NO WAY TO PICK A PRESIDENT.

• Author: Taylor, Paul
• Position: Review

NO WAY TO PICK A PRESIDENT By Jules Witcover Farrar, Straus anti Giroux, $26

A great campaign reporter describes what we've lost

JULES WITCOVER HAS WRITTEN A GOOD, PASSIONATE and disheartening book. It's a grand tour of everything not to race about presidential campaigns, from Dick Morris to John McLaughlin, from the Electoral College to the primary calendar, from soft money to attack ads, from canned conventions to ducked debates. It's vintage Witcover--which means strong reporting, sharp analysis, well-turned anecdotes, revealing interviews and an abiding love of the game, warts and all. Yet through it all there's a melancholy at the core of the enterprise.

Witcover is a great political reporter coming to grips here with his disillusionment in the marquee story he's devoted his career to telling. It's no surprise he should feel that way; just about every sentient citizen in the land feels that way. But citizens have an easy out. They can shrug their collective shoulders, carp or muse fleetingly about how small and unappealing politics has become, and go on their merry ways. Rarely has the political life of the country seemed so inconsequential to the real life of the country. For most people, this is a good thing.

For Witcover, it's a disaster. Not just because it makes what he does so well seem less important, but because it's an affront to the belief system that led him to do it in the first place. Witcover cares deeply about politics and thinks its place is at the center of things. He's written four books about presidential campaigns (three of them co-authored with Jack Germond, with whom he also writes columns for The Baltimore Sun and National Journal), and eight others about U.S. politics and history. When his book about the 1976 race, Marathon, became a bestseller, he inherited Theodore H. Whites pen as the official instant biographer of modern presidential politics.

But his subsequent campaign books have played to a dwindling readership, as the political culture has drifted further and further down alleyways Witcover dissects in No Way to Pick a President. The author's disillusionment was painfully evident as early as the 1980s, just in his choice of book tides; Wake Us When It's Over was the 1984 offering and The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency was the sub-tide of the 1988 book. That's about as close as any author wants to get to posting DO NOT ENTER signs on his book covers.

Witcover has since taken a break from quadrennial...