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It's been exactly four weeks since Game Change: Obama and the Clinton, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime was published. Co-written by New York magazine writer John Heilemann and Time magazine's Mark Halperin, it's become an instant bestseller (currently #1 on the NY Times list) and reviewed in such non-political journals as Entertainment Weekly, so great is its gossip factor.

And it's that gossip factor that has led commentators to blast it for being completely superficial, such as Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald, who wrote last month that

the book is filled with the type of petty, catty, gossipy, trashy sniping that is the staple of sleazy tabloids and reality TV shows, and it has been assembled through anonymous gossip, accountability-free attributions, and contrived melodramatic dialogue masquerading as "reporting."

Having just completed reading it over the weekend,  I would counter Greenwald on a couple of points.  For one thing, as the writers said in an inteview on BayNews 9 yesterday,  there really hasn't been any pushback from those who are quoted in the book, though of course those quotes are not attributed to any particular source.

There have been several much-hyped campaign books published about the 2008 election, and before I began reading this one I questioned how interesting the entire premise could be.  Having finished it, I'd still argue that much of this is re-hashing of the (at times) incredibly exhilarating Clinton/Obama Democratic primary, with some John McCain stuff added on.

One thing is the absolute anger and even loathing that Hillary and Bill Clinton expressed toward Barack Obama, especially in their belief that his camp was absolutely playing the race card.  Their frustrations (shared by many Republicans) with what they claim was the media's  refusal to get tough on Obama is especially illuminating.

Then there's the sheer hell inside Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign staff, which led to the problems we all read about two years ago. The book has an extended play-by-play discussion of Clinton with the much-hated campaign strategist Mark Penn in the summer of '08, after she had conceded and Obama was already working on the general election.

Clinton told Penn that she took responsibility for the dysfunctional nature of her campaign, but she said that it would have been a hard campaign anyway, because,

"We had the entire press corps against us, which usually Bill and I could care less, but this was above and beyond anything that had ever happened.  I mean, it was just a relentless, total hit job, day in and day out.  I don't mind that, because people seem to do hit jobs on me, but with a total free ride for (Obama).  It wasn't even a one-to-ten parity, in terms of anything that we thought would be put out there that might get traction.  And you know, it was really hard to run against an African American when the entire Democratic Establishment was scared to death.  They could not deal with it."

On playing the so-called race card, Clinton said,

"And I would love to get all their internal documents about playing the race card, because I know it was their strategy."

The other part of Game Change that's illuminating is how utterly unprepared Sarah Palin was to become vice president, and how utterly irresponsible the McCain camp was for selecting her.

Although she was asked as recently as this past weekend on Fox News Sunday about her possible Presidential ambitions, after reading the chapters about her two months as a vice presidential candidate, one would be hard pressed to take that seriously.

John McCain comes across looking worse.  And in both Game Change and in former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's new book, the Arizona Republican's attempt to dramatically save the economy — like his announcement days before the first debate between himself and Obama that he was canceling his campaign appearances to "work" on solving the financial crises — come across as embarrassing.

For close observers of Heilemann and Halperin's previous work, it's sometimes apparent who has worked more on certain chapters.  Halperin appears to have the awesome intel in Hillaryland, while Heilemann, a far better writer, seems to be the one working on the Obama chapters.

On their BayNews9 interview, the two said they never would have worked on the book if it didn't include the fascinating battle between the Clinton and Obama camps. If that means Game Change is the definitive tome on that epic campaign, then political junkies should be sated.