Election 2004: How Bush Won and What You Can Expect in the Future

by Evan Thomas, Eleanor Clift, Jonathan Darman

A full year before the presidential election, four Newsweek reporters are detached from the magazine to work fulltime on getting inside the campaigns of the Republican and Democratic candidates. Because Newsweek promises not to reveal any information until after the votes are cast, the reporters receive highly unusual access. They travel with the candidates, live at their headquarters, befriend their staffs. They blend into the background, where they watch and listen. Evan Thomas has been the writer for this project for the last three elections, and each time, he has brilliantly woven together an award-winning narrative of the campaign,based on the reporting of the Newsweek team. The goal is a rich narrative, a telling, human, and personal story of the extraordinary ordeal of running for the presidency. The characters are the candidates, their families, and their top advisers. They battle uncertainty, exhaustion, a hostile media, and each other in a high-stakes contest that can produce only one winner. The 2004 election promised to be drama of a high order, a close, tense, bitter struggle in a deeply divided country caught in a strange and hard war. Newsweek's reporters were there at the critical moments, recording the scenes that decided the outcome. Post election, the Newsweek team will now produce an expanded version of the stories that appeared in the magazine and Thomas will write an essay on the new administration, its key players and its prospects, the tone and direction it is expected to set. The book that emerges will be a first draft of history—not rough—but knowing and deeply reported.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 4, 2005

About the author

Evan Thomas is the author of nine books: The Wise Men (with Walter Isaacson), The Man to See, The Very Best Men, Robert Kennedy, John Paul Jones, Sea of Thunder, The War Lovers, Ike’s Bluff, and Being Nixon. Thomas was a writer, correspondent, and editor for thirty-three years at Time and Newsweek, including ten years (1986–96) as Washington bureau chief at Newsweek, where, at the time of his retirement in 2010, he was editor at large. He wrote more than one hundred cover stories and in 1999 won a National Magazine Award. He wrote Newsweek’s fifty-thousand-word election specials in 1996, 2000, 2004 (winner of a National Magazine Award), and 2008. He has appeared on many TV and radio talk shows, including Meet the Press and The Colbert Report, and has been a guest on PBS’s Charlie Rose more than forty times. The author of dozens of book reviews for The New York Times and The Washington Post, Thomas has taught writing and journalism at Harvard and Princeton, where, from 2007 to 2014, he was Ferris Professor of Journalism.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was an okay read, but quickly put together with not much depth or novel perspectives on the campaign.

[Emiliano Orencia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really encapsulates how and why Republicans win and Dems lose in elections of recent times but hopefully not in the long-term. This book is an "inside baseball" look at the 2004 Election and you'll fly right through it.

[Robert Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good.