and Hillary Clinton over for dinner in his first four years. Obama made a few friends in Washington that he regularly played golf with, and he hated mixing politics with golf-- hence rounds with Boehner would be useless. (Alter writes that one round with Clinton ended up making Clinton angry because Obama was beating him and refused to allow mulligans.)
Obama preferred to spend his free time reading, Alter cites his love of novels, and a desire to write a book with Elie Wiesel, who had inspired him in college.

Obama was likewise "allergic" to "soundbyte politics," preferring deep policy discussions to pithy phrases. Many of his "schmoozing" efforts, like spending hours on the phone with people like Olympia Snow on the ACA, who eventually voted "no" turned him off. He hated greasing the wheels of government. This led to an embarrassing moment in December 2010 where Obama and Bill Clinton held a joint press conference, and Obama left early. Clinton proceeded to explain Obama's policies more cogently than Obama could himself and the media was ecstatic. Obama's dislike for soundbyte politics was evident in his first debate with Romney in which he refused to engage in point-scoring and "lost" the debate, causing much consternation and Democratic "bedwetting."

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster soaked up much of the news coverage of mid-2010, and the Obama Administration's determination not to let it be a "Katrina moment" and stay in front of all media coverage diverted efforts that might have been put toward policy, raising funds, or motivating the base for the presidential campaign. Alter bemoans this "wasted time." Alter seems to favor views that the government could have done more economic stimulus and that Obama had settled for a "U-shaped" recovery rather than a V-shaped one. One weakness here was ignoring Obama's delay in appointing members to the Federal Open Market Committee (as well as more Republican hostage-taking here), as the Fed had more to do with the delayed recovery than Obama possibly could have.

--
Part 2: The 2011-2012 Presidential campaign.

The author gives an inside look at the massive analytics machine the Democratic Party had assembled and its wishful thinking. The laboratory featured advanced econometric modeling by a former U of Chicago economics student who recruited a team of 54 people and spent $15 million. The analytics team was like Facebook or Google, you had to pass a complex 4-hour exam and be willing to work 24-hour days. They called their dream product "Narwhal" and basically wanted to connect every social media post and email with a voter ID-- a profile of every person in America's likelihood to vote, donate, volunteer, or share information. The best they were probably able to do on that front was design algorithms to direct advertising. The analytics team had huge data-driven projects that were costly, behind schedule, suffered from many crashes, and not that effective. Eventually, by the end of the campaign the campaign techies had designed a Dashboard that gave people going door-to-door on the ground real-time ability to profile voters, see donation histories, see which volunteer was garnering the most donations, etc. Obama would basically "win" Twitter and Facebook in terms of retweets and shares. The RNC would later try to copy the "Narwhal" project's grand ambition with tragic results.
Here's a Slate piece from 2012 on Narwhal's promise:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_an...

The major weakness the Democrats had in 2012 was similar to 2016--a candidate that was more comfortable talking details of policies than making pithy soundbytes. Alter writes of the Democrats' problem with "jargon filled with programs and policies" whereas Republicans use words that appeal to emotions and stick in the mind of voters: "Death panels," "Obamacare," "Drill Baby Drill," ("Make America Great Again"). Alter retells decision to kill/capture Bin Laden in Pakistan and Obama's stated belief that it was the most important thing he'd done in his first term-- he felt it neutralized the GOP's usually strong foreign policy credentials. While Dick Cheney had said it was an "easy call," Alter notes the Bush Administration made no serious effort to go after him, and Republican Bob Gates had called it one of the "gutsiest decisions" he'd ever seen a President make.

The GOP primary circus is detailed. There was a period where Romney did not look like he'd emerge the winner, and Alter recounts how his chief donors and strategists got things in gear to take the nomination. Alter is highly critical of the "clown car," highlighting times like when all candidates on stage would not agree to even a 10:1 spending-to-tax-hike reduction. One thing I learned was that Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who has backed various GOP candidates is pretty socially liberal. Obama apparently respected John McCain in 2008 as a person more so than he did Mitt Romney, who he saw as simply the 1%. (Axelrod's memoir shows that Axelrod felt even more contempt for Candidate Romney.) Romney's history with Bain Capital Management was easy to turn into to the anti-trade rhetoric that Axelrod favored and his bank accounts in the Cayman Islands made him look like one of the Wall Street bankers that took us into the 2007 financial crisis.

