In 1961 Theodore White published The Making of the President, 1960. It turned out to be the initial volume of a famous series. The book was the first and arguably the best of the instant analyses of presidential elections and presidencies that now form a whole genre of nonfiction. The two books under review differ considerably but easily fall into the genre as it exists in the early twenty-first century.

The Obama Victory follows the campaign in close detail, concentrating on the day-to-day ups and downs. These were determined by advertisements, good and bad; the statements of candidates; media coverage; and events at home and around the world. If for any reason you need a blow-by-blow account of the summer and early fall of 2008, this is your book. The narrative is supplemented by regression analyses, more charts than you can shake a stick at, special lingo, and a daunting statistical chapter, primarily written by a young scholar (a fourth author) who is able to show off his mathematical prowess and some new techniques. The result is undoubtedly a more scientific and quantifiable understanding of who voted for Obama and why.

Nonetheless, one must wonder how high the price is for this understanding. In the usual case the authors wind up their exposition of a certain point by saying: it is likely; the evidence suggests; the data indicate; we can see that a role was played by … The methodological tour de force has produced a minuscule advance in political explanation. In addition, the authors’ grasp of the election often begins at ground zero. That is, they often seem to have learned in the seminar room basics that ought to be intuitional. For example, the writers state as their premise that they wanted to see “what part, if any, media, money and message” played. If part of your hypothesis is that these variables may have played no part, you should not be studying politics. Finally, this book repeats itself again and again. In some measure this is because it was written by a committee; in some measure because the writers belong to the PhD school of prose, which instructs us to tell the reader what we are going to tell the reader, and tell them again when we conclude. Finally, we get reiterations because the book takes a thematic, next a chronological, and at last a “moments that matter” approach. Each circumstance appears at least three times.

The Obama Victory is a serious book, but it is perhaps fatally marred by its repetitions and sludgy prose. The other effort, Reading Obama, only indirectly concerns itself with the election, but rather places the new leader in the rich history of presidential thought and the thought of Obama's own time.

Kloppenberg, who teaches history at Harvard, begins by reconstructing the intellectual context in which Obama was educated, and outstandingly depicts the left–liberal social thinking that the future President absorbed at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard. One might describe this ethos as that of postmodern pragmatism. It takes us from Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions to Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. For someone trained as a practitioner as Obama was, however, the ideas mix early and late John Rawls – from a Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism. Kloppenberg also successfully suggests that the President's own background as a “mutt” who adapted to different cultures fits neatly into the experimentalist, anti-absolutist learning on offer in Obama's academy.

Kloppenberg, I believe, is less compelling when he tries to make the case that Obama internalized these high ideas in any detail. Moreover, I don't think that the close absorption of this erudite writing is necessary for the author's case. More important, it involves Kloppenberg not just in exposition of figures like Rawls and Rorty, but also in exhaustive exegesis of minor thinkers like Hilary Putnam and Richard Bernstein whose views seem to me entirely peripheral to American politics. Kloppenberg implicitly takes the position that the more politicians have an intellectually credible notion, the greater the chance that they will be effective and admirable.

This is the aspect of the book that one doubts, and it is a function of the author's desire to be first with a valuable appraisal of Obama. Reading Obama was written during the President's honeymoon in 2009, and it appeared after the mid-term elections when Obama tanked. We would unfortunately judge his ability either on the basis of 2009, or 2010. But Kloppenberg is unrelenting in his positive evaluation of the President. Some of Kloppenberg's indefatigable optimism comes from when the book was written, but some of it comes from the axiom that ideas count for the good, and that Obama has the ideas of a Harvard professor. We need to step back here and give the President more credit than being a Cambridge product, and also to recognize that, as Plato put it, knowledge is not virtue. Ideas are no guarantee of commendable decision-making, and in any event it is far too soon to make such an appraisal. A real pragmatist has to wait to see if Obama works.

The flavor that ran through the books of Theodore White was his belief in democracy, that whoever won, deserved to win. We don't find that spirit in either of these more academic descendents of White's. Kloppenberg has a prescriptive view of democracy: some people ought to win on the basis of their scholarly character. The multiple authors of The Obama Victory look to future changes in the techniques candidates will use to achieve victory, and hope that the techniques will allow the best candidate to prevail. But as a good small-d democrat, you must believe that the candidate who prevails is the best; winning is the only thing.