i was trying to get an experienced person down to cover it. they said why don't you go. i said okay. i went down there. as i have often said to people, in the ten years i have been writing about this i have never really found the words to describe what it was like to go down in the year 2000 and to see a country that looked like it was at war right here in the united states. of little border town in the southeastern corner of arizona. i will read a fragment from my book. ..

ordinary american life continued all around them. agents of my own government were chasing down farm workers and bus blaze and cleaning ladies with helicopters and infrared cameras and halting of the poorest of the poor off to jail we hadn't seen this kind of, i guess we will call it militarization on the border, before then. arizona in the last 10 years has become a killing field. we have now found the bodies of those to 2000 migrants. this is just in southern arizona since the border enforcement was stepped up. it goes back to 1994 when the federal government decided to seal a v-victor been crossings in san diego and in el paso because so many migrants were

pouring through. part of it goes back to nafta. when we made our north american free trade agreement, the united states started selling very cheap and some of the poorest parts of mexico in southern mexico, displacing what are probably millions of compensating those are on their land to war are ready living a marginal existence. they started flooding the borders in the united states and it became a political problem so the federal government under clinton sealed up those urban crossings. the thinking was, if you took care of urban crossings you would take care of illegal immigration. and i have a "map from doris meissner who was the commission of the ins back in those days. she said, we did believe geography would be an ally to us. it was there since the number of people crossing the border through arizona would go down to a trickle. that inking was wrong. as i have said we have found in

the last 10 years we have found close to 2000 bodies and those are only the bodies we found. i know i don't have a real long time to speak here but i would like to tell you the story of one, the body of one person who was found. it is the title of my vote, the death of jostling. she was 14 years old and she died two hours from here in arizona in the wilderness in january of 2000 and eight. jostling was a young girl living in el salvador. from other wasn't illegal immigrant in l.a. and jocelyn had a younger brother who was 10. they had been left behind and tell the mother could find the money to bring them up here. they were living with their grandmother. the mother scrape together the money and god knows how much he paid. some of the were high as $8000 a person. so it would have taken somebody

working at a low-level job, which migrants hold immigrants in this country hold a long time to say about that kind of money. sheer range and have her children brought up from el salvador. they traveled all the way across mexico probably a couple of weeks in a group and they crossed over the border into arizona, two and a half hours from tucson. the goal is to then walk through southern arizona and tell you can get past the border patrol check points. it can be a walk of three to five days. this was in january and some people outside of arizona don't know that it gets very cold here in the winter so this group of people walked through these mountains and judging by the name of the place you can imagine what it is like. up-and-down rollercoaster browns, no water, lots of cat does, lots of rocks and lots in lots of ways to trip. josseline got sick when she was crossing on the trail probably from drinking the water. it is green, it is putrid and

makes people sick. i have her autopsy report from later. her stomach was empty so she was vomiting on the trail. she could not continue with the group. the quail to a who delivered this child made a decision to leave this young girl on the trail and the little boy, her little brother was screaming and crying but reported later that josseline said to come, you go ahead, you have to get the mom. nobody called anybody, no one. little boy arrived in l.a. safely three days later sounded the alarm to his brother-- other. people went out looking for her but nobody found her. we didn't have good information. three weeks later a young local list into sand happen to be hiking the trail putting out food and water and he came

across the body of this child. she had been dead about three weeks so you can imagine the condition. the reason i tell you the story in my book is because i was able to get information about her because her body was found and i was able to get her autopsy report and learn something about her family. she was one of 183 people who died in southern arizona in the wilderness just in that year alone. everyone of every one of them would have a story equally as tragic. that was in 2008 and since then the numbers have gone up. you last year we were up to 206 bodies found in southern arizona and this year they say we are on target, 30% ahead of that number. my goal here is just to-- a lot of us know the numbers but interestingly since i have written this book i have found out that people outside of arizona don't know there's numbers. a cousin of mine, sheila sweeney in pennsylvania, she just read my book and she told me i had no

idea. i didn't know these people were dying on u.s. soil every single year so my goal in writing this book and telling stories like josseline's is to let people know what is going on. some people have said you are blaming the united states for the problem of poverty. there are poor nations below us but i'm just trying to say we as a people have a responsibility to realize these people are dying on u.s. soil and we should do something to stop it. my book is my small effort in that direction. [applause] >> our third panelist is philip caputo. he is a ringer. i say that while technically this is to be a nonfiction panel, i think you'll agree his experience and his tenacity and his abilities to, that is developed as a journalist shows

