Veteran journalist and USA Today political columnist Walter Shapiro moonlights as a stand-up comic; when he's not taking America's political pulse, he's working on the comedy routines he regularly performs in New York City.

In One-Car Caravan: On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In, his irreverent look at the early days of the 2004 Democratic presidential campaign, Shapiro combines seasoned political savvy with a keen eye for the absurd and a love of the tortured pun.

As such, he offers an engaging and informative account of the humble beginnings of the current Democratic presidential primary contest.

Shapiro takes the measure of the candidates he followed (John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, Howard Dean, Bob Graham and Dick Gephardt) while they were still struggling to define themselves and their messages - before their campaign consultants and media managers took charge.

Shapiro strives to figure out what makes the candidates tick, and while he admits some uneasiness about the tendency of political journalists to cover campaigns "carrying analytic couches on their backs," he acknowledges that he is among those in the press vans who "can be described as Forever Jung."

He dissects Edwards' "relentless optimism," Lieberman's use of humor "to wall people out" and Kerry's reputation for being overly somber.

In his effort to provide a picture of the "real" candidates, he shares private conversations with them, explores how they make crucial decisions (including the decision to run for president) and examines how they hired their campaign staffs.

One-Car Caravan also provides an insider's view into the all-important reality of campaign fund-raising.

In a particularly informative and amusing discussion of the implications of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, Shapiro explains that the bill's increasing the limit on individual campaign contributions in a primary campaign from $1,000 to $2,000 "illustrates the truism that a rising tide lifts all candidates."

He writes: "That seemingly innocuous double-your-pleasure-double- your-fun numerical change probably kept Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman and even Edwards in the race. Do the arithmetic - a candidate can now harvest twice the campaign cash from the same two hours spent in a Fifth Avenue living room or at a beach house in Malibu. For a presidential contender who must put all his begs in one ask-it, the implications are enormous."

While Shapiro goes to great lengths to make the behind-the-scenes tales compelling, One-Car Caravan tends to be a bit long on minutiae and short on ideas - on the policy discussions that should be what matters most to us in choosing leadership.

For example, he explains that because Howard Dean likes to stay in the homes of supporters while on the road, his long-suffering campaign aide is relegated to the next-best room available, which Shapiro describes in detail - story-book mobiles, teddy bears, PlayStations and all.

Yet Shapiro's only real examination of the candidates' policy positions is their stance on the war in Iraq.

Toward the end of the book, Shapiro acknowledges this fact when he recounts a conversation with former Sen. Gary Hart: "I felt protective of Hart's wispy fantasy that ideas still matter in politics. . . . But I couldn't portray the early stages of the 2004 Democratic race as a noble struggle of policy arguments with party activists and the press providing a rapt audience. There is a vast chasm between what ought to be and what is in presidential politics. Ideas, aside from the deep rifts over Iraq, were no longer how serious candidates defined themselves."

For die-hard fans of the game of American politics, the witty and astute political commentary of One-Car Caravan is a must-read.

For everyone else - which is almost everyone - Shapiro doesn't do much to engage readers in the real value and importance of the political process, or to stand against the media's reputation as a primary agent of that "vast chasm between what ought to be and what is in presidential politics."



Susan Bridle is a book editor, freelance writer and graduate student in political science at the University of Colorado at Denver.