Quest for the Presidency: 1992.

• Author: Birnbaum, Jeffrey H.

From the Bushes' irritation with James Baker to Clinton's temper tantrums, a new book about the 1992 race proves bow little we really understand about what happens during a campaign

It is fashionable to disparage book-length retellings of presidential campaigns. Ever since the great Theodore White died and mainstream journalism got more nosy, the genre has fallen into disrepute.

On its face, Quest for the Presidency 1992 doesn't do much to reverse this trend. First of all, it is painfully late. The team of Newsweek reporters and writers that produced it was able to churn out an abbreviated version almost immediately after the election was over. But the whole book took two additional years to publish.

And the volume itself, at nearly 800 pages, is twice the length of a standard marketable work on the subject. No doubt that is part of the reason Quest has been published by a university press rather than by a more established New York-based house. The result will probably be that few copies will be sold, and that future books like it will face an even harder time finding a mainstream publisher--and audience.

That is too bad. In a steady, unsensationalized way, Quest paints portraits of the 1992 contestants, especially Bill Clinton, that are more insightful and, in many ways, more disturbing than the ones the public was privy to before the election. The pictures are not cartoons or quick sketches written on deadline in the haste of a campaign. So perhaps this result--the longer, more elaborate profiles of the men who ran for president--is what makes the Newsweek project most worthwhile.

Quest's rendition of the Clinton campaign in particular, reported by Mark Miller, is stingingly accurate and prescient. The quotations from the people Miller encountered in the Clinton hierarchy are not reconstructed; he wrote them down as, or shortly after, he heard them himself. Like the other able reporters on the project, Miller had remarkable access to the campaign's inner sanctum. He was credentialed as a Clinton staffer, wearing a coveted "hard pin" on his lapel, which got him backstage and at times on stage for the most significant dramas of the year. In many ways, Miller was treated like a staffer, sitting in on major meetings between Clinton and his top advisors, in exchange for embargoing what he heard until after the election.

That kind of proximity inevitably led to carping by his fellow reporters on the campaign trail. Why should he get in there...