up on every page of his brand-new novel, "crossers." takes place primarily in southern arizona and northern sonora. is based on observations gleaned on foot, horseback in jeeps come in a way thank. he talked to both official and decidedly unofficial capacities. phil has written about the border for the atlantic and the virginia quarterly review. he is her second marine on the panel. you are surrounded by marines, margaret or kerry served in the marines in the mid-1960s out of which came his highly acclaimed mr, a rumor of war. his magazine roe files authors such as william staton, actor robert redford and the soviet invasion of afghanistan. in 1974 he won a pulitzer prize for the "chicago tribune" and that was investigating, corruption in chicago. following that he became a foreign correspondent at the

left for the glamorous world of freelance writing. his books include acts of faith faith set in the sudan, 13 seconds a look at 50 kent state shootings and meetings of escape, a war correspondent memoir of life and death in afghanistan the middle east and vietnam. with all that i am proud to present the author of "crossers," philip caputo. [applause] >> i would like to second david's thanks to everybody that has been involved and that is attending the tucson book festival. i have got to say that this is really really encouraging. my wife and i were a fund-raising cocktail party last night. there were probably about close to 1000 people in attendance they are.

and the only thing i don't like about it is that i kind of like to be gloomy and miserable most of the time, and despairing of what is going to happen to writing and to storytelling and into the print industry in general, and this kind of gathering makes me think i am all wrong. as tom mentioned, "crossers" is a novel. it is not a nonfiction piece so i probably don't belong here. but, i am here. i want to point out that being a novel, it is not really about the border is an issue. it is not about the border as a geographical feature or geographical expression and it is not about the border is a problem which can be solved or as the case may be, not solve. it is about people who are caught up in a particular

situation, people who are caught up in a particular place and in this case here it is the border in the complex that exist there past and present. i have always had a foot in both worlds. the worlds of journalism or nonfiction in the world of fiction throughout my whole career. they have cut across-- if you will i will use the word synergistic relationship between them. for example might verse book which was about my service with the marine corps in vietnam, was a memoir, a nonfiction narrative but in its structure, the way i selected details, even the tone of the book, it are owed a lot from fictional techniques, so much so that some reviewers and many readers from whom i do still get letters, refer to it as a novel. on the other side of the

equation, the techniques of journalism i have found very useful in writing fiction especially those of researching and interviewing. a lot of novels that i've written have run out of journalism. the first novel i ever did, war of africa, which was set in ethiopia during the civil war with eritrea, grew out of an assignment i had for the "chicago tribune" and that heart of the world. similarly the last novel i did before this one, "crossers," acts of faith which is set in kenya and sudan, that brought up an assignment i had with "national geographic" adventure. this one, "crossers," was inspired by an assignment that i originally got from a virginia quarterly review to write about the border as an issue, to write about the border is a problem and i must say or a small

university magazine that gave me a lot of space, 10,000 words. they called me because i live part of the year with my wife down in patagonia and over the years, that would be since 1996, i have accumulated a lot almost by osmosis about what is going on down there. and of course almost every day that i am down there or nearby in the san rafael valley, i have encountered undocumented aliens coming over the border. i have certainly encountered an awful lot of drug swindlers because for various reasons the area we live in is more of a drug corridor, a drug smuggling corridor then it isn't area for smuggling illegal aliens. i can think of one incident when i wife leslie and i were hiking only a mile from patagonia and we were erred watching of all

the innocuous activities, and we came around a bend in the road and there were five guys offloading tales of marijuana into a beat up old volvo station wagon. we were only about 50 feet from then and of course we stopped cold and they stopped cold in the drug dealers ran off into the bushes of the creek, and the guy who was driving the ball go god in and drove off, and made a u-turn and drove out past us kind of giving us his best treasure of the sierra madre stair, probably to let us know he didn't think it would be cool if we call the cops, which we did anyway. in another case, kind of a humorous one about two years ago, i was horseback riding with a friend in the san rafael valley and four east real sad

tax and popping out of the canyon. they really look like a mess, and they were waving at me and, so i've made sure they weren't armed. i rode up to them and it turned out there were for drug deals who had dropped their loads and they were asking me for a road where they could get picked up by the border patrol because no longer having dope on them, they would not he arrested for illegal narcotics trafficking. they would simply be arrested as undocumented aliens and instead of having to walk dirty miles back into mexico, they get a ride in a homeland security bus back to the border. that is standard operating procedure. so i got a laugh out of this. i gave them directions to the road and then i called a guy i know when the border patrol and i said, i am now and aiding and

