Campaign 2012: how we dodged a bullet: Mitt Romney didn't lose because of the GOP's far-right agenda. That's what's scary.

• Author: Kilgore, Ed

The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

Simon & Schuster, 428 pp.

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Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America

by Dan Balz

Viking, 381 pp.

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The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election

by John Sides and Lynn Vavrick

Princeton, 352 pp.

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To those of us who wrote on a daily or weekly basis about the 2012 presidential campaign, it was a long, hard slog with countless significant moments that brought us to a conclusion that less attentive observers might have predicted (and often did predict) from the beginning: a decisive but not overwhelming victory for the incumbent president over the early front-runner among opposition-party candidates. In conjunction with a general backlash among journalists, political scientists, and even political practitioners against hyperventilating coverage of presidential campaigns (typified, it was often said, by the 2010 John Heilemann and Mark Halperin book Game Change), writers of 2012 postmortems have struggled to balance the drama we experienced and the determinism we perceived. This is evident in the two major conventional books on the campaign that have appeared so far: writer Jonathan Alter's The Center Holds and Collision 2012, by the Washington Post's Dan Balz. The discounting of campaign drama has more recently been taken to a new level by political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavrick in The Gamble, which might have been subtitled Nothing to See Here, Folks.

All three of these books accept the premise that either party or candidate might have won last November, but none of them identifies the moment in which Barack Obama won and Mitt Romney lost. Alter focuses on Obama's 2012 campaign as well as the post-election struggle with the GOP that ensued the moment he won in 2008 and continues today. Obama, suggests Alter, was saved by a superior campaign strategy and organization that effectively exploited the Romney campaign's mistakes. Balz, who has written the traditional, balanced, and "granular" account of the campaign cycle from beginning to end, appears to believe that the delusions of the GOP and the Romney campaign lost the party a winnable election. Sides and Vavrick take the provocative but stimulating route of considering every explanation of the outcome other than the "fundamentals" (basically, the power of incumbency and acceptably positive economic trends and...