Let the 2012 Presidential Campaign Books Begin

Here come the quickie journalistic accounts of the 2012 campaign.

“Panic: 2012 â€"The Sublime and Terrifying Inside Story of Obama's Final Campaign,” by Michael Hastings, who covered the campaign for Buzzfeed, will be released Jan. 15, his publisher Blue Rider Press said on Sunday. The book is being published in digital format only, Blue Rider said, “so as to bring this riveting account to readers as quickly as possible.”

The publisher said that the book was in the spirit of the Hunter S. Thompson classic “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail” and “gives a firsthand account of the madness traveling with the White House press corps, bringing to life a series of unforgettably strange moments from the trail.”

Mr. Hastings has a history of tangling with the administration. In a 2010 Rolling Stone magazine article, he revealed that Gen. Stanley McChrystal was openly contemptuous of how the White House was handling the war in Afghanistan, which eventually led to his being stripped of command. It also became the basis of a book by Mr. Hastings called “The Operators.”

More recently, Mr. Hastings has been a critic of the administration's handling of national security matters, especially at the United States Consulate in Benghazi.