abetting criminal enterprise that i said there were four guys in the forest road 58 waiting for you guys to pick them up and bite you go do that. anyway, in writing the article for virginia quarterly review i developed sources. and the border patrol and other enforcement agencies are learned the ins and outs of drug smuggling from them. i went over the border with them on a couple of clandestine missions, so we were kind of illegal aliens on the other side of the law. and there were a lot of things, because this novel takes place primarily on a cattle ranch in southern arizona that i didn't know about cow buoying and cattle raising. i've got a lot of friends who are cowboys and cattle ranchers and they allowed me, this total incompetent cowboy, to go one a

couple of roundups and a couple of branding so i could learn about that or go again, does the kind of thing you would do as a journalist. and i interviewed them about ranching is the business. in addition to that again, i picked up a lot of lower. one cowboy friend of mine he used to live in the san rafael valley but moved because he and his wife and small children were harassed so much by drug deals, he told me a story i used in the novel about one night at 3:00 in the morning for drug dealers on their way back to mexico banged on the door and wanted something to be. and, he made in a butter sandwiches them. he went outside, holding the sandwiches in one and one hand on a plate and a 357 revolver in the other hand just in case they wanted something more than the

peanut butter sandwiches. gave them the food in a little while later, about two weeks later he and his wife were out of town on a vacation and they came back and found their host-- house had been broken into and the freezer, where they had just butchered a, had been broken open and all the steak stolen out of it. he said he was pretty sure it was the same guys letting him know that they didn't like tina butter. [laughter] anyway, one of the reasons i did turn this into a novel is that as a journalist you are restricted to the facts, even in this day and age of new journalism have i felt there were certain emotional truths and psychological truth that i could only get across through a novel. the kind of truths that william paul are called those of the human heart in conflict with itself. and that which i think is what

the novelist province should be. and that imagination can shine as right is not a brighter light on the truth as journalist can. so, as this novel "crossers," church of the reality of life on the border today, and the answer is yes and no. it is a novel but i think of a novel as a truth that's grating grading as a lie back. thank you turko. [applause] there are two microphones here and please line up that you have questions. this being a somewhat volatile topic, if you were going to make a statement at least put a? knack at the end. while you are lighting up with questions, i want to throw out a question for the panel to discuss just among the three of you and then we will get to questions from all of you. to the panel, when will it and?

margaret five years from now will someone write a book called the death of immigration stories from the mexican border and phil will things get more and more depressing? david will then portion of things he witnessed in your trips continually get worse? how can this be reversed? immigration results from push and pull factors. what compels somebody to leave point a and what attracts them to.e. drug smuggling on the other hand is a result of supply and demand. who grows it and where and who consumes it and for how much? is that it or can we move into a more sane direction? you three, taken away. >> i guess i will start since you asked me first. unfortunately i think there's a good chance five years from now somebody else will be writing a book called the death of julio was that? the fact is the united states

shares a 2000-mile border with mexico and we have a poor country next to a very wealthy country and i think long-term the only thing that is going to be preventing people from wanting to move to the outside word is poor to the side where there are more economic opportunities as economic development in mexico. in my book or tell the story of a small coffee co-op that got started with a $20,000 microloan from the presbyterian church. it is now supporting a village of 200 families in salvador. 80 other young people have returned home from the united states he could as now they can control, they can earn a living wage back home. they control their own coffee as a co-op or good they don't have to sell it to the big companies. this is a very small model into me and all the research i did this was the most optimistic thing, that you are helping people to stay home because most of them want to stay home and

helping them earn a living. unfortunately we are looking more at spending several billion dollars on border enforcement and i think we are probably going to continue in that direction. >> david. >> margaret was the carrot. i will be the state. so we will just kind of jump into all the different dynamics of everything. talking about migration and talking about migration north of mexico. one point about that, i think it is difficult for us as americans to understand there is internal dynamics that take lace in the mexico. the population of the border on the mexican side has doubled since nafta in 1994. coming north into the united states might he consider getting to harvard, and heading into some of the monkey love's--

