One-Car Caravan
On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In
by Walter Shapiro
Public Affairs, 220 pp., $25 WALTER SHAPIRO has done us all a favor. 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. And this was just the beginning. Shapiro flew in a twin-engine Cessna with John Kerry, attended Manhattan cocktail parties with Joe Lieberman, and canvassed treeless tracts of suburban St. Louis with Dick Gephardt–many months before any normal person had given a thought to the presidential election. And you say you hate your job.
Shapiro is a political columnist for USA Today, so he did these things at least partly from professional obligation. 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. “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.”) That’s when the candidates, happy for the attention, are at once most accessible and least guarded. “The best way to gauge their personalities, their intellects, their motivations, and their aspirations is to be there at the beginning.”
Really, there’s not much evidence here of Shapiro’s “cynicism about presidential politics.” He is at heart an idealist, though not a booby. 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. 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.
“The answer should be that I deeply care about it,” the doctor replies. “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. I know that doesn’t make any sense. It sounds like I’m just a very ambitious person who wants to be president.”
Well, yeah. It does. And it’s the kind of candor that before too long is pressed out of any serious candidate. Shapiro’s long hours in the back of rental cars have not been spent in vain. He has done this so we don’t have to. Accept the gift.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
