Experience has taught Shapiro, a veteran journalist and USA Today political columnist, that once the media managers and campaign consultants take hold of the 2004 Democratic presidential primary contest, there will be no way for anyone to get a meaningful sense of who the candidates are and what makes them run. Experience has also persuaded Shapiro that a fix on a candidate's character is more important than set-piece proposals on health care and foreign policy. Thus he takes a pre-emptive strike at the aspiring candidates. In 2002, before the leading Democratic presidential hopefuls are captives of the political process, when traveling with the candidate means sitting with the candidate as he crisscrosses New Hampshire rather than taking a seat in the press plane, Shapiro sets out to take their measure. He isn't interested in the predictable answers candidates offer to the question, Why me for president? He is going after deeper insights, and his active mind looks for clues everywhere: in private conversations with the candidates, in whom they hire to run their campaigns and in how they make crucial decisions, small and large, about their futures. Readers will be pleased with the result-Shapiro succeeds in offering a commentary that is mature, witty, entertaining and marked by political and emotional intelligence. And his final judgment of the candidates he followed (Edwards, Lieberman, Kerry, Graham, Dean and Gephardt)-that at least there is not a "charlatan or a chiseler among them"-might provide comfort through the inevitable mind-numbing moments of the coming primary season.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From The Washington Post
Even the most lyrical campaign book can feel a little musty by the time it gets published. Who wants to hash over, say, Al Gore's stump speech nine months after the fact, when he's retired to Nashville? To cope with this rapid aging, Walter Shapiro has opted to embrace it; his new book is a conscious caving to what he refers to as the "warp-speed political culture," a campaign memoir written "before America tunes in," timed to hit bookshelves just as Democratic primary season began.
The idea was to write a book that leads the discussion instead of rehashing it. Just as the names -- Howard Dean, John Kerry, John Edwards and the others -- were first coming into focus, Shapiro would drop in with his firsthand accounts, his breezy insights, his transcripts from the early unscripted days of the campaign trail.
The flaw in the plan is obvious in retrospect (and predicted in the book by Shapiro, a real campaign veteran): With the new, compressed primary schedule, states pile up one after another, and that period between the first blush of curiosity and the onset of inevitability is apt to be short. As it happens, in this year's campaign it lasted the whole of a week -- the one between Iowa and New Hampshire, when Sen. John Kerry was practically anointed.
Already most of the characters in the book have faded into political trivia. Dick Gephardt? Did he really run again? Joe Lieberman? Somebody Graham? Howard Dean was a superstar? Then Wesley Clark, who sort of fell between the cracks, joining the race after Shapiro was done reporting, dropping out too early to be remembered. Inevitably there are moments that seem painfully irrelevant: Bob Graham's decision whether to run or not, a detailed behind-the-scenes peek at the making of Dick Gephardt's announcement speech, complete with last-minute scriptwriter action.
Yet books by their nature are not meant to be expendable. And behind this breezy journal a more universal story lurks. What saves Shapiro's book from the recycle bin is the particular stretch of the campaign where he chose to linger. Although he casts himself as a reporter-cynic, he is drawn to the sentimental early days, when the campaign is just a group of men (mostly) alone with their thoughts, testing the strength of their egos, the loyalty of their friends, less a race than a set of dreams, the Invisible Primary, with all its "innocent simplicity." His best chapters are the ones that catch the candidates as they're deciding whether they should run, where he is standing in one or another of their foyers -- Kerry's with the big, weird, expensive painting, Edwards's with the jumble of mittens and boots, his wife, Elizabeth, in the kitchen toasting bread for egg-salad sandwiches. Here are the candidates before their campaign personas harden, slightly insecure, deeply ambivalent. Edwards talks around the forbidden subject -- his son Wade's death -- and how it made him numb to failure. He retreats to the family beach house for three days, alone. Kerry talks angrily about the Republican attacks on Max Cleland, a fellow senator and veteran.
Dean is almost too painful to read about, given what's happened to him since. He is just as angry and unscripted as always, but he's an unknown -- Sen. Tom Harkin refers to him as John Dean, and Lou D'Allessandro, a New Hampshire state senator and big shot, says he is "not a player" -- so his rawness has an innocence about it. At one point a young woman interviewing to be the Dean fundraising director asks the candidate how much money he expects to raise. "We're looking at 10 million," he answers with a bit of swagger, "probably exaggerating for her benefit," according to Shapiro, who writes that generally the minimum required is $19 million.
Shapiro is often the only traveling press -- hence the title "One-Car Caravan." Yet from this intimate unstructured time come insights that would be lost later. While piloting a private plane Kerry answers his cell phone. (Yikes!) It turns out to be his sister Diana, calling from their mother's hospital bed. Shapiro then points out that lots of candidates decide to run after one or both parents die. After spending a lot of time with Lieberman, Shapiro realizes that his affability is really the opposite of what it seems -- armor, in the form of a constant patter of one-liners to keep strangers at bay. He recognizes that Kerry stiffens as soon as the microphone is on; with it off he gets Kerry looser, playing his classical guitar, talking about how people think he's "weird" because "the nails on one hand are longer than the other." "I went through a period where I wasn't very happy," Kerry says, talking about his divorce in the mid-'80s. "Maybe you cross that great divide with being fifty years old. Suddenly you see things differently and feel things differently -- and things that used to bother you don't. And life is fixed. It's all there. I like it, very much. It's a comfortable place to be emotionally." These are moments of candidates unplugged, musing, philosophical -- and much harder to come by later in a campaign.
Reviewed by Hanna Rosin
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
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