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Copyright © 2011 by POLITICO LLC

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-679-64507-8

Cover design: Ruby Levesque

www.atrandom.com

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

First Page

Acknowledgments

Appendix

About the Authors

INTRODUCTION

One of the prerogatives of being POLITICO editor-in-chief is the ability at any time to feel I know what’s really going on in Washington. All I need to do is sidle up to Mike Allen, our senior reporter and the star of our show, and ask, “What’s going on?”

Mike, a friend of two decades since our days as young reporters in Richmond, Virginia, will smile and, custom-designing his stories around what he knows of the specific interests of his audience, announce enthusiastically, “YOU will love this …”

Then will pour forth a torrent of the latest news about high-level maneuverings among familiar names at the White House or Congress or presidential campaigns, along with low-level scuttlebutt about their triumphs and tantrums, break-ups and make-ups, humor and hubris—all the quotidian details that establish these people might be human beings after all.

These conversations with Mike are the pure and unfiltered version of what Mike gives to readers every day in his now famous POLITICO Playbook: the feeling (and even some of the reality) of being an insider.

My reaction to talking with Mike is usually the same: “Man, it would be great to get some of this stuff on the site.” Sometimes we can, or already have. Other times we can’t, or intend to but don’t, or whatever—life rushes by too fast, or it would look strange to order up a whole story just so we can find a home for one juicy morsel.

So some portion of Mike’s tips, like those of other great POLITICO reporters, stays dormant—tantalizing but undeveloped.

The prospect that more of Mike’s reporting and analytical intelligence could be shared with readers was one reason—among many—that we were so intrigued by the idea Random House editor Jon Meacham presented us some months back. His proposal was to write a series of eBooks telling, in serialized form, the story of the 2012 presidential campaign. The hope is that this format will allow the revival of the kind of detail-laden, insider narratives the newsmagazines used to publish immediately in the wake of presidential campaigns. These stories made for arresting special editions of the magazines, and were often expanded to be published in book-length form. Instead of waiting to produce one giant text, why not use the speed and dexterity made possible by digital publishing to produce these accounts in something more like real time?

He also threw in an irresistible bonus: Mike could collaborate with the brilliant writer Evan Thomas, someone all of us in the leadership of POLITICO had known and admired for many years.

Meacham and I are kindred spirits of sorts. We are of the same generation (it turns out he knew my wife, from their shared time at The Washington Monthly, before I did). We both grew up and prospered professionally, he at Newsweek and me at The Washington Post, in what I think of as the media old order—a world in which big and powerful news brands had robust business models and awesome editorial power to set the national agenda. At mid-career, with the old order diminished in some places or crumbled altogether in others, we both face the same imperative to answer the question, “What’s next for our business and the kind of journalism we think is important?”

POLITICO began five years ago, in January 2007, with Mike, Jim VandeHei, and me as co-founders in the newsroom, in large measure out of an urgent desire to arrive at a good and preferably prosperous answer to this question. We found an answer that works for us with a niche publication—producing content aimed at people who share our intense, even obsessive,