Game Change
Based on Wikipedia: Game Change
The Book That Made Washington Squirm
In the winter of 2010, a book landed on Washington like a grenade with the pin already pulled. Within days of its release, a Senate Majority Leader was apologizing for racist remarks, a former president was denying he'd ever belittled Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin's team was insisting that her own autobiography was the only trustworthy account of what had happened during the 2008 campaign.
The book was Game Change.
Written by political journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, it promised to reveal what actually happened behind the scenes of one of the most consequential presidential elections in American history—the race that put the first Black president in the White House. The subtitle alone was a declaration of ambition: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime.
What made the book so explosive wasn't just what it contained. It was how the authors got their information—and what that approach revealed about the strange, symbiotic relationship between political journalists and the powerful people they cover.
Three Hundred Sources, Zero Names
Heilemann and Halperin conducted interviews with more than three hundred people involved in the 2008 campaign. Campaign managers. Pollsters. Advisers. Family members. Perhaps even the candidates themselves, though the authors never confirmed this directly.
Every single one of these interviews was conducted on what journalists call "deep background." This is a specific arrangement that goes further than the more common "off the record." When a source speaks off the record, they might still be described vaguely—"a senior campaign official" or "someone close to the candidate." Deep background means something more radical: the information can be used, but the source cannot be identified in any way whatsoever. Not even as "a source" or "someone familiar with the matter."
This approach was pioneered by Bob Woodward, the legendary Washington Post reporter who helped break the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. Woodward went on to write a string of bestselling books about various presidential administrations, all based on deep background sourcing. His defenders argue this method is the only way to get powerful people to speak candidly. His critics counter that it makes verification essentially impossible and allows sources to settle scores anonymously.
Game Change embraced this approach completely. The result was a book that read almost like a novel—full of vivid scenes, reconstructed dialogue, and intimate details about what candidates were thinking and feeling at crucial moments. It was compelling, dramatic, and almost entirely uncheckable.
What the Book Revealed
The revelations in Game Change ranged from the merely interesting to the genuinely damaging.
On the interesting end: the book revealed that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and New York Senator Chuck Schumer had privately encouraged Barack Obama to run for president as early as fall 2006—just two years after Obama had been elected to the Senate. Their reasoning was purely strategic. They believed an Obama candidacy would energize the Democratic base and improve the party's chances of winning back the White House. This wasn't about Obama's qualifications or readiness for the job. It was about electoral math.
The book also detailed Hillary Clinton's consideration of a 2008 run—and the internal debates within her family. According to Heilemann and Halperin, polls in 2004 had shown her odds of winning the presidency were encouraging. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, urged her to run. But their daughter Chelsea advised against it. Hillary herself was reluctant, in part because she had promised New York voters she would complete her full Senate term when she ran for that seat in 2000.
Then there was John Edwards.
The Edwards Affair
John Edwards had been the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004, running alongside John Kerry. Handsome, charismatic, and possessed of a compelling personal story—he was the son of a mill worker who had become a successful trial lawyer—Edwards was considered a serious contender for the 2008 nomination.
What the public didn't know was that Edwards had been conducting an affair with Rielle Hunter, a videographer who had been hired to produce documentary footage of his campaign. The affair would eventually become public in August 2008, effectively ending Edwards's political career. But Game Change provided new details about how Edwards had handled the situation before the story broke.
According to the book, Edwards's own advisers had begged him to distance himself from Hunter. He angrily refused. The book painted a portrait of a candidate who had become reckless, convinced of his own invincibility, unwilling to listen to anyone who told him uncomfortable truths.
The Edwards affair had another dimension that Game Change explored: Edwards's wife Elizabeth knew about it. She was also battling cancer. The book suggested that Edwards had continued his presidential campaign despite both his affair and his wife's illness, driven by an ambition that seemed to override all other considerations.
The Palin Problem
If the Edwards revelations were damaging, the sections about Sarah Palin were devastating.
Palin had burst onto the national stage in late August 2008, when Republican nominee John McCain selected her as his running mate. The Alaska governor was virtually unknown outside her home state. McCain's team had conducted only the most cursory vetting before making the choice. What followed was one of the most chaotic vice presidential campaigns in modern American history.
Game Change provided an inside account of just how bad things got.
According to the book, McCain's aides grew deeply concerned about Palin's basic knowledge of public affairs. Before her ABC News interviews with anchor Charles Gibson—her first major national media appearance—staffers reportedly worried that she didn't understand why North Korea and South Korea were separate countries. She also allegedly believed that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, had been behind the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
This last claim requires some context. In the years after September 11, polls consistently showed that large percentages of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was connected to the attacks. This was false—the attacks were carried out by Al Qaeda, a terrorist organization based in Afghanistan, not Iraq. But the Bush administration's rhetoric in building support for the 2003 Iraq War had deliberately conflated the two threats, and the confusion persisted. Still, for a vice presidential candidate to hold this belief in 2008—years after the question had been definitively settled—suggested a troubling lack of engagement with basic foreign policy facts.
