No one comes off worse in “Game Change” — the best-selling chronicle of the 2008 presidential campaign by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann — than Elizabeth Edwards, whose public persona as a stoic cancer victim (“St. Elizabeth”) was wildly at odds with her shrill haughtiness.
HBO optioned the rights to the book, and Halperin told us he can’t wait for the movie or miniseries. Asked who should play Elizabeth, Halperin dead-panned to Page Six, “I like Rosie O’Donnell.”
And who could play Sarah Palin? “Palin could play herself. It seems she’s willing to do almost anything for money. It would be great stunt-casting,” Halperin said.
The authors, at a Time Inc. panel discussion Wednesday, were asked by host Joe Scarborough how they got 300 political operatives to grant them interviews. “Is this one of these [Bob] Woodward things — cooperate or die?” asked the “Morning Joe” host, as the audience at the Time-Life Building laughed.
“No, more like ‘Cooperate or get hurt,’ ” replied Halperin, who covered the campaign for Time magazine. “We weren’t dealing with strangers,” said Heilemann.
Asked if anyone had complained about the book’s accuracy, Halperin replied, “Literally, no one.” He added that they were scrupulous about their facts because “we want to continue to be reporters.”
The authors said a turning point in the campaign came in February 2007, when David Geffen, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg co-hosted a fund-raiser for Barack Obama in Beverly Hills, long a Clinton stronghold. “At the time [Geffen] did that, the assumption was that the Clinton machine was unbeatable,” Heilemann said.
Geffen, a former Clinton loyalist, twisted the knife when he told Maureen Dowd, “Everybody in politics lies, but [the Clintons] do it with such ease it’s troubling.”