Lucky

March 22, 2021
Fortunate breaks allowed Joe Biden to overcome a slow start, uneven stump performances, and shoddy fundraising on his way to the White House, according to this familiar rehash of the 2020 election. Among the fortunate twists of fate, journalists Allen and Parnes (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign) point to a technological glitch that allowed Biden to temporarily hide his disastrous fourth place finish in the Iowa caucuses; Elizabeth Warren’s evisceration of Michael Bloomberg, Biden’s main rival for centrist Democrats, on a Las Vegas debate stage; and Rep. James Clyburn’s unexpectedly emotional endorsement of Biden ahead of the South Carolina primary. But at least one Biden staffer privately admits that the luckiest break was Covid-19, which took the air out of the Democratic primary right after Biden’s Super Tuesday victory and gave him a credible reason to “lay low” while President Trump bungled the response to the pandemic. Allen and Parnes shed light on President Obama’s doubts that Biden could win, and reveal that Hillary Clinton gave “serious consideration” to entering the race in November 2019. But much of the analysis will be old hat to news junkies, and attempts to add color (Bernie Sanders played catch with his advisors; Jill Biden sipped “fine wine”) mostly fall flat. The result is a well-sourced yet unenlightening run-through of recent history.

April 1, 2021
A probing history of the 2020 presidential race. Building on Shattered, their excellent account of Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 campaign, Allen and Parnes attribute much of the success of the Biden campaign to a combination of fortuitous events. In some ways, Biden was a weaker candidate than Clinton, as his age, demeanor, and tendency to make faux pas statements weighed against him. Though the race was tighter than any Democratic campaigner would have liked, Biden's opponent was Donald Trump, whose character flaws and scandal-plagued administration far surpassed any of Biden's shortcomings. For instance, though Trump was advised countless times to attempt to show empathy for the victims of the pandemic, which he repeatedly called a hoax, he refused to do so for fear of appearing weak. Trump also believed that "there were millions of Trumpsters out there who just hadn't voted for him yet." He may have had a point, but Biden still beat him by 7 million votes. Biden's good fortune also owed to the failings of those who faced him in the primary, and, as the authors clearly show, it was the result of significant effort on the parts of Black organizers and voters, particularly Stacey Abrams, who emerges here as a superbly effective political savant who withheld her endorsement of Biden until it was clear that he would be the candidate. Other news in these pages: Though Barack Obama proclaimed Biden as his brother, the authors write that he "had worried that his friend would embarrass himself on the campaign trail" and didn't call to congratulate him until the networks finally declared the election on Nov. 7. In the end, in 2020, Biden "caught every imaginable break." As one staffer noted, "if President Trump had just acknowledged there was a virus, even midway in August or September, acknowledged this is a fucked-up situation, and pivoted, we would have gotten crushed." A must-read for politics junkies, with plenty of lessons on how not to run a campaign.

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April 9, 2021

Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election was contested by Republicans.Journalists Allen (NBC News) and Parnes (The Hill) believe it was thanks to a series of lucky breaks along the way that Biden won at all. This behind-the-scenes report of the Biden campaign, from the earliest days through election night, explores the campaign's strategies, the primary election contests, and the general election confusion created in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors maintain that glitches in CNN polling before the Iowa caucuses and technical problems in reporting caucus results were Biden's first lucky break because they took the spotlight off his fourth-place finish in Iowa. Later, a pivotal late endorsement enabled Biden to win the crucial South Carolina primary, and set him up for a near-sweep on Super Tuesday to help him secure the Democratic nomination. The book also has an intriguing account of Biden's choice of former California senator Kamala Harris as his running mate. Allen and Parnes thoroughly document the interviews, broadcast and print articles, and anecdotal evidence they use to tell the story of Biden's election. VERDICT Readers who enjoy political coverage of the election process and want to know more about Joe Biden's campaign will be well informed by this book.--Jill Ortner, SUNY Buffalo Libs.

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