From the Publisher

By Louis A. Weil III

"No one in California this fall saw any sheep being slaughtered on the roadway in honor of an arriving candidate, the way they still like to do it in Turkey. That would not go over in the shopping malls of Rancho Cucamonga." So observes TIME's West Coast bureau chief Jordan Bonfante, who should know.

Before assuming his current post in Los Angeles two years ago, Bonfante served more than 13 years as a TIME foreign correspondent -- six years based ! in Rome, seven in Paris -- and covered political campaigns from Galicia to Anatolia. This year he was charged with reporting not only the most important gubernatorial race in the nation, between Republican Pete Wilson and Democrat Dianne Feinstein, but also California congressional races and ballot initiatives. To do so, he teamed up with correspondent Jeanne McDowell and senior correspondent Edwin Reingold, who spent 11 years as Tokyo bureau chief, as well as photographer P.F. Bentley, a veteran of political campaigns in Haiti, Panama and El Salvador in addition to the U.S. The team's foreign experience gave it a rare perspective on U.S. politicking.

Many of the rituals are similar: the hominy grits served at a black church breakfast in Oakland have their counterpart in the cassoulet laid on at a campaign meeting in Toulouse. But in Europe candidates still rely on speeches at mass rallies; in California politicians talk not about districts but about television markets. More important, European politicking is ideological, while campaigning in the U.S. tends to be pragmatic. As former Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi once told Bonfante: "Ours is a politics of ideas. Yours is a politics of problem solving. We certainly could use more of yours, and you would be better off with at least some of ours."

On a personal level, Bonfante, McDowell, Reingold and Bentley were struck by the informality of American politicians. In California pols and reporters regularly call one another by their first names, a practice almost unheard of in Europe or Japan. In fact, the secretary of one Los Angeles politician asked our man over the telephone, "Bonfante? Is that your first name?"