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"FacebookPinterest\n\nFacebookPinterestHunger Reads Badge.jpg\n\n It's July, and you can't read another rehash of the health care ruling or another sourcing-free prediction about Romney's VP. So all this week (and hopefully throughout the summer), GQ editors, contributors, and friends will be recommending their favorite political writing of all time.\n\nI don't know about you, but after the latest Romney gaffe-fest (international edition!), I'm pining for the good old days of political reporting. You know, the time when candidates and political operatives and, yes, even the flacks, were personalities (or at least had a personality). When reporters got access, any access. When the whole thing, the whole long march to the White House, seemed like one incredibly awesome reality TV show, a show that could be analyzed and dissected and recapped endlessly and entertainingly. Yes, I'm talking about 2008. Man, that was fun, wasn't it? So, rather than reach waaaaaaay back to some of the real classics of the genre, I'm looking in our rearview, four short years ago. I've never been so nostalgic for something that just happened.\n\n\"The Making (and Remaking) of McCain,\" Robert Draper, NYTimes, 2008\n\nI'm still rewatching The West Wing, which I realize makes me sort of a lowbrow politics junky (at least compared to my very erudite coworkers). I like dirt. The scoop. I like when a reporter gets you inside some Hilton Hotel suite somewhere as campaign operatives strategize\u2014pragmatically, cynically\u2014trying to \"define\" their candidate. I like seeing how the sausage is made. And my favorite sausage-making story in a long while is GQ contributor Robert Draper's \"West Wing\"-style look at the disintegration of the McCain campaign. It's got everything. The stakes are high. The characters are, well, characters. And the machinations are so genius and yet, ultimately, so flawed, that you can't help but get lost in the moment. Really, it's the original Game Change.\n\n\"Gentlemen, let me put a few things on the table for observation and discussion,\" Steve Schmidt said to his fellow strategists while sitting in a conference room in the Phoenix Ritz-Carlton. \"Would anyone here disagree with the premise that we are not winning this campaign?\"\nNo one disagreed. It was Sunday, July 27, and Obama had just concluded an eight-day swing through the Middle East and Europe that received practically round-the-clock media coverage. \"Would anyone disagree with the premise,\" Schmidt went on, \"that Mr. Obama has scored the most successful week in this entire campaign? I mean, they treated him like he was a head of state! So tell me, gentlemen: how do we turn this negative into a positive?\"\"It's third and nine,\" Bill McInturff, a pollster, observed. \"Time to start throwing the ball down field.\"Eventually, it was Schmidt who blurted out the epiphany concerning Obama. \"Face it, gentlemen,\" he said. \"He's being treated like a celebrity.\"The others grasped the concept\u2014a celebrity like J-Lo! or Britney!\u2014and exultation overtook the room.\n\n\"Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama,\" Ryan Lizza, New Yorker, 2008\n\nI don't think I really understood candidate Obama until I read this piece by Ryan Lizza, which came out at about this exact point in the 2008 cycle. I'd read Obama's books. I had followed all the daily coverage. And yet, I only got it\u2014got him\u2014when I tore through this New Yorker opus. Credit Lizza's reporting. Credit the access he received. Credit the idea, by Lizza or his editors, to focus on this precise moment, when Candidate Obama was born. It is, essentially, a Marvel-style creation story of a politician\u2014and who doesn't love watching Peter Parker turn into Spider Man?\n\nDuring Project Vote, Obama also began to understand the larger world of Chicago's liberal fund-raisers. \"He met people not just in the African-American community but in the progressive white community,\" David Alrod said. \"The folks who funded Project Vote were some of the key progressive leaders.\" Obama met Alrod through one of Project Vote's supporters, Bettylu Saltzman, whose father, Philip M. Klutznick, was a Chicago shopping-mall tycoon, a part owner of the Bulls, and a former Commerce Secretary in the Carter Administration. Saltzman, a soft-spoken activist who worked for Senators Adlai E. Stevenson III and Paul Simon, took an immediate interest in Obama. \"I honestly don't remember what it was about him, but I was absolutely blown away,\" Saltzman says. \"I said to several people that this guy, who is now thirty years old, is someday going to be President. He will be our first black President.\"\n\n \"44.\" Newsweek.\n\nOh, Newsweek! This week in particular, I feel bleak. So... what went wrong? Well, in my very careful, scientific analysis, I choose not to focus on the Internet or the 24-hour news cycle or the rise of HuffPo. Instead, I focus on one particular moment: April 30, 2009. That was the night, at an awards ceremony in New York, when the American Society of Magazine Editors decided that a magazine celebrating breakfast\u2014you know, that meal we eat everyday\u2014was a better paragon of the form than Newsweek's \"44.,\" an issue covering the most entertaining, historic election in a generation. I will say no more than that. And urge people to take another look at this classic, which, after all the cutbacks at the magazine, will have to serve as the magazine's longform, political swan song.\n\nRead more on Death Race 2012\n\n\n\nThe Seersucker Debacle\n\nToday's Political Firestorm: Romney, In London, Saying Critical Things about London\n\nA Word about Mindy Meyer, the New Queen of Sparkle\n\nHunger Reads: Apologies are for the weak and the Right to Bear Arms\n\nFollow us @GQPolitics on Twitter for more updates on the campaign trail"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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