Early Days
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Early Days The first book on the 2004 campaign. BY ANDREW FERGUSON Walter Shapiro has done us all a favor. Over the last two winters, while the rest of us were minding our own business, Shapiro...
...Shapiro is a political columnist for USA Today, so he did these things at least partly from professional obligation...
...He has done this so we don't have to...
...And this was just the beginning...
...The answer should be that I deeply care about it," the doctor replies...
...Shapiro's long hours in the back of rental cars have not been spent in vain...
...He is at heart an idealist, though not a booby...
...Really, there's not much evidence here of Shapiro's "cynicism about presidential politics...
...most accessible and least guarded...
...That's when the candidates, happy for the attention, are at once Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...But the way it happens is that I'm very intuitive, so I was driven toward running before I knew why I was doing it...
...His sketches of the Democratic contenders as they crisscrossed Iowa and New Hampshire over the last eighteen months are witty and hard-headed and make excellent reading, with happy little surprises scattered here and there...
...For all my cynicism about presidential politics in election years," he writes, "I still thrill to the innocent simplicity of the off years when it all begins...
...Yes, he said "thrill...
...Shapiro flew in a twin-engine Cessna with John Kerry, attended Manhattan cocktail parties with Joe Lieberman, and canvassed treeless tracts of suburban St...
...And you say you hate your job...
...Well, yeah...
...But to judge by One-Car Caravan: On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In, it is clear that he did these things mainly because he loves to do them...
...I know that doesn't make any sense...
...Louis with Dick Gephardt—many months before any normal person had given a thought to the presidential election...
...It sounds like I'm just a very ambitious person who wants to be president...
...The best way to gauge their personalities, their intellects, their motivations, and their aspirations is to be there at the beginning...
...And it's the kind of candor that before too long is pressed out of any serious candidate...
...Accept the gift...
...One night, for example, driving to the annual dinner of the Cheshire County Democrats in Keene, New Hampshire, Shapiro asks Dean why he is running for president...
...Over the last two winters, while the rest of us were minding our own business, Shapiro drove hundreds of miles crowded into the back seat of rented automobiles, talking to Howard Dean...
...It does...
Vol. 9 • November 2003 • No. 10
