Inventing Al Gore.

• Author: Nichols, John

Inventing Al Gore by Bill Turque Houghton Mifflin. 448 pages. $25.00.

Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose have written the best damn book of the 2000 election season. As such, Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush is a dangerous text. This tale of the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee's political foibles is so thoroughly reported, so well written, and so consistently convincing that a casual reading could turn even the most radical critic of the Vice President into a rabid Al Gore partisan.

Outright fear of a Bush Presidency is the rational reaction to Shrub. One need not be particularly progressive to feel intestinal discomfort upon digesting the details of the "compassionate" conservative's record.

On the poor: "Bush proposed to `git tuff' on welfare recipients by ending the allowance for each additional child--which in Texas is $38 a month."

On the environment: "According to the trinational North American Commission on Environmental Cooperation, set up by NAFTA, Texas pollutes more than any other state or Canadian province."

On his religious intolerance: "Ever since his 1994 race against Ann Richards, the story has followed Bush that he believes only Christians are granted God's grace."

On his a-little-to-the-right-of-Reagan approach to economics: "We can find no evidence that it has ever occurred to him to question whether it is wise to do what big business wants."

Ivins, a favorite writer for The Progressive for the last fourteen years, is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and Dubose is the veteran editor of the scrappy Texas Observer. Only a pair of credentialed Texas populists--the toughest breed of progressive this side of Idaho gay rights activists--could understand the necessity of a full-fledged Bush burning. And Shrub leaves no branch unscorched.

What is striking, however, is that the damage is inflicted without resort to the Ken Starr Rules of Political Engagement. Sure, George W. is the Republican Bill Clinton--a too-slick-by-half politician prone to weasel-word responses to persistent questions about his alleged cocaine abuse, draft dodging, and womanizing --but Shrub does not go there. "No sex, no drugs, no Siggie Freud," is how the authors put it, before wondering whether a review of the Lone Star State's battles over tort reform and property tax-abatement is "a by-God recipe for bestsellerdom."

The answer is yes--and not just because Shrub is infused with the slice-and-dice humor that has...