there is different opportunities there is a lot of industrial work there. there is migration that takes place inside mexico, north from mexico. a lot of that has been transpiring from industrialization. it is difficult for us also to capture the type of machismo that is granted to a mexican man when he successfully completes a crossing north through the desert. running the devil's highway is an adrenaline rush and it is a, i don't want to say of honor, but there may be a little bit of a gold star at the end are some bragging rights. from my perspective, i think part of doing something about it is taking the devil's highway a way. i think that has to be part of the solution. i think that has to be part of the solution and a bilateral

pattern. one of the things i have seen that i think it's is an encouraging sign is the partnership between mexican law enforcement and the border patrol that are patrolling the border together. i think that is something that usefully could expand regions of the border where people don't live. the devil's highway that runs through the barry coldwater training range, which you are familiar with here, which our viewers can see on the map up there, those are places people should be going. those are places right now that are governed by the drug smugglers and the quoyote's. i think preventing them from physically getting there has to be part of the solution.

>> finally, phil. >> coming up for questions, if you have any. continue. >> both margaret and david, talking about solutions, some of which you have to understand i think would or, i don't really think of it is a problem because i don't think there's a solution bring it under some sort of said in here i am going. i know there is lots of illegal immigration from el salvador and guatemala and about, from what i

i 90% of those, is that country, if you look at the statistics depending it has actually got a bigger economy in i think there ought social revolution an awful lot of is produced in that country to the people.

we have aggravated it some other measures, i big social change in rarity that is inherent from what i heard talking about economic justice. as far as the drug regulating which the to put a lot of you

know, i would like especially some of the guys who ought to know better so they can go out and get another every time they do that that cocaine, and most of i don't know if that but i think it would do we have questions coming up? here, a few. very quickly or want to in the

last panel, the last discussion that was here in what happens to a result of migration. can any of you three discuss what happens to a major american city as a result i think there were 340 people that could clear in terms of the economic strain physical strain, well there is a reason why it is a divisive issue him hospital's.

so many migrants to pay for. i would that strains us a place like tucson many productive workers who happen not to have papers allowing them to be in this country and i think they are country co-taxes and social security are taken out of their paychecks. they are never going to see that social security money. they say it is helping to. the local schools are getting money from just like any other working family, the local the real estate think of contributed

could you it is a two edged sword. there immigration is put a great strain on social this country. there is a great contribution the and i don't know if the landscaping crew, a construction crew or a roofing crew or anything, including the ones i don't think there is them, on

the work that, so they made a contribution to now i have got who complains that she says, she is a rancher and she says i have got these migrants coming through and they have stolen my truck but if i were living instead of that she says i don't and it is okay is how i feel about,, you introduce the panel

i think just for 10 years, not for 20 years but for many, many to guadalupe day, that they thee been these it brought people back and forth across can remember a time in the early '80s was a u.s. war zone between mexico very nuanced ways, when people from el salvador and wars in fled a particular area a, helping

because of in military determine to six months later we would see of bombing. so, here it, for us?

, to create why are the most wealthy, to that are can any of you three address that? don't feel compelled, but if you yeah hacking industry in the united states benefits chicken and poultry processing industry benefits and the status quo is a

lot less money and with a lot less benefits than you of is that to work that americans aren't willing to do. in some cases that is true if you are talking it is that americans the amount of money that is now under a to american workers and discovered they could so they are i am sure

there is a lot of people, who just. >> boeing, millions to erect these border walls we are projecting i think want to pay to put virtual towers all the way across so far i don't know what the numbers are. i have it written down someplace that it is almost like on some

level if you want there were many interests in the united states. i'm a veteran rumor of war. i use that for. my comment in question to you is, there is of a middle is a great middle class in the united states is why we are such either have it or you don't in mexico so there is definitely a class system. i wonder if you would comment on

those flowing from mexico. >> or kos be one of the thing that i've been puzzled about is there is that i in, and by northern mexicans i am speaking the, as we work our way west to east's human development index had it is in those mexico city

it the winter solstice holiday celebrated one thing. i have yet to meet a single person more than one when you go over 80% of the people that i've

in the united states in many cases for a year story was about a by the most common method i found up to legal cross, went to las vegas a because he wanted to learn english more leverageable skill for him in mexico. he was very excited to be able he was a college graduate who's he wanted to go across a year, but is now living an internal

dynamic taking is hard for me to capture and hard to understand and in saying that that is something that needs twofold, one think the border is a condition to be managed rather dying in the desert and i would like to see both the. >> first to comment and part of the problem lemma we are in is that we the we have revised you

