Star-Crossed Politicos

By WALTER SHAPIRO

In campaign politics an idea is like a fruitcake at Christmas -- there's not but one, and everybody keeps passing it around.

That is campaign consultant James Carville's maxim -- and it applies to popular entertainment even more than running for office. So you can imagine the frenzy in the book world when publishers were offered an age-old story line with a modern twist: boy meets girl from the wrong party; boy loses girl to rival presidential campaign; and, after the election, boy and girl reconcile and marry. It's Romeo and Juliet, His Girl Friday and Adam's Rib, with Bill Clinton and George Bush in supporting roles. With two publishing giants sharing the imprint, the hype machine for this joint memoir by Mary Matalin and James Carville is racing on overdrive: a love story for the ages set against the drama of the 1992 campaign. But if romance is your primary reason for reading All's Fair: Love, War, and Running for President (Random House and Simon & Schuster; 493 pages; $24), you are doomed to feel like a disgruntled voter fooled again at the ballot box.

In Matalin and Carville's book, as in real life, love keeps running far behind in the polls to the authors' passion for politics. The courtship of Mary and James (as they call themselves in the alternating monologues that are the book's format) is re-enacted in a single 11-page chapter and merely augmented by bittersweet scenes of them pining at a distance. The uninitiated may find it startling that Bush's political director (Mary) was besotted with Clinton's master strategist (James), but political Washington is smaller and more inbred than Lake Wobegon. Now if either of them had been in love with a tree surgeon from Idaho, that really would have been something. Mary was the one who fretted that her relationship might hurt her career, which says as much about the G.O.P. as about gender. Her fellow Bushies kept warning her, "If anything goes wrong, if anything leaks, you're going to get blamed." James' attitude was, in effect, "A man's got to do what a man's got to do," which simply says a lot about gender.

All's Fair may be gimmicky, but it is also street-smart, chatty and instructive, as well as the best reprise of the 1992 campaign likely to see print. While overly charitable to their candidates, the authors are meticulous and nonideological about the political narrative. There are, to be sure, scant revelations. Mary and James have future careers in politics and remain chary about violating trust in the quest for truth.

Mary does shed new light on the aborted effort to dump Dan Quayle because of a secret poll showing that the Vice President was costing Bush 4 to 6 percentage points. (She later strains credulity when she gushes, "We knew the real day-to-day Quayle, and he was really smart.") Where Bob Woodward breathlessly announced in The Agenda that the President has a temper, James rightly treats these tantrums as common knowledge and not to be taken too seriously. "The truth of the matter," he says, "is that ((Clinton)) was all smoke and no fire."

The most beguiling parts of All's Fair are those in which the authors try to explain the intricacies of their oddball craft. Here's James: "There's this huge myth, which the media perpetuates, that candidates do what they're told. They don't." And Mary: "The problem with incumbents is they hate bad leaks so much that they start clamping down on all leaks, and you lose a very useful tool."

As a reporter who went through the campaign spin cycle, I found the authors' lengthy musings on the care and feeding of the media (which the Clintonites called "the beast") to be sensible and fair-minded, but also as pedestrian as an overused stump speech. In one prickly passage, James complains that reporters would ask him only about strategy and never about "what Bill Clinton was trying to do for the country." He forgets that he was the campaign strategist -- and not exactly the best source to discuss the nuances of Clinton's health-care plan.

Each in different ways, Mary and James are misfits ill suited for conventional callings. Fortunately for them, campaigns remain one of the last arenas in America where you can earn an officer's stripes on talent rather than paper credentials. All's Fair is a ruggedly honest look at the work and life of political operatives. The authors' byzantine campaign machinations often appear futile and ridiculous, which they freely admit. That is modern politics, a world populated by people like Mary and James, who are neither remarkably noble nor base but simply action junkies with the hubris to believe they can control the chaos of a presidential campaign. If they fall in love along the way, well, that's almost an afterthought.