REVIVAL is out on Tuesday, but details are already starting to leak. Here’s the first take from Mike Allen at Politico:

FIRST LOOK - Richard Wolffe's "Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House" - out Tuesday -- $17.16 on Amazon http://amzn.to/cDkbGR -- Among the juicy bits from Richard's all-access semester in the West Wing ("based on my contemporaneous notes of White House events from January to March 2010"): 

--"How and why Obama grew detached from Change - even as he was enacting big changes - is one of the stories at the heart of this White House." (p. 7) 

--"[O]ther senior staffers believed that [former Chief of Staff Rahm] Emanuel's excess energy was a major part of the problem ... In place of the rigid discipline of the presidential campaign, instead of their no-drama style and the strategic focus, ideas ricocheted around the West Wing with each firing of Emanuel's synapses. 'It's all tactics and no strategy,' said one of Emanuel's close colleagues. 'That's something the president feels very strongly he's missing. How do I get from here to where I want to go? It's all tactical and it's all Rahm. He has no follow-through and no management. Nobody is there to check that what was decided in the seven-thirty meeting actually happens. The problem with Rahm is that, yes, he's brilliant. But he is purely tactical, and he changes his mind based on a conversation he just had with Paul Begala. There are many times when Axe has to shout him down to drop an idea or a tactic. And his style is unbelievably bad. It's just too abusive." (p. 55-6)

--"The Revivalists were campaign loyalists who believed in the transformational spirit of Change. They nurtured a sense of mission ... The Survivalists were political insiders who measured Change in the smaller increments of the here and now. They saw themselves as scrappy realists ... Obama himself straddled both groups, leaving the questions about his character and purpose unresolved." (p. 94-5) 

--"The Survivalists were represented by Emanuel, senior adviser Pete Rouse, deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, and congressional liaison Phil Schiliro. And the Revivalists were represented by Axelrod, senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, press secretary Robert Gibbs, former campaign manager David Plouffe, and two communications directors, Anita Dunn and Dan Pfeiffer." (p. 116) 

--Larry "Summers was a Survivalist, and his opposition often lay among the Revivalists at the Council of Economic Advisers: [Christina] Romer, as well as Obama's campaign economist Austan Goolsbee, a young University of Chicago economics professor." (p. 176) 

--"Emanuel was the master of the system, not the man to change it." (p. 99) 

--"Everyone knew the communications effort was struggling, including Dunn and her successor, Dan Pfeiffer, who had spent several weeks reviewing their operations. He wrote his critique in a seven-page memo and delivered a forty-five minute version of his conclusions to the team in the Roosevelt Room. Pfeiffer believed the Cabinet was underused in 2009. They had failed to coordinate their message with Democrats in Congress and Democratic pundits on cable and in print. Rapid response and planning were both in trouble. Above all, they needed to be more strategic in using the president's time. They relied too much on him to deliver the message. 

"Obama agreed. He was out there all by himself. There were a few cabinet officials out there, but most were hardly seen or heard. The other side was running a campaign against them, but they weren't running a campaign back. It was all defense and no offense. And they needed to accomplish what he had always set out to do as a community organizer, as a writer, and as a presidential candidate: to tell a story. 'We did a lot of good things last year, but we could be a lot tighter in how we operate," said Obama. To the campaign veterans, the flashbacks to Ohio and Texas were vivid: They were repeating many of the same mistakes they had made as they tried to close out the primaries early in March 2008. They had grown conventional in their politics and message, forgetting their identity as outsiders in their desperation to win." (p. 109) 

--"Source Notes": "This volume draws heavily on exclusive interviews with several dozen White House officials, congressional staffers, administration officials, and Obama advisers and friends, using a variety of ground rules: on the record, on background, and off the record. ... Exclusive comments from President Obama include several drawn from interviews during the presidential election, as well as two Oval Office sessions, one of which was dedicated to the subject of this book, on April 22, 2010. My interview with Vice President Biden was held in his West Wing office on July 21, 2010." (p. 295)