Which is where Dan Balz comes in. His brand new book, Collision 2012, is also an insidery account of the 2012 presidential campaign. There are a few eye-opening revelations—the thing that took me most by surprise was the fact that Romney was seriously considering dropping out of the campaign entirely when the Wall Street Journal attacked him as the father of Obamacare—but for the most part, it's a blow-by-blow account of the 2012 campaign, from the crazy-pants Republican primary all the way through November of last year. And Balz is good at what he does, providing extensive postmortem interviews with lots of key figures (Chris Christie is very forthcoming, Mitt Romney still sounds like a stuffed shirt) and summarizing the complex insanity of the race with brevity and clarity.
But you can tell Balz is walking a fine line, here. This book had to come out before the new Game Change title started to dominate the conversation, and so parts of it feel rushed, or fail to bring any new analysis to the story. (For instance, early in the book, Balz accepts the conservative conventional wisdom that the Tea Party was a grassroots phenomenon when it started, when evidence indicates that the "movement" came about through a highly organized media play from right-wing think tanks.) In other places, the book suffers by aiming solely for reenacting recent history. Unless you have a particularly bad memory, this stuff is all still rattling around your brain, and Collision 2012 too often fails to perform the function that a book like this should—illuminating and adding context that wasn't available in the moment. We expect more from a book than just a rehash of everything that happened, especially when the ordeal that the book describes is something that most of us would rather forget.
