A political reporter documents the campaign he thought would decide
the presidency..Occasionally in the sports section one reads an
account of a baseball game that the reporter, rushing to make a
deadline, wrote while the game was still in process. Normally this
is no big deal, but occasionally something happens at the last
minute that changes everything. The result is an article describing
how the Red Sox marched to victory, capped by a paragraph saying
something like, "and then the Yankees scored five runs and won."
That is the sensation one gets when reading "Washington Post"
political reporter Milbank's account of the 2000 presidential
campaign. Poor Milbank spent two years following the campaigns and
had his chronicle substantially complete by election day, expecting
only to have to add a final chapter - not available at the time of
this review - telling us that either Bush or Gore had won. So much
for that plan. In the rush to print, there was never going to be
much time for hindsight anyway: More than a retrospective analysis,
this is really a compendium of the articles Milbank wrote about the
campaigns, placed in roughly chronological order. But given the
post - Election Day fiasco, the strategy is a disaster. The
author's thesis is that the employment of "smashmouth" politics
(hard-hitting, "dirty," combative tactics) is both good for
democracy and necessary for a candidate to succeed - but his story
takes place before any of the real mouth-smashing began. His
attempts to make the campaign look more exciting than it was,
mostly unfulfilled promises of sexual titillation, thus end up
sounding silly. And the carnival atmosphere he strains to create
rings phony, given that the carnival was only about to get started.
Instead of an account of how two years on the campaign trail
influenced what happened next, we get what sound like willfully
blind irrelevancies..Decent writing, bad luck, terrible timing..
(Kirkus Reviews)
Contrary to most media reports, negative campaigning is actually in
decline, but our political system is no better off for it. Or so
believes Washington Post political writer Dana Milbank, whose
campaign book Smashmouth provides a witty yet ultimately very
serious look at the sense and senselessness that occurred during
the 2000 presidential campaign. What matters is not whether a
campaign claim is positive or negative, but whether the claim is
relevant," writes Milbank. "The press should police outright
falsehoods, of course, but otherwise let the candidates fight it
out." Traveling by bus, plane and motorcade with the candidates,
Milbank provides an indelible behind-the-scenes look at the brutal
skirmishes that made up this century's first presidential campaign.
General
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