Renegade: The making of Barack Obama By Richard Wolffe, Virgin, Rs 490

When candidate Barack Obama threw his hat in the 2008 presidential sweepstakes, he, ever so conscious of history, allowed Richard Wolffe, a senior White House correspondent of Newsweek, to travel with him and be at his side till election day. One of the book’s most interesting episodes reveals that it was Obama who came up with the idea of a tome, nudging Wolffe with a casual remark — “Why can’t you write a book about it? Like Theodore White. Those are great books.”

Obama is often bracketed with John F. Kennedy on the charisma barometer, and a Camelot-style report on his remarkable campaign was inevitable. Kennedy’s election was a political as well as a literary watershed: not long after the election, Theodore White made it big with the publication of The Making of the President, 1960, a classic on political reporting that covered the campaign with a novelist’s sense of drama coupled with astonishing detail. It has been imitated many times since, even by White, who dutifully put himself through the same paces every four years, never replicating the energy of the original. In retrospect, despite hundreds of campaign books since then, no one else has been able to do the same.

Renegade makes an audacious claim with a title to match White’s classic, and largely lives up to it. Like White, Wolffe was lucky that the campaign he was chosen to cover was exceptionally historic and the candidate charismatic. Crisp and lively, the book will please the millions who lived and died with every breath of the campaign and will satisfy the hunger of those who want to know more about the person at the centre of these historic events. Wolffe faces a problem that has afflicted others who have written about Obama — it is difficult to write better than what Obama has himself already written in two of his own best-selling books. But Wolffe does a commendable job of exploring the paradox within the “quiet renegade” who rewrote all the rules of American politics, retelling a story that manages to captivate us even though we all lived through the event. Obama, the son of an anthropologist, offers gnomic observations about the political process (interestingly, he admires Ronald Reagan, a quintessential Repulican) and retains his likeability even when complaining that the media scrutiny is like a “public colonoscopy”.

Like White, Wolffe obviously favours the protagonist whom he refers to as “the candidate”. But to his credit, he points out the odd warts too — some dubious entries on campaign finance and his shifting stance on the North American Free Trade Agreement for instance. In the process, he reveals a steely politician who is determined to play hard to win, even while seeming to be above the politics of anger. Wolffe flavours the book with his own opinions — including the arresting thought that the intemperate sermons of Obama’s then-pastor, Jeremiah Wright, might easily have been discovered before the Iowa caucus, thereby seriously damaging Obama’s campaign at the outset.

What the informed reader would have liked was more inputs about the other aspirants as well as insights on the colossal effort Obama put in critical states such as Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Missouri where he narrowly beat Hillary Clinton. It was, by any standard, a remarkable turnaround for a candidate who lost the “momentum” state of New Hampshire, and was also beaten in the popular vote in the two most populous states of California and New York. The chief drama revolves around Obama-Clinton more than Obama-McCain, and we are offered glimpses of the agitation that Clinton’s perseverance was causing inside the Obama team. But we are told little of the genuine policy differences that separated them, their take on the spike in gasoline prices for example, which was prominent in the complex equation of 2008.

Of special interest to readers in the subcontinent is Obama’s close friendship with two Pakistani students in college. Apart from the usual trivial conversations in the college cafeteria, “they shared a week-long driving vacation along the West Coast, down to Mexico and up to Oregon, visiting friends in a beat-up red Fiat coupe”. Both were from Karachi, and Obama visited their families and stayed with them for a few weeks during Ramazan. In Hyderabad (Pakistan), he was “shocked to see a life that had barely changed in centuries”. While the landlord lived in comfort and luxury with running water and electricity, the peasants toiled in the fields without any such facilities in their homes. “You had untouchables who were still functioning as indentured servants, effectively”, Obama confided in the author. Among the peasants was an indentured servant of African origin whose forefathers were brought to the west coast of India from East Africa, and could well have been from Kenya, the home of Obama’s Muslim father. These experiences, and the years he spent in Indonesia as a child, shaped his view of Islamic nations and his stance on the ‘War on terror’. Consequently, when he talks about their politics and the changes they need to bring to their societies, he is seldom cast aside like other American leaders.

Around the beginning of their collaboration, Obama asked Wolffe whether there would be enough drama in merely a successful realization of a vision: “What happens if we just had a plan and then went out and said, let’s execute it?”. That is precisely what happened in 2008, but not without drama. Renegade is surely not the final word — but it is as close as we are likely to get until Obama’s aides write their version of an extraordinary story that is still unfolding.