The Obama Victory: How Media, Money and Message Shaped the 2008 Election

The Obama Victory: How Media, Money and Message Shaped the 2008 Election. Kate Kenski, Bruce W. Hardy, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010. 378 pp. $21.95 pbk. This is the best book on a presidential campaign since the Making of the President series by Theodore White in 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1972. It is a product of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania under the leadership of Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the Elizabeth Ware Packard professor of communication. Bruce Hardy is a senior research analyst at Annenberg, and Kate Kenski, who was at Annenberg when the study was made, is now an assistant professor of communication at the University of Arizona. The heart of the study is the extensive survey effort by the National Annenberg Election Survey - 57,000 telephone interviews conducted between December 2007 and the election. However, there is a lot more to this study than this enormous database. There was a post-election panel study with 3,700 respondents. There was a post-election survey to find out what people believed and didn't believe of the campaign claims. There was a debriefing of those involved in the campaign in Philadelphia and Washington in December 2008. There were interviews with campaign staffers during the campaign. There was computerized content analysis. The Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org was used to check accuracy of campaign ads. All of this is woven together into a comprehensive tale of what the candidates and their staffs were doing and how it worked out and how the campaign went day-by-day and over time. Newspapers and television news tend to focus on today, but this book gives you the longrange picture that you didn't get from the press. The text is supported by more than one-hundred charts and tables. You may think that Obama led all the way or all the way after the Democratic Convention, but there is evidence to the contrary in this book. If you think TV ads are a sure-fire thing, there is evidence to the contrary of that, too. The book is divided into three parts, "The Forces and Messages That Pervaded the Campaign," "Shifts in Momentum," and "The New Campaign Landscape." The first section begins with analysis of the importance of the economy and the Iraq war as issues. The economy became seen as the more important increasingly, and Barack Obama was seen increasingly as the candidate who could best deal with the economy. The book then deals with the stereotypes that McCain was too much like Bush and that Obama was a tax-and-spend liberal. Republicans did not think McCain was the same as Bush, but a majority of Democrats did, and that image persisted throughout the campaign. …