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The Lightning Rod
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a m e r i c a n + n o m a d B Y S T E V E E R I C K S O N | H O L T , 3 2 0 P A G E S
BY DAVID FUTRELLE something about the last presidential election drove many political commentators, professional and amateur, to distraction. When novelist Steve Erickson agreed to cover it for Rolling Stone, with no contacts in Washington and no desire to acquire any, he was under the impression he was supposed to write about the campaign "as though it were a novel" (as one editor told him at first). He discovered at his first meeting with Jan Wenner that the Rolling Stone editor wanted something closer to the New York Times, hoping (it seemed to Erickson) that if he "squinted long and hard enough I might turn into R. W. Apple." Erickson didn't, and after several months working at cross purposes with the magazine, he found himself canned, a "correspondent without portfolio." The Rolling Stone editors hadn't been thrilled by his "admittedly peculiar idea to skip the New Hampshire primary altogether," and he wasn't pleased when his second piece for the magazine was spiked at the last minute, forcing him to churn out some 6,000 words on Bob Dole in a matter of hours. The book that emerged from Erickson's little misadventure is an engaging, if deeply eccentric, hybrid -- part "The Selling of the President, 1996," part gonzo memoir and part apocalyptic fantasy. Starting out as a more-or-less diligent, if highly digressive, chronicle of political maneuverings on the campaign trail, the book transforms toward the end into a weird mixture of political pontification and surrealistic fantasy. Erickson treats us to lengthy maundering on the Meaning of Frank Sinatra and takes us through a hellish alternate political history of the past decade and a half, from Carter's victory in 1980 through the subsequent presidencies of Koch, Nunn, Kemp, D'Amato and Helms. At one point, having given up all pretense of covering the campaign in anything resembling a conventional manner, in the midst of a cross-country drive nearly as crazed as Bob Dole's frantic, last-ditch national tour, Erickson decides that "in a perverse way I was covering the presidential campaign perfectly, since it had slipped the moorings of logic as easily as I had." But that's not quite true. It's after he slips the moorings that the book loses its primary reason to be. What gives the first part of the book its energy is Erickson's enforced and often painful exposure to the manic, sleepless lunacy of the campaign trail -- the horrific rote speeches, the inescapable spinners, Erickson's unexpected encounter with a disgruntled Bob Dole, emerging from behind the restroom door Erickson had only moments earlier been impatiently pounding upon.
What made Dole, at times, such a fascinating figure to watch in the 1996 campaign is that it was manifestly clear that he hated every moment of it: He was a man almost incapable of the forced jollity of the natural campaigner. Similarly, it is Erickson's obvious distaste for the job at hand that gives the first half of his book its bite; when he loses his job, the book goes slack, and despite moments of clarity, like the campaign itself, coasts listlessly to its end.
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