Richard Wolffe is what they call a political embed. As a reporter with Newsweek, he was on assignment to cover Barack Obama’s campaign from its earliest stages — back when the Senator from Chicago took on the seeming inevitability of a Hillary Clinton Democratic nomination. He also had unusual access to “the candidate” (as he is inclined to refer to Obama) and his campaign staff. A measure can be had from a remark reported in the afterword. Days after the race speech in Philadelphia, Wolffe had just finished a long interview for a profile of the candidate’s early years in Indonesia and in college, and remarked how even after the two memoirs there was a vast curiosity about who Obama really was. “You’re absolutely right,” responded Obama. “If I wasn’t in this campaign, I would love to follow this election as an observer. Why can’t you write a book about it?”

The book written about it is difficult to find fault with even as a sense of incompleteness lingers after it has been read. The account is fascinating, especially in the early bits when Obama and his advisers are trying to figure out whether he should run in 2008. Wolffe builds up the story incrementally with accounts by all those involved at each step. And perhaps that is the problem. He is so caught up in collating quotes from those who were there as it happened, in compiling the inside story, that he loses the distance needed to appreciate just how remarkable Obama’s story really is.

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