It's been exactly four weeks since Game Change: Obama and the Clinton, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime was published. Co-written by New York magazine writer John Heilemann and Time magazine's Mark Halperin, it's become an instant bestseller (currently #1 on the NY Times list) and reviewed in such non-political journals as Entertainment Weekly, so great is its gossip factor.
And it's that gossip factor that has led commentators to blast it for being completely superficial, such as Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald, who wrote last month that
the book is filled with the type of petty, catty, gossipy, trashy sniping that is the staple of sleazy tabloids and reality TV shows, and it has been assembled through anonymous gossip, accountability-free attributions, and contrived melodramatic dialogue masquerading as "reporting."
This article appears in Feb 3-9, 2010.