Politics as crack cocaine

Novelist Stephen Elliott talks about John Kerry the guitar strummer and avid reader, George W. Bush the magnetic caveman, and his own loopy new book about the 2004 campaign.

By Alex Mar

Oct 27, 2004 | Stephen Elliott is the author of "Happy Baby," a dark, lyrical novel about juvenile institutions, drugs, abuse and S/M, inspired in part by his childhood as a ward of the state of Illinois. (Salon's review called it "a most impressive little novel ... heartbreakingly and bewilderingly alive.") In the summer of 2003, having garnered attention for his essay on Howard Dean in the Believer, Elliott improbably turned political commentator, dropping everything to follow the candidates and bring together two great American traditions: the presidential election and the cross-country road trip. His deeply unconventional and heartfelt book on the campaign, "Looking Forward to It: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Political Process," was released this month by Picador, and the result is a gonzo, do-it-yourself look at the winding road to Election Day.

When you wrote the piece about Dean last September, were you thinking of it as a one-off, or the beginning of something bigger?

Ever since 2000, when I followed [Ralph] Nader, I wanted to get back on the trail, to write a book about it. I was ready to walk away from everything I had to go follow this campaign on my own dime. I thought, I've got $20,000 in the bank, and I could just go blow it! Fortunately, when the article came out, I was able to get an actual book advance.

How much was that?

Fifty thousand dollars -- which surprisingly doesn't go that far when you're trying to keep up with the candidates. Alex Pelosi [director of the documentary film "Journeys With George"] told me that her travel cost half a million dollars, which I could never afford. I would be the only guy on the campaign bus who wasn't getting on the plane. I've read "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail" six or seven times -- it's a kind of gold standard -- but Hunter Thompson had total access, and all I had was my advance.

What was it about the 2000 campaign that made you think, OK, next time around I've got to do this?

It was my first time writing nonfiction. I was traveling through the deep South, and I'd send these e-mails from the Nader trail, just dispatches to my friends. And the editor from the Sun literary magazine [in North Carolina] got in touch and said he wanted to run my e-mails. It was the first moment of, "Oh, I can write nonfiction like that?" Because I didn't think that that was a publishable thing that I was doing -- just off-the-cuff, full of lies and creativity. For instance, I wrote one dispatch about how I was at a press conference with George Bush, and he had just come from executing somebody in Texas. And he'd pulled the switch on the guy, but the switch didn't work. So he had taken out a pocket knife and stabbed the guy instead -- and he'd shown up at the press conference covered in blood. And Gore responded to this by promising to clean up pornography on the Internet. So I'd send out dispatches like that: partly what I was doing, and partly this made-up thing.

At any point did you think, OK, now I'm a journalist?

Selling the book, probably. But then I had to actually write it, and I totally didn't know what I was doing at all. The first week on the campaign I thought, I don't see how this can possibly work. And even if I can do this, how can I do this for a year?

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