Mark Halperin, co-author of "Double Down" and "Game Change"

The U.S. presidential campaign. It’s the horse race. The often-ridiculous, never-ending, up and down, bad food and bad manners parade of candidates who travel the country for years trying to get that golden 50.1 percent ticket to the White House.At the same, it’s our democratic process, the national stage where ideas get raised and debated, where our 240-year experiment with democracy plays out in slow motion.The 2012 campaign – the Obama vs. Romney battle – was no different. Plenty of ideas; plenty of intrigue; plenty of silliness. And today, no one does a more exacting job of retelling what happened in the last campaign – with an eye on what might happen in the next one – than Mark Haperin, Editor-at-large and senior political analyst for TIME and co-author of “Double Down: Game Change 2012.”