While Obama basically thought it would be an easy-enough ride with the GOP no longer being a "serious party," there was enough Democratic infighting to make it challenging. Some members of the African-American community, like Cornell West, attacked Obama for not doing enough for black people; which led to a stinging public confrontation between West and Obama. George Soros was invited to a meeting of fundraisers and strategists and gave Obama advice on policy, which Obama rebuked with basically "I know policy just fine, thanks." Alter writes that Soros was deeply offended, this was another demonstration of Obama's inability to "schmooze."

The June, 2012 Supreme Court ruling on the ACA may have saved the Obama campaign because it cemented Obama's biggest legislative achievement and gave voters and major corporations the sense that health care reform was here to stay. That health care reform and Medicaid expansion showed up in Romney's worst moment-- the 47% fundraiser speech-- as an entitlement that Americans liked and would not want taken away. Romney's campaign rhetoric of being able to "fix" Obamacare based on his experiment with Romneycare in Massachusetts confused or fell flat. Romney was also too nice a candidate to attack Obama as a Socialist, or appeal to the right-wing conspiracy theories that Trump would use to motivate his base in 2016. Romney's choice of libertarian-leaning and Ayn Rand-influenced Paul Ryan made it easy to characterize the campaign as ultra-conservative. Alter writes that both Romney and Ryan shared a "maker versus taker" mentality that angered the Left, with Ryan characterizing government programs as a safety "hammock" rather than a "net."

Down the stretch, the polling showed it as close and Romney had beaten Obama soundly in the first debate by all accounts. It's interesting in light of the sainthood status given to Nate Silver in 2015-2016, and his (and others') epic failure to both predict Trump's nomination and eventual win, but Silver had basically predicted a close Romney win, and Romney's strategist Stuart Stevens put great faith in that.

Alter chronicles the major events that supposedly doomed the party:
1. The RNC had weaker technology than the DNC. Their attempt to create "Orca" to rival "Narwhal" failed, particularly when their Dashboard crashed nationwide on election day and Republicans were left "flying blind" as to voter turnout, exit polling, etc. For the Narwhal's failures, the DNC still won the technology and social media war handily.

2. Romney's 47% moment. Alter chronicles the life of that video's maker and in hindsight Romney's comments really do look careless. (I'm reminded of Hillary Clinton's leaked speeches about favoring free trade publicly to Wall Street donors and reminding them that she has to take a different stance publicly in the late days of 2016.) Still, Obama missed chances at the second debate to attack Romney on this point.
... to see the rest, read my blog post: http://justintapp.blogspot.com/2017/0...

[JiaJia Jin · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's always nice to take a nostalgic tour of the calmer political days of 2011 - 2012. It's not Alter's fault that many of the declarations on how "the 2012 election is the single most important election" sounds anachronistic now, and the tea party members ridiculed for their absurd policy positions are now considered the relatively reasonable GOP members. The book is propped up by lots of juicy, comical anecdotes; I'm not above enjoying some gossip, but I do wonder how much of these are one-sided speculations vs. verified truth. Highlights include the digital inner workings of the 2012 Obama campaign and the tech / political bro cultural clash.

[Christian]

I read this for the first time in 2021 and it felt dated THEN. Now it's like reading about an alien planet. Which is funny, considering that the base values of the electorate haven't changed all that much since then.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alter gives the reader a brief look at U.S. politics in the year-and-half prior to the 2012 election. This setup is to give the reader context, partially, as to why the election turned out the way it did.

Alter's more detailed account of the election itself is really unbiased; pointing flaws by both Obama and Romney. However, Romney, partially due to a long primary fight, ended up making more gaffes, flip-flops, and amateurish mistakes. On top of that, Romney clearly showed he was out of touch with middle class America. While Romney was caring and empathetic in private, for, whatever reasons, he and his campaign never showed that on the trail.

Romney's running of his campaign more as a business hurt his chances as well. Instead of adopting innovative analytics, like the Obama campaign did in both 2008 and 2012, he greatly hurt his chances of developing messages that resonated with voters. But his 47 percent remark did show a darker side to the man. The man responsible for shooting the video, Prouty, remembered how Romney was amazed at how, during the same speech Romney made the 47 percent remark, a fence was designed to keep people on the outside from coming into a sweatshop in China. Prouty remembered how Romney showed no sadness or empathy and was willing to pan to the Republican base after wrapping up the nomination instead of continuing to run a centrist campaign like he usually did during the primaries.

