Renegade: The Making of a President
By Richard Wolffe
Crown $26 368 pages

In 2000, when Richard Wolffe was covering George W Bush’s election bid for the Financial Times, he told a documentary-maker why the governor of Texas was getting more favourable coverage from the US media than Al Gore: “The Gore press corps is about how they didn’t like Gore, [they] didn’t trust him,” he said. “Over here, we were writing only about the trivial stuff because he [Bush] charmed the pants off us.”

Wolffe will be more readily forgiven for having been charmed by Barack Obama, a candidate whose studious behind-the-scenes personality broadly chimed with his political agenda – something that cannot so easily be said of Bush. Journalists who drunk Bush’s Kool-Aid could be accused of having been played for fools. With Obama the content roughly matched the packaging.

As Newsweek’s correspondent, Wolffe was one of a handful of reporters who tracked Obama’s exhausting 21-month odyssey from start to finish. “Why can’t you write a book about it?” Obama asked the future author early in the campaign. The result, Renegade: The Making of a President, is consciously modelled on Theodore White’s classic account of John F Kennedy’s 1960 campaign.

Unlike White, who often roved beyond the candidate to describe the context around him, Wolffe’s book throughout stays within his candidate’s bubble. “You will get more access than anyone else,” Obama promised Wolffe. For journalists, access can be like a drug. The book provides only marginal tidbits in the way of new facts to make up for Wolffe’s inevitable compromise with objectivity.

To be fair to Wolffe, who has since left journalism for a career in public relations, Renegade provides an authoritative account of the most extraordinary campaign in modern history. For anyone who missed part or all of the show, Wolffe’s book will bring them up to the mark. But it won’t take them much further. Since Wolffe talks only to the candidate, the candidate’s friends and his campaign staff, it inevitably provides a fairly uncritical narrative of Obama’s rise.

At one or two stages it borders on credulous. Wolffe takes at face value the candidate’s assertion that he was “deeply ambivalent” about whether to run for president – not just in 2008 but at any stage. This is hard to square with the fact that in 2006 Obama launched an explicitly presidential book – The Audacity of Hope – that was impeccably timed for the electoral cycle. It is also hard to square with Obama’s ringing 2004 speech at the Democratic convention in Boston that launched his meteoric rise to the Senate and beyond.

Renegade is good at describing Obama’s genius as a politician – and his ability to assemble the best strategists around him. It is less good at locating the philosophical wellsprings of Obama as a policymaker. There are genuine insights about the process through which the new president takes decisions, his ability to seek out the smartest advisers, synthesise their advice and put it into his own often transformative words.

It also builds on some of the autobiographical insights Obama offered in his first book, Dreams From My Father – the connection between Obama’s biracial background and his instinct always first to seek common ground over confrontation. But it is frustratingly light on Obama’s underlying objectives.

Beneath the hope and the desire for change, does Obama have an ideology? Does America’s most exciting electoral maestro in decades possess a definite vision of what his country ought to look like?

Does he admire or disdain European-style social democracy? Instead, we get a blow-by-blow account of the tactics of the long campaign.

As a chronicle of its twists and turns, Wolffe’s book is hard to fault.

But the gaps it leaves are large. To help fill them in, we are treated to the time-honoured colour-coded detail of news magazine writing.

Bill Clinton is described as being “resplendent in a mango shirt that crested over his khaki pants”. Hillary, meanwhile, “wore a raspberry jacket over a raspberry top”.

On election night Obama “walks into a tan hotel suite” and sits on “a red, orange and green sofa”. If only we could have learned more about Obama’s internal leanings – red, green, orange? – that sofa might not have been necessary.

Edward Luce is the FT’s Washington bureau chief