Customer Reviews

Smashmouth: Two Years in the Gutter with Al Gore and George W. Bush

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I enjoyed this book, but it's too clever by half. Milbank is a humorous and reasonably insightful political author, and he could have produced a great work on the 2000 campaign. Smashmouth's failings are less Milbank's fault than the fault of a churn-'em-out publishing culture that needs to race campaign books to the shelves before they're cooked. Basically, Smashmouth is just a recycling of Milbank's funny Washington Post columns from the campaign trail, wadded up and wrapped with a bit of flimsy conjunction. Besides creating a superficial and weak narrative, it also results in redundancy, as repeated puns (like "JugGoreNaut") that might bring a chuckle once a week are repeated again and again just pages apart.

This was a very funny look at the 2000 presidential race. His book is not a dry blow by blow account of the race that focuses on issues, but a fun look at the process from a reports eye view. I have read a number of serious books on politics and elections and this book was a nice change of pace. If you are looking for a book to take you through the differences in the candidate's issues then this is not the book for you. It is a fun look at all the parts of a campaign that the average person would not know about.

The writing is very humorous, interesting and insightful making the book a real joy to read. It takes you through two years of debates, stump speeches and the "story of the day" news cycle that seam to define the candidates now. We even get a lot of behind the scenes info like how does a pole actually work, what is he day like for the reporters and how do the candidates get around. I also found that the author gave digs to all the candidates, not just the ones that he did not like. Overall this was a funny, smart book that is a refreshing step away from the serious books in this field.

Overall, this book was quite amusing, somewhat vacuous, and a little too long. I'm not really sure what I expected from the book, but I certainly didn't expect an entire chapter on the food that the campaigns fed to journalists (and the importance of keeping journalists fat and happy during the dead zone between the primaries and election proper)! The book is about campaigning and its associated evils, but has little to say about the campaign issues, real differences between the candidates, or anything else of much substance. If you want a book about the main campaign issues and a sober analysis of Bush's tax plan or Al Gore's Medicare proposals, you will be sorely disappointed. If you want to get a taste of what it is like being a reporter on the campaign trail, however, the book can be fascinating. One thing I really liked about the book was the obvious lack of `after the fact' editing - it seems to be written as the campaign was going along without the benefit of hindsight. My favorite example of this is the discussion of Florida (p. 253), where the author asserts that Florida was not `in play'. Since the book was completed after the election (indeed it has a quick discussion of the Supreme Court and Kathleen Harris), this serves as a reminder of how wrong the pundits and conventional wisdom can be during an election. Of course, the downside is that the lack of editing makes the book repetitive in places. My main complaint is that the book is too long. Although the author's cynical tone might play well over a short article in a magazine, over nearly 400 pages it does begin to grate on the nerves.

The essential formula behind Dana Milbank's Smashmouth is this: string together clouded attempts at humor with serious reportage to produce the skeletal outlines of what is still an incoherent, non-sequitur narrative, when needed stick in a paragraph or two to summarize important month-long stretches of the campaign the author somehow missed writing about, and package it by naming your book after a rock band that most people who salivate over minor shifts in polling data have never heard of. While you're at it, disregard typos and instances where the writer repeats exactly the same information, word for word, that he included 30 pages earlier. Such are the travails of releasing a book a mere month after the presidency was decided.

Other than that, you'll have a mildly entertaining series of vignettes that might be of interest to C-SPAN junkies who haven't quite yet gotten to reading every word ever written about George W. Bush and Al Gore. On occasion, Smashmouth is worthwhile: some of the hard-headed reporting on Bush's background and philosophy might even please some of the Republicans in the audience. Other times, Milbank slips and shows his true colors as a self-indulging mouthpiece for an Eastern media establishment that looks in disbelief on any aspiring president whose values have been thus far untouched by Beltway mores and sensibilities.

This book was a lot of fun. And it came at just the right time to keep me from sinking into a post-inaugural letdown. I'd forgotten that once upon a time Campaign 2000 was actually INTERESTING. Milbank packs his book with humor and insight in telling the whole tawdry story.

I was hugely disapointed by this book. The 2000 election was one of the most fascinating ever. I was looking forward to reading a great behind the scenes look at the whole process. Jack Germond & Jules Whitcover wrote books of this sort from the 1980-92 elections. I guess I was expecting a similar book. Instead, this is more the story of Dana Milbank covering the campaign. Although there were a few interesting tidbits (the fraternity jokes among Gore staffers forced to share rooms, for example) this book focuses too much on the author's views/judgements and is written from a satirical point of view rather than a historical or investigative look at the strategies that were the 2000 election. For someone who likes fluffy anecdotal impressions of the past campaign this book may be perfect. As for me, I wish Germond & Whitcover were still around writing recaps of Presidential elections.

I really liked reading this book but as I put it down for the last time I realized that there was really nothing in it that changed my life for the better or the worse. It has a lot of great stories but not a lot of substance. It is a good book but not a political classic.

Political junkies take heed! This book is great fun; a romp through the 2000 political campaign. It's easy to forget in the wake of election day and its aftermath how interesting (at times) this campaign was, particularly when it came to John McCain's "straight talking", in-your-face moment in the spotlight. Milbank captures the true quirkiness of his subjects, including McCain, and has a way of injecting himself into the story that is quite appealing. Some of this material will be familiar to New Republic Readers, but the vast majority of it seems to be new to the book.

A terrific combination of entertaining, funny, and even moving narrative; thoughtful analysis; and necessary irreverence. Highly recommended.

Well, look at us, the American constituents. What a bunch of knuckleheads we turned out to be, allowing ourselves to blindly chase after and faun for some of the biggest moronic toadies to ever hit the campaign trail. At least, this appears to me to be the message that Milbank is shoving down our throats.

Milbank is an extraordinary writer, I will give him that much. In fact, I laughed almost as much at these stories as I did the FIRST time I read them in the Washington Post and the New Republic. Rehashed anecdotes and thigh-slappers from as many as two and a half years ago, purporting to reveal what the candidates are really like when caught off-camera and away from the bag of sound bites they so frequently tote along with them.

My main gripe with the book is that it IS a rehash, and perhaps that is being unfair to giving Milbank only three stars. In ten years, when I pick the book up again and wipe most of the dried, caked-on spit from its cover, I may actually appreciate what it was that he was trying to tell me. That we feed on hateful campaigning, that we delight and take no end of glee in the venomous rantings of candidate A after candidate B has let slip a less-than-flattering bon mot.

I doubt it.