Election 2004
How Bush Won and What You Can Expect in the Future
by Evan Thomas and the Staff of Newsweek
Public Affairs, 209 pp., $14

IN THE SUMMER OF 2003, Teresa Heinz Kerry was perturbed. Her husband, John Kerry, once the frontrunner for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, was slipping in the polls, steadily losing ground to former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Heinz Kerry intended to fight back--and she knew exactly how to do it. So she telephoned her husband's campaign manager and told him: "I want you to issue a challenge for me to debate Howard Dean."

As campaign anecdotes go, this one is a treasure. Yet it wasn't told until after Election Day, in the November 15, 2004, issue of Newsweek. And even then, it was only one story among hundreds in a 45,000-word article reported by seven different people and written by Evan Thomas--which has now been supplemented and published in book form as Election 2004: How Bush Won and What You Can Expect in the Future.

The result is quite a piece of reportage. There are gossipy set-pieces (James Carville broke down in tears during a September meeting with top Kerry brass), there are tidbits of insider information (Laura Bush's Secret Service codename was "Tempo"), and there are quirky character notes (Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's campaign manager, once fell asleep standing up and "hit the floor with such force that he cracked a rib"). But the book is also a little bewildering. It contains so much detail, so many factoids, that a reader's first reaction must be: How on earth did they get this stuff?

Here's how. For over a year a team of Newsweek reporters had exclusive access to the presidential campaigns' upper echelons. They attended meetings, listened in on strategy sessions, befriended flacks and operatives, transcribed conversations--all on the condition that nothing they learned would be published until after November 2. This approach isn't new, of course. Newsweek has been making the same deals, assigning (in some cases) the same reporters, and writing the same long, long postelection stories every four years since 1984.

Twenty years is a long time, however, and a lot changed in those years. Cable news cycles began to spin faster and faster. Newspaper budgets shrank. Bloggers emerged to feed on headlines with a voracity that would raise eyebrows in a school of piranha. The market for long-form political journalism died off, and so did most of its practitioners. By now, it seems as though Newsweek is the only publication left with the organization, the resources, the clout, and the contacts to undertake big-picture projects such as Election 2004.

AND THAT PROJECT IS . . . well, what, exactly? After all, the campaign had only just ended when the report appeared. To paraphrase John Kerry, memories of it are still seared--seared--in voters' minds. It is not quite time for a refresher course. But, still, one has the feeling that Thomas wanted to do something more than write a sketchy narrative containing some pithy anecdotes.

Indeed, Thomas says the report was intended as "the first draft of history," and as such it is largely successful. Thomas and his reporting team, through sheer accumulation of detail, present clear portraits of the two candidates and their organizations, with scene after scene, conversation after conversation. And all that reporting ends up explaining why Bush won and Kerry lost--for Election 2004's portrait of John Kerry is not a flattering one.