Tales from the Trail

Tucked inside Washington is a fenced-in, heavily guarded complex housing the president, the vice president and all their top aides. It is 18 acres of important turf and that is why Nicolle Wallace entitled her novel, “Eighteen Acres.” 

Nicolle is a Republican who was a top communications adviser to President George W. Bush and a senior campaign adviser to John McCain in 2008. She has drawn from those experiences to write a novel about three powerful women: the president, the White House chief of staff, and a White House correspondent.

In the book, President Charlotte Kramer’s administration is at risk of imploding over rumors of her husband’s secret affair.

We spoke with Nicolle and she said writing the book was a great way to get the 2008 campaign out of her system.

“It’s my best attempt at a story that I hope people will pick up and read and enjoy and maybe feel like they’re getting to see what it’s really like in the White House in this entirely fictionarl story,” she said.

You’ve seen the Sarah Palin book excerpts in which she complains about being “bottled up” by Republican John McCain’s campaign last year.

Long-time McCain adviser Mark Salter explains here the thinking behind the McCain campaign’s media strategy that Palin seems to be complaining about in an excerpt of her book published by the Drudgereport today.

“After we had been criticized in the press for a lack of disciplined messaging earlier in the campaign when we provided frequent and unscheduled access to the candidate, we felt it necessary to adopt the same deliberativeness and discipline employed by our opponents and rely less on impromptu press conferences with our traveling press, and more on interviews arranged in advance so our candidates would have the same opportunity our opponents enjoyed to discuss and prepare for the interview.