Obama made mistakes along the way, too. Obama was slow at making certain decisions at critical points in the campaign, which tended to hurt him at particular moments. Not to mention, in his first two years in office, he was so focused on learning the political game inside D.C. that he completely forgot that his greatest asset was the American people. When pushing Obamacare through, he regrets not stump-speeching more on the issue and this, unfortunately, led to Republicans spinning Obamacare successfully as "death panels."

Obama wasn't into schmoozing in the political arena either. He preferred to govern and get things done. Sadly, this led to many people, who were used to presidents schmoozing as part of their job, believing Obama to be arrogant and out of touch. This developed some heated, and in some cases broken, relationships Obama had created during his initial run for president in 2008. Obama was no fan of Romney either. In fact, he despised him. Obama thought Romney to be an empty suit who was out of touch with the poor and middle class and had a lot handed to him in life; to which there is a lot of truth in.

Obama admits to his first debate as being, not only his fault, but a complete failure. While he hated debates, he made sure he got his punches in the final two and took a couple of big ones at Romney in the final debate.

"The Center Holds" is a wonderful book that does a wonderful job at painting both candidates, and campaigns, in a humanizing and unbiased way. For those who love politics, and want to know a little bit more about the inner workings of the 2012 election, this book is worth your time!

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A detailed look into Obama's 2012 reelection campaign. Includes some details I hadn't seen reported elsewhere. For example, there's an entire chapter about Valerie Jarrett's sway in Obama's White House and the pernicious effects of Jarrett's personal relationship with the Obamas. Bottom line is that the book picks up steam after a boring, arguably unnecessary, first five or six chapters.

[Rajesh Kurup · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book about that tracks Obama's challenges heading into the 2010 mid-term election and partial recovery leading into the 2012 presidential election. Alter is team Obama and takes the opportunity to put blame- where deserved- onto the Tea Party and the Republican party whenever he can. He also makes it clear that while during many presidential races, the talking heads claim that each race has a generational, long-lasting effect, the 2012 race actually did.

For me the most memorable part of the book details Obama's disinterest or inability to shmooze his allies. I've heard the pundits discuss how such a great campaigner is such a lousy politician. Alter also lays out how his desire to keep out the trappings of the Beltway left him at a disadvantage in governing. By keeping himself removed from the politicians, he failed to keep his ear to the ground during tense negotiations and sometimes lost the plot, as it were.

For a guy that is as brilliant and as in touch with the policy details as he is, it's a bit befuddling that he lets other handle the important details. It's surprising that with the lessons of 2010 behind him, that he repeated some of those mistakes in the health care roll-out.

In the lead-up to the election, Obama stated that he'll be damned if he put all this work and effort into the health care reform and stimulus in order to build a bridge to the future to have Romney then win and take credit for the recovery. Alter does persuasively argue that this election was a game changer. Had Obama lost, many of his policy changes could have been reversed and we could have seen extended Republican gains. By winning, he's able to cement those policy changes and start working on new initiatives such as the growing income inequality.

All in all, I'd recommend this book to those interested in current politics.

[Libby · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh, Jonathan Alter. I know you’re a good writer, truly, I do. But what happened here?

I guess this book was a fun walk down "Campaign Memory Lane.” Sort of. Anyone that has worked his/her butt off to elect a winning political candidate will appreciate the joy of reading a book about what transpired as a result of all those many hours and hard efforts.

But … WTF? This particular book was a hodge podge of thrown together tidbits about the 2012 election. I didn’t personally have “insider info” but, truly, I could have written a better book. Yes, the Romney Campaign was a hot mess. Yes, the Obama Campaign was a well oiled machine. But, um, what is the story here exactly?

Alter disappointed me so much in this book. I’ve always loved his insights, but they were lost here. It seemed like a cheap shot. And where the hell was his editor? Talk about a HOT MESS!!!

The only chapter truly worth reading is the one about “Obama Derangement Syndrome.” That was spot on. Wondering why your GOP neighbor sees a socialist when you see barely a moderate? Wondering why the conservative mainstream press sees a guy that “hates this country” when you see a man working hard to make it better for all of us? Wondering why that somewhat boring, yet intelligently thoughtful man running our country is considered an infidel, an other, likened to Hitler? Well, my friends, it’s Obama Derangement Syndrome. It’s a sickness. Truly.

I generally love reading post-campaign books, but this one was an overall disappointment. If you want a good one, I highly recommend David Plouffe’s “The Audacity To Win,” chronicling the 2008 campaign. Now that’s a walk down memory lane that will ROCK. YOUR. WORLD. Because … Yes We Did!

[Nicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

After a somewhat slow start, I really got into this book. It was fun reliving the 2012 election that is in recent memory, with the special gift of hindsight and neat organization into well-themed chapters. Alter contrasts the Romney and Obama campaigns in an educated and well-researched yet entertaining way. The further I read, the more I wanted to keep reading. I found myself near the edge of my seat at times, even though I know how the election turned out. (Obviously, I'm happy with how it turned out, or I would have been dreading turning the pages and slumped into my seat instead of at the edge of it.)

My complaints are pretty minor, mostly about editing. At times the book was repetitive, using nearly exactly the same phrases in different chapters. I counted five times that Alter quoted someone and then said that the person was "only half joking." Seriously, Alter, you think you have the insight into the mind of that many people? There was also a period in a place where there should have been a comma, and a place where a footnote was given and the exact same statement was made in parentheses. (Somebody couldn't decide, so they put both to figure it out later and it looks like later never came.) Truly, I don't know how a book gets published like that.

Minor complaints aside, this was an entertaining read, although I think it may be less so if you were (or are) in the Romney camp. Alter does not try to hide his strong liberal leanings, but (mostly) backs up his facts in a relatively thorough "Notes" section and discloses his MSNBC connection in the section about the author.

[Bookworm · Rating 2 out of 5]

Same quality as his first book In a "sequel" of sorts to his book about President Barack Obama's first term, Alter once again takes a look at Obama's midterms and second election. It serves as a book end in a way, although we are not at the end of Obama's second term as of this review.
 
This time, though, we are not looking at a challenger fresh from a historical win. But rather an incumbent who is now fighting to keep his job and fighting to tell the people of the United States why he should be re-elected again. Alter follows most of the same format as his first book--a mostly chronological retelling with occasional chapters and sections dedicated to themes or people.
 
Much of this is familiar to readers if they've read the newspaper and kept up with the news. However, as in the first book, Alter makes no secret of his liberal leanings. And again, it's not bad to know but it colors his writing very much. Alter also isn't a very good writer--maybe he is successful as a journalist but gosh this text was boring.
 
As a retelling of the time up to the election it isn't too bad, but I would guess there are other, better books out there. Borrow from the library if you're curious.
 
 

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am enjoying this book but I have to confess I have skipped over substantial chunks. The book is organized into relatively short chapters which made it easier to skip the parts I'm not interested in. Don't need to read a whole bunch about the history of Fox News. Ditto Roger Ailes. I haven't gotten to the part about the 47% flap yet.

OK now I'm done and can recommend it as a worthwhile read. As a big Obama supporter it was fun to read of the haplessness of the Romney campaign.

The things I learned included how ineffective the big money super PAC ads were. They tended to reflect the biases of the funders rather than having a message that would get traction with voters.

I also didn't realize how the Republican efforts to supress the votes actually wound up increasing black voter turn-out and may have tipped Florida and Ohio to the President.

I also forgot about some of the silly things that happened toward the end of the campaign.

While I don't consider schadenfreude to be a virtue, it was kind of fun to read how clueless the Romney team was about their prospects, right up to election night. As we all know, the election wasn't even close.

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

How did Obama win reelection despite a weak job recovery, stagnating family income and what was a bad political climate?

Jonathan Alter does, in my view, a pretty good job of summing it all up for us all. He broke down President Obama and Mitt Romney's campaigns and it was a tale of two campaigns. One was organized and did well with a 21st century digital effort that outreached to targeted voters, demographic groups, and got them out to vote. The other was banking on hate -- and for people to view it was 1980 again when in reality, there were several differences to that election.

The story also told a tale as to what the candidates thought of each other, their rivals and how the GOP blew it for themselves by running what was a primary of circus clowns and not real contenders (outside Romney).

A must read for political junkies out there that like good narrative stories about how the election was won, how it was lost and why that was such a surprise to most of the "beltway media."

[Fred Forbes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some may think Alter, as a member of the "mainstream media" incapable of a balanced approach to this overview of the 2012 election but he manages to pull it off. An in depth look at the methods used by "Boston" (Romney) and "Chicago" (Obama) leads to the conclusion that despite Obama lacking the "schmooze gene" necessary to get the big hitters into one's corner ("He's already got two pictures with me, what does he need another one for?") their superior use of data driven technology and the troops on the street made the difference. Evidently voters can tell the difference between ardent volunteers and paid operatives. Interesting analysis of how the "voter suppression" moves (fraud prevention if you are a Republican) backfired, generating an anger and backlash that got more votes into Obama's column. A great book for anyone interested in the political process.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jonathan Alter has authored a number of useful studies, including THE DEFINING MOMENT about the first months of the FDR Presidency and the formulation of the New Deal. That Alter is admittedly a supporter of the Left and admirer of Obama Presidency doesn't prevent him from showing how the internal bickering, deficiencies within the Democratic coalition and in the sometimes shockingly disconnected President nearly led to disaster. This book is an invaluable and exhaustive look behind the scenes at the political battles waged from 2010 through early 2013. Those of us who lived through it and were involved in the battles on either side will find this book to offer an interesting expose of "what was really going on behind the scenes". It was a particularly hard fought, bitterly contested election and Alter captures the shifts in tide and strategy as the days narrowed to the climax.

