For Romney’s aides, dealing with Christie’s overbearing team was about as pleasurable as a traffic jam on the New Jersey Turnpike. For Christie’s staff in Trenton, the feeling toward the Romney machine was pretty much mutual.
Many months after Romney’s loss, that toxic relationship is revealed in page-turning detail in “Double Down,” a chronicle of last year’s grind-it-out election by journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. The authors deploy the conversation-driving formula that propelled their previous book, “Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime,” to bestseller status and a movie deal with HBO. (The same network has already optioned the rights to “Double Down.”) The duo’s M.O. — translating insider politics for mass-market readers with behind-the-scenes reporting and Gonzo flair — is custom-built for today’s news cycle, in which scoops explode on Twitter and oblige the rest of the political media to chase, confirm, refute, scrutinize, analyze to death. The digital blast radius for “Double Down” is infinite.
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