The rush by authors to cash in on the Obama brand was both predictable and inevitable; just as foreseeable is the general worthlessness of most of the post-election tomes purporting to reveal something new about the president. The 2008 election, imbued as it was with history and merchandising opportunities, has been an irresistible, shining bug-zapper to authors ranging from the friendly (Richard Wolffe’s Renegade: The Making of a President) to the hyperbolically hostile (Michelle Malkin’s Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies).

But in an election that took place during the golden age (relatively speaking) of the 24-hour news cycle, blogging and YouTube, all authors are having an equally difficult time unearthing information that is both new and interesting.

If there is one book on the 2008 election worth one’s time, however, it’s Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson’s The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election. Balz, whose skilled reporting and measured style stood out during an election cycle that brought out the worst in so many others, and Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize winner and journalism chair at the University of Maryland, managed to put together an election chronicle that’s a must-read for political junkies, history buffs and everyone else looking to understand the pivotal public event of this generation.

The book justifies its pretensions as the premier chronicle of the campaign that launched a thousand book deals almost entirely on the strength of its reporting, providing the reader access and managing to navigate through the almost labyrinthine trail of screw-ups and dysfunction that led to the collapse of both the once-inevitable Hillary Clinton campaign and the more shoe-string John McCain effort.

Historians will justifiably hone in on the enormous implications of the election of America’s first black president; political scientists, however, will probably appreciate the book just as much for the painstaking way in which the authors manage to track how Hillary Clinton went from the future president of the United States to an also-ran in a matter of months. Balz and Johnson keep a continuous focus on the internal squabbles of the Clinton campaign through to the bitter end, and use their access to key players like Mark Penn to allow these figures to speak for themselves (and, in Penn’s case, say enough to injure their own credibility without forcing the authors to sully their hands).

The biggest scoops, however, come with Balz and Johnson’s narration of the most noxious side effect of the 2008 election: the unleashing of Sarah Palin on the American public. Not only are some long-standing questions cleared up (yes, Palin did tell the McCain campaign about her daughter’s pregnancy; no, she really didn’t prepare that much for her interviews with Katie Couric), but information is provided that allows for some genuine insights into the personality who has now become the Republican party’s most polarizing figure.

Indeed, Palin comes off as an almost-sympathetic figure, with the caveat being that most of her problems stemmed from her own insecurities, miscalculations and paranoia — Balz and Johnson have her blaming the scheduling of the Couric interviews, and her subsequent poor performance, on McCain aide and former CBS employee Nicolle Wallace. At the same time, she was apparently so worried about losing standing with her home voters in Alaska that she put off studying up on the issues, to better ensure that surveys for the local Alaska newspapers were filled out properly.

If the tome has any major flaws, they were likely forced on the authors by the rush to have the book on shelves before the market could be flooded with other serious works on the Obama presidency.

Balz and Johnson easily could have added a couple hundred pages to the work and still not harmed the book’s ebb and flow; there’s no narrative reason why the authors couldn’t have gone more in depth on something like the selection of Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate, which is dispatched in two sentences and treated as far more of an inevitability than it seemed at the time.

In reality, very few observers predicted Biden to be the choice when Obama wrapped up the nomination; a run-down of how the Obama campaign weighed and dismissed the idea of selecting Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh or Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine — just to name a few options who seemed more likely than Biden in June 2008 — wouldn’t seem to have been expecting too much.

It’s this perspective, choosing to focus on the campaign with an eye toward the eventual results, that will probably keep the book from taking its place among the immortal chronicles of past presidential elections, most of which were authored by Teddy White.

The book gives short shrift to what didn’t happen, honing in from the start on tracking the progress of only three actors (Obama, McCain and Clinton) and thus robbing the reader of the chance to be thrust back into the uncertainty of late 2007 and early 2008, in which Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani seemed just as, if not more, likely to claim the Republican nomination as John McCain.

Ultimately, it doesn’t make the product offered up by Balz and Johnson any less readable or enjoyable — but it does slightly diminish the book’s utility as a genuine first draft of history of the 2008 campaign.

— Contact Asher Smith.