ONE-CAR CARAVAN(2004总统竞争内幕)

Walter Shapiro, the political-coiu-mnist for USA Today and a seasoned presidential campaign reporter, decided that for the 2004 Democratic race,the most dramatically unpredictable nomination fightin three decades, he would get to the candidates early,when their campaign stops were small gatherings in New Hampshire living rooms and Iowa union halls, their staffs a beleaguered aide or two, their ideas not yet
codified in sound bites. He hoped to capture the drama and the behind-the-scenes stories of the opening days of a presidential race, the uncharted "Invisible Primary," when the candidates are open and accessible, and poli- tics is still truly fun.

Book Description
One-Car Caravan, Shapiro's inside look at American presidential politics in action, and at the particular men who had the gumption to believe they could govern our nation.

This revised paperback edition of One-Car Caravan contains several new chapters chronicling the dramatic triumph of John Kerry, the Icarus-like fall of Howard Dean, the enduring and endearing persistence of John Edwards and the fireworks that briefly surrounded the surprise candidacy of Wesley Clark. Full of incisive observations of the candidates and trenchant analyses of the successes and failures of their campaigns, Shapiro's journey offers a wry and refreshing update on how presidents are really made.

An offbeat, irreverent look at the 2004 presidential race, in its not-ready-for-prime-time preliminaries. By the time most Americans see the presidential candidates on the campaign trail, they are practiced performers surrounded by a platoon of staffers and a brigade of reporters. But on their initial forays into Iowa and New Hampshire in 2002 and early 2003, their entourages were decidedly unpresidential -just an aide or two, perhaps a local reporter, and the candidate himself. Their motorcades were literally one-car caravans; their campaign stops, small gatherings in living rooms. The national media only intermittently follow the candidates as they struggle to define themselves, work out the kinks in their message and refine their personas. But Walter Shapiro did. One-Car Caravan is Shapiro's revealing account of the humble roots of the current presidential campaign, and he provides a telling picture of the 2004 Democratic contenders in their metaphorical boxers and briefs. He shows us John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, Howard Dean, and the others with their hair down, their ties askew, and their foibles bared. It's not pretty to watch a candidate who dreams of flying on Air Force One bump his head on a luggage bin on a small commuter jet, but it can be pretty funny.

From Publishers Weekly
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.

From The Washington Post's Book World
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 d……

1 Rubes on the road
2 Testing the waters
3 I nominate me
4 The money primary
5 The staff of life
6 Iowa and New Hampshire
7 The candidates in wartime
8 The Reverend Al
9 In which the candidates define themselves
10 In which the candidates remain themselves (despite all efforts to package them into something else)
11 Visions of the White House
12 Dateline : Des Moines
13 To Boston and beyond