The book also described Palin as becoming depressed and unresponsive during debate preparation. McCain reportedly suggested moving practice sessions from Philadelphia to Sedona, Arizona, so Palin could be closer to her family. This was an extraordinary accommodation—major party campaigns don't typically relocate their operations based on a candidate's emotional state.
Palin's team pushed back hard against the book. Her spokeswoman, Meghan Stapleton, suggested that Palin's own autobiography, Going Rogue, was a more accurate portrayal of what had happened. The implication was clear: Heilemann and Halperin's anonymous sources were settling scores, not telling the truth.
The Reid Controversy
The most immediately consequential revelation in Game Change involved Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader from Nevada.
According to the book, Reid had privately said he believed Obama could become the country's first Black president because Obama was "light-skinned" and had "no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."
The remarks were shocking not just for their content but for their source. Reid was one of the most powerful Democrats in the country. He had been a strong supporter of Obama's candidacy. And here he was, apparently reducing Obama's viability to his skin tone and his ability to code-switch—to speak differently depending on his audience.
The word "Negro" was particularly jarring. By 2010, it had been out of common usage for decades. While it wasn't necessarily a slur—the United Negro College Fund and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People both retained it in their names—hearing a sitting senator use it to describe a colleague felt like a dispatch from another era.
Reid acknowledged the comments immediately and apologized. Obama accepted the apology, and the controversy might have faded quickly if not for the political context. Reid was facing a difficult reelection campaign in Nevada. Republicans saw an opportunity.
The chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, called on Reid to step down as majority leader. So did Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl. Their argument was straightforward: if a Republican had made similar remarks, Democrats would have demanded his resignation.
Reid held on. Democrats rallied around him. And in November 2010, despite polls that had shown him trailing, he won reelection. The Game Change controversy, it seemed, had not defined him after all.
The Clinton Coffee Remark
Another explosive claim in the book involved former President Bill Clinton.
According to Heilemann and Halperin, Clinton had tried to convince Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts not to endorse Obama but to support Hillary Clinton instead. In making his case, Clinton allegedly said of Obama: "A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee."
The remark, if true, was an astonishing dismissal of Obama—a suggestion that a man on the verge of becoming president was really nothing more than a servant, someone whose proper role was to bring refreshments to his betters. The racial undertones were impossible to miss.
But here's the thing: there was no evidence Clinton ever actually said it.
The book attributed the remark to anonymous sources. Clinton denied making it. Kennedy, who had endorsed Obama in January 2008 in a moment that proved pivotal to the Democratic primary, had died in August 2009 and could not confirm or deny the account.
This is where the deep background approach created problems. The authors were presenting a damaging claim about a former president with no way for readers to evaluate its credibility. Who had told them this? Were they in the room when it was said? Did they hear it secondhand? Were they people with a grudge against Clinton?
There was no way to know.
The Reverend Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist, condemned the alleged remark as worse than Reid's comments. "This is someone seeking to stop Mr. Obama's campaign," Sharpton said. "If someone said that he would have been getting us coffee like that in the context they said he said it, that would be very offensive to me."
But Sharpton was responding to an allegation that might never have happened. That was the strange power of Game Change: it created controversies out of claims that could neither be proven nor disproven.
Hillary and the Race Card
The Clinton sections of the book contained other damaging claims. According to Heilemann and Halperin, Hillary Clinton had accused Obama of "playing the race card" during the 2008 primary campaign. She allegedly believed Obama was "importing people into Iowa" to improve his chances at the caucuses there.
The book described an hour-long meeting between Clinton and her pollster Mark Penn in which these accusations were discussed. Penn was a controversial figure in Clinton's campaign—many observers blamed his strategic advice for her loss to Obama. According to Game Change, Clinton wanted to make a bigger issue out of Obama's acknowledged past drug use (Obama had written in his memoir about using marijuana and cocaine as a young man), but was dissuaded by her staff.
Perhaps most striking was a comment the book attributed to Clinton during this meeting: "I hate the choice that the country's faced with. I think it is a terrible choice for our nation."
This was Clinton, allegedly, describing the prospect of an Obama nomination as terrible for America. If true, it suggested a level of bitterness toward her rival that went beyond normal political competition.
The book also made an extraordinary claim about Bill Clinton: that in 2006, Hillary's advisers had developed a strategy to deal with any public disclosure of an affair Bill Clinton was then conducting. The book did not name the woman involved, describing only "a sustained romantic relationship." It provided no further details.
This was perhaps the most frustrating kind of revelation—an explosive claim with just enough specificity to be tantalizing but nowhere near enough to be verifiable. Was there really an affair? Who was the woman? How did the advisers find out? The book didn't say. Readers were left with an insinuation dressed up as reporting.
The Criticism
Not everyone was impressed with Game Change.
Critics focused particularly on the sourcing. Kelly McBride, a journalism ethics scholar at the Poynter Institute, warned that "both accuracy and fairness can be in jeopardy when anonymous sources are overused and misused." Deep background sources, she noted, "cannot be held easily accountable."
