Renegade: The Making of a President »

Richard Wolffe is an award-winning journalist and political analyst for MSNBC television, appearing frequently on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and Hardball. He covered the entire length of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign for Newsweek magazine. Before Newsweek, Wolffe was a senior journalist at the Financial Times, serving as its deputy bureau chief and U.S. diplomatic correspondent. He lives with his wife and their three children in Washington, D.C.

This audiobook is the previously untold and epic story of how a political newcomer with no money and an alien name grew into the world’s most powerful leader. But it is also a uniquely intimate portrait of the person behind the iconic posters and the Secret Service code name Renegade.

Drawing on a dozen unplugged interviews with the candidate and president, as well as twenty-one months covering his campaign as it traveled from coast to coast, Richard Wolffe answers the simple yet enduring question about Barack Obama: Who is he?

Based on Wolffe’s unprecedented access to Obama, Renegade reveals the making of a president, both on the campaign trail and before he ran for high office. It explains how the politician who emerged in an extraordinary election learned the personal and political skills to succeed during his youth and early career. Richard Wolffe shares with us his front-row seat at Obama’s announcement to run for president on a frigid day in...

The Washington Post - Ted Widmer

Renegade"stakes an audacious claim to its own importance and largely lives up to it…the book is clear, concise and well written, effectively retelling a story that still astonishes us, even after we all lived through it

1 Change 1

2 The Decider 22

3 Rules for Radicals 59

4 Failure 104

5 Barack X 138

6 Game Changer 186

7 Alien 232

8 The Reckoning 274

9 Transition 301

Afterword 329

Postscript to the Paperback Edition 335

Acknowledgments 339

Source Notes 343

Index 351