Mad As Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992.

• Author: Shapiro, Walter

As I think back on it now, reading Theodore White's The Making of the President, 1960 at the impressionable age of 14 probably changed my life. Coming from a family of last-gasp Stevenson Democrats, I was transfixed not so much by the saga of Kennedy triumphant as by the small, lovingly etched portraits of thwarted dreams - a forlorn folk singer crooning a ballad for Hubert Humphrey on the eve of the West Virginia primary, the packed galleries at the Los Angeles convention in hopeless thrall with Adlai. Other young would-be writers fantasized about running off to Paris to emulate Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but romance for me could be found here at home, chronicling the pageantry of a presidential campaign.

How hollow that dream feels 30 years later. Political reporting, my chosen trade, has become a burnt-out genre, as derivative as medieval Scholastics trying to ape the rhetoric of Cicero. The literary flowering that followed White sadly lasted little more than a decade; the 1968 and 1972 elections alone produced The Selling of the President, The Boys on the Bus, and the gonzo posturing of Hunter Thompson. But since then, the void. Only Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes, his landmark character study of six 1988 presidential contenders, rises from the muck to redeem White's legacy. With the publishing industry now convinced that campaign narratives don't sell, the once-proud genre has been winnowed down to the quadrennial now-it-can-be-told Newsweek book and the inevitable entry from Jurassic-era Baltimore Sun political columnists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover.

Mad As Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992, the fourth Germond-and-Witcover collaboration, is best read as the literature of decline. The authors, in a rare personal flourish, concede as much when they quote Dan Quayle's toast from the book party in honor of their 1988 campaign volume: "I knew Teddy White. Teddy White was a friend of mine. And believe me, you guys are no Teddy White." Quayle may have missed the boat with "Murphy Brown," but he got this one right. Germond and Witcover write in a style that might be called Teddy White Lite - political narrative stripped of all the elements that made The Making of the President such a watershed. There are virtually no behind-the-scenes glimpses of the candidates, no insights into character, no deep analysis of the anguish facing the nation, no panorama of the electorate, and nary a critical word about the political handlers.

What...