Michiko Kakutani, the influential book critic at The New York Times, offered a mixed assessment. She acknowledged that the book contained "impressive legwork and access" but also noted that some of its content "simply crystallize rumors and whispers from the campaign trail" and that portions were "hard to verify independently as more than spin or speculation on the part of unnamed sources."
Both Kakutani and Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic suggested that the book sometimes veered into gossip.
Heilemann and Halperin defended their work. Halperin insisted they maintained "an incredibly high standard" and that they had left material out if it couldn't be verified. Heilemann argued that "gossip is that which is unverified" and that "everything in our book is factual."
This was a somewhat circular defense. The authors were saying their claims were factual because they had verified them—but the readers had no way to check this verification, because the sources were anonymous. You either trusted Heilemann and Halperin or you didn't. There was no middle ground.
Some critics went further, arguing that Game Change represented something troubling about American political journalism itself. The book was, in this view, the embodiment of insider access journalism—a product of reporters who were so close to the people they covered that they had become part of the same world. The sources trusted the authors to present their accounts favorably, or at least not to expose them. The authors needed the sources to keep getting access. Everyone was complicit.
The Aftermath
Jay Carney, who was then communications director for Vice President Joe Biden, criticized the authors for not checking directly with any of Biden's staff to verify accounts in the book. This was a telling complaint. It suggested that the authors had relied primarily on sources hostile to, or at least independent of, the Biden team. The book's account of Biden might have looked very different if his own people had been given a chance to respond.
In 2018, Meghan McCain—daughter of John McCain and a co-host of the ABC talk show The View—condemned the book during a discussion about Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury, a controversial account of the early Trump White House. She compared the two books, calling both unethical and citing them as reasons she didn't trust journalists.
This was notable because John McCain himself came across relatively well in Game Change. The book portrayed him as a genuine war hero struggling to manage a chaotic campaign and an unprepared running mate. But Meghan McCain apparently felt that the overall approach—anonymous sourcing, reconstructed dialogue, intimate details that no journalist could have witnessed firsthand—was fundamentally problematic regardless of how her father was depicted.
The HBO Film
Game Change was adapted into an HBO film in 2012, directed by Jay Roach and focusing primarily on the Palin sections of the book. Julianne Moore played Palin. The film premiered on March 10, 2012, and was a critical and commercial success, winning four Emmy Awards including Outstanding Actress in a Miniseries for Moore.
The film brought the book's portrayal of Palin to an even wider audience. For viewers who hadn't read Game Change, the HBO adaptation became the definitive account of what had happened inside the McCain campaign. This was exactly what Palin and her supporters had feared—a version of events that they disputed, presented with the production values and cultural authority of a major HBO production, becoming the accepted historical narrative.
The Reckoning
In 2017, multiple women accused Mark Halperin of sexual harassment. The allegations, reported by CNN and others, described inappropriate behavior toward female colleagues over many years. Halperin initially apologized, then largely disappeared from public life.
The consequences extended to his work. Penguin, the publisher, canceled a 2016 follow-up book. HBO dropped a planned miniseries based on that book. The Game Change brand, once so valuable, became toxic by association.
This created an awkward situation for the book's legacy. Whatever its journalistic merits or flaws, Game Change had been a major work of political reporting—the kind of book that shaped how Americans understood a consequential election. Now its co-author was disgraced, and the institutions that had published and promoted the book were distancing themselves from him.
John Heilemann continued his journalism career. Halperin, after years out of the spotlight, attempted a comeback, but faced significant resistance from many in the media industry who felt his behavior had been disqualifying.
The Larger Questions
Game Change raised questions that extend far beyond one book about one campaign.
How should political journalists balance access against independence? The deep background approach gave Heilemann and Halperin extraordinary material—the kind of intimate detail that makes for compelling reading. But it also made them dependent on sources who had their own agendas. When everyone is anonymous, score-settling becomes indistinguishable from truth-telling.
How much do behind-the-scenes revelations actually matter? The book told us that Harry Reid made racially insensitive comments, that Sarah Palin didn't know basic facts about foreign policy, that Hillary Clinton was bitter about losing to Obama. Some of this was genuinely important—Palin's knowledge gaps were relevant to her qualifications for office. But other revelations seemed more like gossip than news. Does knowing that Bill Clinton may or may not have made a dismissive comment about Obama change anything about the historical record?
And finally: who benefits from this kind of journalism? The sources got to shape the narrative while remaining hidden. The authors got a bestseller. Readers got an entertaining account that may or may not have been accurate. But the subjects of the unflattering revelations—Reid, Palin, the Clintons—had no real way to respond, because they couldn't know who had said what about them.
In the years since Game Change, American political journalism has continued to grapple with these questions. Anonymous sourcing remains common. "Access journalism" is frequently criticized but still practiced. And books promising to reveal the real story behind major political events continue to be published, read, and debated.
Game Change didn't create these tensions. But it exposed them, vividly and uncomfortably. That may be its most lasting contribution—not the specific revelations about the 2008 campaign, but the questions it raised about how we learn about our politics, and whether we can ever really know what happens behind closed doors.