are a european descendent white in 2000 by a done this

gigantic research project on his family history and his life, and i had just risen that for the tucson weekly went i went down there. his immigration history was his grandparents came from ireland in 1872 just like all these people we see today, very poor rural people driven out by poverty and desperation. they arrived in philadelphia, a great big city, and they both died in their 30's and their children were orphaned. the it for children. two died and the mother died at

the age of 34, the father died at the age of 36. it was pretty much a disaster. my grandfather was orphaned at age of 11, left to raise his hopes on the streets of philadelphia. that is one of the shading stories of my whole life. i think about it around st. patrick's day. and when i was down there in douglas and i just had this whole consciousness of what happened to my family and how difficult it was for the first generation who came over here and i saw this same thing happening again very, very poor people trying to get here, just trying to go where they could make a living. and you know, it made me realize in this romantic immigration story that and the stories that we tell ourselves is always a big success. yeah my ancestors came over. it's very, very difficult. has been difficult for all the ancestors come all the people in this room ensure. so that's where i'm coming from, and i have that consciousness

all the time when i'm writing about the immigrants today. .. >> i will tell you, as you can tell by this last name, and italian ancestry, and some years ago, i was talking to a guy from new jersey, also of italian

ancestry. and he says, in his best kind of, you know, soprano accent, he says so when did your people come over here? and i said, well, my great grandfather came here in 1884. and jesus, 1884? he says, that was the f'ing mayflower. [laughter] >> but anyway, that is a story. and so i do want to point out that, you know, it is true that, if your white skin now he were a descendent of european immigrant, you are a hero. but back in my great grandfather and my grandparents day, if you are italian, as was the case of barbarous ancestors, probably 50s to 100 years ago if you are irish, you were not a hero.

foreshore. and are used to be signed, in fact, on factory gates allegedly anyway that said no irish need apply, and so forth like that. but i will have just one confession to make, is my great grandfather whom i just spoke was, would be classified as an illegal immigrant. he originally went to canada. he was a minor by profession, and then he basically locked over the line. and got a job with the great northern railroad when they were building it from chicago to seattle. and got himself into some sort of trouble, of which it's never been specified exactly what that trouble was, but i heard he shot a man. and got on the train and went back to chicago from somewhere

in montana. so that's my -- my mothers side by the wind was a little more addition, but that's not as interesting. [laughter] >> david, wrap it up in a minute or two picked. >> my father side was a time, mother site is mission of english, scots irish, cherokee and osage. >> okay. >> so i got a multi-breed. >> on behalf of the panel a >> from today's book tv coverage of the tucson festival of books, dan bowls discusses the outcome of the battle for america 2008 with moderator on great journey.

[inaudible conversations] >> thank you everybody. we are very excited to be having this event here. first of all i want to take a moment to thank everybody who has been involved with the tucson festival of books. i think all of us who are here have seen in a very short time this festival has grown to one of the really premiere book events in the country, one of the really important pieces of our arizona landscape and one streak may have been over last week that we have a new streak of great book festival event so let's give everybody a big round of applause. [applause] we are very excited to have dan also here today and we are going to have a conversation and open it up to questions. i will ask when you do ask a

question please come to one of the microphones so not only the people in this room can hear you but all of the fine folks watching at home on c-span can hear you as well. and then of course after we are done here, dan has graciously agreed to sign copies to all those who would like one. he will be at the madden media signing area, tent b. i don't know if that is how they decided. he is right out light into the right and of course if you are watching at home you can go on amazon.com as we speak and order his look or any of your find local bookstores. dan balz is truly the dean of national political journalists. he has been writing for "the washington post" since 1978 and has a massive track record as someone who is not just been covering the day-to-day events, but really providing a level analysis and thoughtfulness that is fairly unique. he has been called i tom brokaw

somebody who goes to the head of the class when the subject is presidential campaigns. and if class is the right word he used with dan for many reasons because in a field where it has a share of egos and prima donnas, dan is a somebody told me the other day, a true gentleman so we are lucky to have him here today. please join me in welcoming him. [applause] dan, yours is i think the subtitle calls it an extraordinary campaign. it is an extraordinary book as well, and it really is one that tells a story that is so thrilling, even for all of us who have lived through it over the past two years. as i said you have been covering presidential campaigns for three decades now. why was this-- why did you

