American Nomad: Restless Politics in a Secret Country

Just as Richard Ben Cramer managed to produce one of the great campaign books of all time, What It Takes : The Way to the White House, largely by ignoring the 1988 Presidential Campaign and focussing instead on the candidates themselves, Steve Erickson has written the best book on the 1996 campaign by focussing on the cultural moment in which it occurred, rather than on the tactical minutiae of the campaign itself. There are actually at least three books lurking between the covers of American Nomad. First, there is the extremely funny tale of how he came to write the book, which initially started out as an assignment for Rolling Stone. Second, there are extended riffs on topics that range from the novels of Philip K. Dick, to Olivers Stone's movies, to Bruce Springsteen and Frank Sinatra, to a long bizarre comparison of Richard Nixon and the Mike Hammer of Kiss Me Deadly. Finally, there is the aforementioned discussion of the state of the Nation circa 1996, a time when we had come to almost casually accept such previously unthinkable events and conditions as the OJ verdict, abortion clinic bombings, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Olympic Park bombing, the repeated Unabomber attacks, a divided government led by the morally bankrupt Bill Clinton on one side and the equally corrupt Newt Gingrich on the other, and the approach of the millennium--all of them seeming to somehow indicate a country so deeply divided that the various sides were actually willing to go to war with one another. In Erickson's eyes these are all potential signs of the apocalyptic collapse of democracy. The story of his work for Rolling Stone is a genuine hoot. The Californian Erickson, a successful young author in the Thomas Pynchon mold, was originally hired because, as the features editor told him, "What we want is a novelist who will write about the 1996 presidential campaign as though it were a novel." But even in his first meetings with the magazine's editor, Jann Wenner, he realized that he was expected to compete with the New York Times, despite the fact that he was not a professional reporter. The collision of his own and Wenner's expectations led to a series of amusing misunderstandings and confrontations over the ensuing months, with the author covering the interesting fringes of the Republican race and the fascinating but doomed candidates, while the magazine pushed for strategy, tactics, scoops and straightforward coverage of the Dole campaign. Erickson's account of these battles basically adds up to a drive by shooting in which his target is Wenner and the publisher's grandiose pretensions and limited understanding of politics. Meanwhile, Erickson had really vested himself in the story and when he was finally fired, simply decided: ...I would just go right on covering the campaign. I would get in my car with my bogus press badge and my bogus business cards and I would start driving, a bogus correspondent without portfolio, and I would w