[Harlan Edmonds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Catnip for politics junkies. Not as novelistic as "Game Change" from 2008, but more detailed and heavily researched. Might be heavy going for the casual reader, but for students of elections it provides a lot of fascinating detail that helps flesh out the reasons that the outcome of the election was so much more decisive than many knowledgeable observers were predicting. The inside story of the incredibly sophisticated, data-driven Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago is worth the price of admission by itself. Also new is the full story of the guy who videotaped the catastrophic "47%" remarks by Mitt Romney at a fundraising gathering. He didn't even consider the "47%" comment the worst of his speech, and the other part is what drove him to make it public. Well worth the time of the reasonably obsessive politics fan.

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good campaign account in the tradition of Teddy White's Making of the President series. Alter clearly favors Obama, but is still willing to call out the president's personal and political flaws. He also pulls no punches in describing the racism behind much of the opposition to Obama. My only criticism is that Alter may be giving the Obama campaign more credit than is due. There's no evidence that their vaunted edge in tech and field work made much of a difference and Obama's victory may better be understood as another example of fundamentals where incumbent presidents with growing economies (even slowly) usually get reelected.

[Vivek · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good account of the forces that shaped the 2012 Presidential election, as well as some of the highlights of the election itself. Much, much, heavier on what the Obama White House and campaign were doing than on the Republicans, with a clear positive bias towards the Democrats.

As someone who works on campaigns, a lot of the things Alter touches upon (such as his great bit about how the Romney campaign viewed IEs) echoed experiences I've had or otherwise found very believable.

Overall I really enjoyed reading this work, as I did Alter's previous work on Obama, "The Promise." Look forward to his next work on contemporary politics.

[Callie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This man is clearly a fan of Obama (as am I) but that made me less trusting of his reporting. Some chapters were fairly absorbing others extremely tedious, so I skimmed them. Still, I got a cute anecdote from reading it. My kids asked me the title since they can identify Obama and I told them it was 'Obama and his enemies'. My five year old son who is really into fighting asked eagerly, "Who are his enemies, mom?" Before I could reply, my seven year old daughter interjected, "his enemies are Mitt Romney and the Pakistans". Ha! Or that could be the name of a 1950s be bop group.

[Abben · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too narrative-based, and many sections where it's not clear whether Alter is reporting from sources or engaging in speculation of an irritatingly general sort. This kind of book has a lot of the same turn-your-brain-to-mush characteristics of modern news and reads in large swaths like election-season cable news banter.

Interesting fact I learned: Sheldon Adelson's donations alone were funding half of the pro-Romney Super-PAC ads "by the end" of the campaign. (There again, "by the end" being an irritatingly vague phrasing leaving it unclear if this is a factual statement).

[Gary Land · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I follow the news regularly and knew about many of the events described in this book, it was helpful to have my scattered memories put into an organized narrative. The background or "inside" information that I knew little about was very interesting and helped give meaning to the more public events. Alter believes that the 1912 election was pivotal, for if Romney had won the social/economic safety net would probably have been unraveled. This is a very interesting book and as "instant history" is a useful read until we have greater historical perspective.

[John Findlay · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first of two books I read about the 2012 Presidential election (Double Down was the other) focused more on the exquisite data machine that the Democrats built to identify voters and target their pitches. I found it fascinating, and concluded that the superiority of the Democrats in polling, data management, and getting out the vote was a prime reason for Obama being able to win the election. By contrast, the Republican polls missed their mark and led to a surprise on election night for Romney and his supporters.

[Chad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book which covered the Obama administration from the 2010 midterm elections through the 2012 election. I was especially interested in the chapters that talked about how Obana's campaign used data to drive its decisions. I also ended up respecting Obama more when reading how he doesn't really enjoy the artificiality of much of politics, be it glad handling donors, debates, sound bites, etc.