decide to write this book? b-1 haynes johnson and i got together to talk about this he called me in early february 2007 and he said i have an idea i want to talk you about. we agreed we would have brought us the next morning and i went home that night and i said to my wife nancy, haynes called the dan wants to have breakfast and he has an idea you want to talk about. she said if it is a look idea, just say yes. [laughter] she knew haynes had written 14 books and i had written one. but, we sat down that morning and it was remarkable because he outlined in his mind the concept for a book that he thought we ought to do for the 2008 campaign. and i said to him, haynes, i am two thirds of the way through a book or postal for a book that is almost identical to the book you are talking about in here is what we both live at that point rico weaver added pivot., that this was going to be a very big

election. we didn't know how it was going to come out and we didn't know at that point who the nominees were going to be but we knew after eight years of the bush administration and after the end of the clinton administration, that this was a deeply unhappy country, the war in iraq could split the country, that we were at a point in our economic history where the impact of globalization was causing anxiety. we did not know obviously at that point how bad the economy was going to become. we felt this was likely to be a cast of characters unlike any we have seen in many elections. haynes's goes back to the 50s in terms of covering presidential all it takes. we just felt that this was going to be a significant election and a potential turning point of the history of the country. it was our feeling that it was a campaign that no matter what happened thomas deserved a book

at the end of it. we knew that this was a campaign that was going to be covered as closely as any campaign had ever been and not just day by day or hour by hour by the literally minutes i minute given the role of new media at our sense was that this was also a campaign worthy of the history books and what we wanted to do was write a good narrative history of the. >> that is an answer same point to lead on because your book is part of a long tradition of presidential campaign books going back to teddy white making the president in 1960 and joe mcguinness, richard dan kramer. there has been a great tradition of these kinds of books and i think 2006 or early 2007, matt bayh from the magazine wrote a piece basically saying that this genre was dead four that you just couldn't write these kinds of books anymore in an era that was as he said being covered excessively by 24 hour cable news or logs that had much more

guarded candidates and campaigns. clearly your book as you said is a counterpoint to that are co-what were the challenges though of writing this kind of book that is going to be one for the history books but also one that that is being written soon after the election in this kind of era? >> well, it is a great question. the first challenge is to find a publisher willing to buy the book because for a number of years, this genre went out of favor with publishers for exact reason you are suggesting which is that at a time you got to the end of a campaign, people felt they knew everything there was to know about it and in many ways they did know everything they needed to know about it are co-and so, for a wild publishers were very gun shy. i know i approached an agent and an earlier campaign cycle with the idea of doing one in his view was, almost impossible, if not impossible to sell are co-so that was our first challenge,

and certainly in the proposal that we put together we tried to stress, for the reasons i outlined why we thought this was different, why we thought this was a different campaign. the challenge once we got viking to buy the book and incidentally they were a fantastic publisher to deal with throughout this, the challenge once we were sitting down to write was, okay how do you tell people a story they think they already know? so, we did a couple of things that we think were the keys to that are co-one was that we did a lot of interviews for this book along the way, to try to have a contemporaneous account of events so that everything we did was not simply after-the-fact because it is easy for people in the middle of a campaign or at the end of it to revise history and what you wanted to do was give people's impressions as you were going through and a lot of the interviews i conducted with

campaign people were done with the understanding that that material would not appear until the book came out. they were basically embargoed from the book are co-i was doing elite journalism for "the washington post" that the post was good enough to let you do this on that race is. the second was to pull the campaign apart at the end of that and put it back together in ways that would create or re-create a sense of suspense and a drama in which everybody does know the ending. so part of that is with fresh material you were able to unearth and part of that was in the writing process. we have a fabulous editor on this vote, jim silverman who is the imprint on this book and jim said to us that one point where we were putting the book together an outline form and had ideas on progression into this topic or depression into this topic are co-he said just remember with this story never get far away from the narrative.

the narrative will drive this book and if you do it right will keep people engaged even though they know how it turns out. the third thing we did was, we did not want this book simply to be an inside story of the campaign. our view is while that is interesting, it is interesting to a more limited audience, and though that is part of this book, our sense was we wanted to be able to set this campaign against the backdrop of where the country was in 2007 and 2008 are co-it has always been my view that presidential campaigns are not simply about the candidates. they are about the country at any particular moment. they are a snapshot of where we are collectively as the country. haynes over his career has always been a master at drawing a portrait of where america is at a given time, so we wanted to build an