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January 31, 2005
 
BOOK REVIEWS: ‘Election 2004’ Shows How Bush Won; ‘Santa Cruz’ is Captivating Picture History of California’s Laid-Back Resort town
 
Reviewed by David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
 
The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy. –Theodore H. White
 
Hinton (HNN) — Nobody can replace Theodore H. White’s classic series on “The Making of the President” — including the book covering the 1960 campaign and the 1982 book covering the period from 1956 to 1980. Maybe it’s because the first election in which I voted was in 1960, just after I turned 22. (In those days, you had to be 21 to vote).
 
White — and to some extent Joe McGinniss, author of “The Selling of the President” — are the gold standards of political reporting. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist White (1915-1986) made the comment about the “flood of money” when it was just a trickle compared with the last two Presidential campaigns, but both White and McGinniss are worth re-reading — or reading for the first time.
 
“Election 2004: How Bush Won and What You Can Expect in the Future” by Evan Thomas and the staff of Newsweek (PublicAffairs, 240 pages, illustrated, $14.00) is a handy paperback that makes a valiant attempt to carry on this political reporting tradition. Thomas is a peerless rewrite man — and from me there is no greater compliment. My journalism career began in the stone age of manual typewriters and phoning in stories from school boards and city council meetings. The rewrite person — and I’m thinking of one man in particular at the Milwaukee Sentinel in the 1960s and 1970s — would take my dictation and make me look good the next morning.
 
Thomas, an assistant managing editor at Newsweek since 1991, is backed up by Eleanor Clift, Jonathan Darman, Kevin Peraino and Peter Goldman — journalistic stalwarts all. These ace reporters obtained embedded access to the Bush and Kerry camps and show how the differing styles of staff management may have led to Bush’s triumph and Kerry’s defeat. The old joke about “I’m not a member of any organized party — I’m a Democrat” rings true with the Kerry camp. They had Bob Shrum on board, whose 0-7 record in presidential campaigns almost guaranteed the Massachusetts senator’s defeat.
 
By contrast, the Bush-Cheney camp was led by “Turd Blossom” (43’s nickname) Karl Rove, perhaps the most focused political strategist of our time. In my opinion — and in the view of the Newsweek reporters — Rove is in a different galaxy from Shrum and even from Democratic hot-shot strategists James Carville and Paul Begala.
 
From the start, Kerry was hampered by his wildly independent second wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. I observed this first hand last summer while covering the Beckley, W.Va. stop of Kerry and his wife and Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards and his wife Elizabeth. Teresa hogged the microphone on that hot summer afternoon at the Raleigh County Memorial Airport and I noticed unease among my hardcore Democratic friends who were in attendance.
 
There is plenty of inside baseball information in “Election 2004” — and one howler of an error toward the end. On Page 193, discussing how Bush’s second term may end up, Thomas writes: “Indeed, two of the last three second-term presidents (Nixon and Clinton) were impeached…” This is erroneous, of course: Nixon resigned in 1974 before he was impeached. When Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. Clinton was the only one who was impeached (tried) but not convicted. This is the kind of error that should have been caught by any reasonably competent copy editor.
 
Web site: www.publicaffairsbooks.com

After reading and reviewing — and thoroughly enjoying — Arcadia Publishing’s “Huntington” in the Images of America” picture history series, I obtained a review copy of “Santa Cruz California” (Arcadia Publishing, 128 pages, $19.95) in the same series. Written by Sheila O’Hare and Irene Berry, it draws heavily on the photo archives of the University of California at Santa Cruz, made famous by John Travolta’s T-shirt (“The Banana Slugs”) in the 1994 movie “Pulp Fiction.”
 
Why Santa Cruz? Because it’s one of my favorite cities in California, an often laid-back surfing and tourism town (about 55,000 people) that reminds many people of a California version of Atlantic City. Actually, it’s more like Cape May, N.J. or Ocean City, Md., with the addition of great beaches and a boardwalk and an old-time entertainment zone with a roller coaster.
 
What’s missing these days is the Miss California Pageant, held every year from 1924 until 1990, when it left the resort city because of Politically Correct protests that charged the pageant with promoting a sexist view of feminine beauty. In my humble opinion, the entire state of California–based on residence there from 1976-1992 — is suffering under a cloud of Political Correctness almost as heavy as summer smog in downtown Pasadena!
 
Another reason for selecting a book on Santa Cruz is it’s my wife’s hometown. Liz enjoyed the 200 or so photographs but looked in vain for her old high school or for some other attractions she remembered from her time in this funky little city.
 
Once upon a time, Santa Cruz was more than just the university and tourism: It had a working cannery row for sardines, tuna and salmon, much like the one in Monterey across the bay; it had chicken ranches and apple farms, complete with apple box making contests. It had a logging industry reminiscent of West Virginia’s Cass in Pocahontas County. The authors have a picture of a small, narrow-gauge version of the powerful logging locomotives used at Cass and call it a “shay.” Actually “Shay” was the trade name for a well-known logging locomotive, made from the 1880s to 1945 at Lima Locomotive Works, Lima, Ohio.
 
And, most of all — unlike today — Santa Cruz was affordable by ordinary working people, including reporters at the Santa Cruz Sentinel and factory workers. Of course, even then, many of these workers lived in nearby Watsonville, a more working class town.
 
I’m looking forward to reviewing more “Image of America” books; they’re a fun way to absorb local history. By the way, if you go to Santa Cruz, book a room in the Casa Blanca Inn right on the boardwalk at Beach and Main. We’ve stayed there and enjoyed ourselves immensely.
 
Web site: www.arcadiapublishing.com
 
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More Book Reviews by David M. Kinchen
— 10/28/04 BOOK REVIEWS: Bill Kurtis on the Death Penalty; Ms. Moffett Becomes a Teacher
— 11/15/04 BOOK REVIEW: Roth Envisions a Frightening 'What If?' in 'The Plot Against America'
— 11/24/04 BOOK REVIEWS: Bush, Blair and Iraq; A Shrink at Nuremberg; Updike's Sexy Geek; Potomac Fever Smites an Academic
— 12/15/04 BOOK REVIEWS: 'Past Imperfect' Covers Complexities of History, Plagiarism Issues; 'His Excellency' Reveals George Washington's Accomplishments
— 12/29/04 BOOK REVIEWS: ‘de Kooning’ Chronicles Rise of American Art Supremacy; ‘Adams vs. Jefferson’ Shows That Controversial Presidential Elections are Nothing New
— 01/17/05 BOOK REVIEW: Max Hastings on Germany's 'Armageddon' as Allies from West, East Conquer Third Reich
— 01/24/05 BOOK REVIEW: ‘Images of America: Huntington’ Displays Glorious Architecture of West Virginia’s First Planned City
— 01/29/05 BOOK REVIEW: ‘Auschwitz’ Personalizes Horror That Should Never Be Forgotten

David M. Kinchen is the Editor of HuntingtonNews.Net, repsponses and article submissions can be made to .
 
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