The casual reader might imagine that American elections were always like this, but they were not. When Andrew Jackson ran against John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas and John C. Breckinridge; when former Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson ran against future secretary of state and chief justice Charles Evans Hughes, and FDR broke a tradition as old as the republic and sought a third term against distinguished lawyer and public intellectual Wendell L. Willkie; when victorious theatre commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower ran against the sparkling epigrammatist and intellectual governor of Illinois Adlai E. Stevenson, and when Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, much decorated young World War II Navy officers and literate and learned men, were the candidates, the campaigns were enlightening, dramatic, and presented different policy views on vital national issues. 

In this campaign, as in all of the post-Reagan campaigns for the presidency, not one memorable phrase was uttered. Barack Obama was the first incumbent not to stand on his record in seeking re-election since Martin Van Buren in 1840. (Van Buren inherited a depression from Jackson's revocation of the charter of the central bank and simply pretended that none of it had anything to do with him.) Even Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, unsuccessful presidents though they were, gamely tried to run on their records, and lost. Nowhere does the reader learn in this book that Obama's entire campaign is to go fishing after packets of susceptible voters, and not to claim that, on his record, he deserves to be re-elected.

The president's strategists claimed there was a Republican "war on women" and in furtherance of this, decided that the Roman Catholic Church had to pay to insure all the medical requirements of employees and students at its institutions, including contraceptive devices, abortion-inducing drugs, and processes of sterilisation. The authors made no connection between this (probably unconstitutional) effort to separate the country's 75 million Roman Catholics from their episcopal leadership, implicitly portrayed as a quavering legion of septuagenarian celibates, tolerators of sexual molestation and humbug-spouting killjoys, and the departure from the administration of chief of staff William Daley, of the very Catholic governing family of the President's home city of Chicago. While the murder of the American ambassador to Libya in Benghazi is mentioned, there is no mention of the degrading speech to the world's Muslims that the President prevailed on the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to give, pretending that their ambassador did not die in a terrorist attack but as a result of spontaneous objections to the video of an Islamophobic kook in California, which Obama and Clinton knew to be false.

 

Instead, we have laborious coverage of the magnificent but outrageous Donald Trump's campaign to prove that the President was ineligible to be president because of his supposed birth in Kenya. We are marched solemnly through an endless sequence of facile ad-men and organisers. A succession of Republican contestants for the nomination are treated as if they were potential presidents, when in fact they were caricatures, charlatans, who in a less tolerant society would have been arrested for impersonating presidential candidates. Michelle Bachmann, who went down fighting the inoculation of young children against diseases (unmentioned); Texas governor Rick Perry who jogs with a hand-gun in his shorts and hired his father-in-law to perform a vasectomy on him (unmentioned); Newt Gingrich, intelligent but unfocused, hobbled by dubious financial connections, and well described by former Reagan speech-writer Peggy Noonan as "a human grenade with his hand on the pin, saying ‘Watch this'"; Herman Cain, an African-American former pizza executive afflicted by a semi-public problem of satyriasis; and Rick Santorum, a defeated Pennsylvania senator who espoused courageously a Catholic programme redolent of Pius IX, a man of principle but not of this century or that electorate.