The Frenzy for The Making of the President, 2008

Are the editors and agents who said it would be impossible to write or publish a worthwhile postgame recap of the 2008 election having second thoughts now that the race has turned out to be so much fun?

Michael Takiff, an oral historian preparing to go out with a proposal for precisely that kind of book, hopes they are.

His literary agent, young up-and-comer Jason Ashlock of the Marianne Strong Agency, describes Mr. Takiff’s book as a spiritual heir to the late Theodore White’s classic, The Making of the President, a novelistic ticktock that gave readers an inside look at the presidential race of 1960 and offered a level of detail that daily reporters didn’t have room for in their copy. Mr. Ashlock said last week that he hopes whichever publisher ends up taking on Mr. Takiff’s project would consider buying the rights to the four election books White wrote before he gave up the habit in 1976, and publish them as a series in conjunction with Mr. Takiff’s. Mr. Ashlock has even reached out to White’s son about possibly writing a foreword that would signal what he called “a passing of the torch.” 

Still, Mr. Ashlock will face an uphill battle selling Mr. Takiff’s book, as conventional wisdom in the publishing industry throughout this campaign season has been that the 24-hour news cycle has rendered the mini-genre White pioneered obsolete—that the texture once available exclusively in full-length books has become so abundant online that even the most devoted political junkies will have had enough by the time the circus leaves town in November. As Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal put it earlier this year, “Who wants a book on the campaign when you get the story cheaper and in real time in magazines and on the Web?”

But are these not extraordinary times? Even the skeptics seem to agree that this election has been one of the most captivating and unpredictable in history—that if ever there was a race ripe for the White treatment, it’s this one.

And yet only a handful of our top political journalists will admit to working on such a thing. Among them are Washington Post reporter Dan Balz and Pulitzer Prize winner Haynes Johnson (formerly of The Post), who signed on with Viking more than a year ago, as well as Time’s Mark Halperin and New York’s John Heilemann, whom HarperCollins signed up in June after Ryan Lizza, the New Yorker’s campaign correspondent, canceled plans to write a book for them because David Remnick didn’t want him getting distracted from his work for the magazine.

The only other election books known to be in the works are the 200-page paperback* by Evan Thomas that Newsweek will put out with PublicAffairs—the magazine has issued such a book after almost every election since 1984—and Eric Boehlert’s The Bloggers on the Bus, which covers coverage of the campaign rather than the thing itself. Hedrick Hertzberg’s thinking of putting together a collection of his columns; Jonathan Alter from Newsweek is “saving string” for a book but won’t decide whether he’s actually going to write one until after the results come in. 

Where’s everybody else?

Cal Morgan, editorial director at HarperPerennial and an executive editor at Harper, wishes someone would step up. 

“I would kill to have a book like that,” Mr. Morgan said in an interview Monday. “But I haven’t seen the right person doing the right reporting. Maybe that reporting is invisible to the naked eye because people are doing so much, but … in the past 10 years or so, or in the past eight in any event, there has not been—outside of Woodward and a couple of others—there has not been a lot of intimate reporting that reporters like Teddy White used to get great stories out of.”

Even Mr. Morgan has doubts that such reporting would necessarily attract readers, and though he believes that a Woodward-style insider account of the election published shortly after its conclusion could be a best seller if the author “absolutely nailed it,” he suspects the media has changed too much for any old “here’s what happened” account to find a substantial audience. Next Page >