Politics as crack cocaine

But you seemed so skeptical of Kerry, at least initially.

A politician to the core. He's such a boring person to listen to, and I was like, if he wins, I'm going to have to spend a lot more time with him, and that's going to really suck. And he ran such a dirty campaign in Iowa against Howard Dean. But then you get involved in the general election, and you see that however Kerry was fighting Dean, it's nothing compared to how dirty a fighter Bush is. To paraphrase Hunter Thompson, the worst thing that Kerry has ever done Bush does every day of his life as a matter of policy. [Laughs.] Plus, when I had a chance to talk to Kerry on the bus one-on-one, I did like him. He'd play guitar for us on the road. And he's a voracious reader: He's always got six books going at a time.

What was he reading when you last saw him?

Actually, "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail."

You were there for the demise of the Dean campaign in Iowa.

To bring all these people from out of state to knock on everybody's doors -- 4,000 kids in orange hats -- nobody ever told these kids to shave, nobody trained them. I mean, clean them up! Now I think Kerry was truly the best pick to go up against Bush.

But how do you feel about this business of voting for the candidate who seems most likely to win?

It's totally screwed up. That was one of the ideas I wrestled with on the trail: If we vote for someone because they're electable and then they don't win, then we've fucked ourselves, we totally threw away our vote. Everyone who voted for Gore over Bill Bradley because they didn't think Bradley could win, well, they got screwed.

I have to admit that I've always bought into the idea of the campaign being seamless, this polished political machine that you see glamorous glimpses of on the nightly news. But there are truly unsexy scenes in your book, where you go to see Kerry give a stump speech in some dingy venue, and there's nobody there ...

There were moments when less than 10 people showed up, and you're on the outskirts of some tiny town. Like at the College Convention, all these kids were there for Kerry, waving signs and shouting, "Go, Kerry, go!" And he comes running down from the green room, and he's supposed to turn right and head to the stage -- but instead he runs left and bails through these students and heads straight to the bathroom and closes the door. And he's in there for, like, 20 minutes, and these kids are shouting, "Go, Kerry, go!" cheering on the candidate in the bathroom. These are not moments you see on television.

You told me that at one point you were sleeping in your car.

Oh, I did a lot of that. But when I was on the bus I would stay at a hotel with the candidates because that's where the press were staying, and if I was going to get any good information it was going to be over awful garlic chicken wings with Jodi Wilgoren at the hotel bar in Cleveland while Al Gore's upstairs giving John Kerry $6 million. But when I wasn't on the bus, I'd be in my car, trying to keep up, hitting 100 when I know the president's going 90 just to stay ahead.

What did you think of Bush in person?

I kept thinking how strong he is -- like, if we were cavemen, I would want him to guard my cave. In the audience at Bush events, there's a lot of anger, but with Bush himself there's this calm, this animal magnetism.

Actually, the chapter about trailing Bush is structured in this very conscious, literary way, with shifts in perspective: Second, then first, then third person ...

I liked the idea of pretending that the reader's getting three different points of view when they're all really coming from the same voice, the same person. You can have so much fun with the narrative in these things -- and still, I felt that what I was doing was more honest than most journalism.

So you do think that.

I've decided! Because these people feel like they have to give equal time to the people who are telling the truth and the people who are telling lies. So you open up USA Today, and here's the press release I got this morning from one of the campaigns, and here's a quote from the spokesperson for the Bush campaign -- these are people who are paid to lie, so calling them for a quote is ridiculous. At least with my book, if I think somebody's lying I say that I think they're lying.

But that's partly due to the fact that you're writing this one long project, and you don't have to maintain any of these relationships.

That totally freed me up -- I didn't have to make friends, I wasn't constrained in that way with these sources.

How do you see the divide between your nonfiction and your fiction?

The nonfiction is happy-go-lucky, and the fiction is really dark -- and I don't know which is truer to who I am. My fear is that the fiction is me, and the nonfiction is who I pretend to be.

The tone of your fiction is so personal, and much of it deals with S/M  "Happy Baby," in particular. Do you consider yourself a submissive?

What? It's complicated. Maybe? Yes? I'm blushing!

Is there a link between S/M and politics?

Oh, completely! People who have that incredible need for power are often the ones searching for, you know, the punishing mother figure. With Republicans especially, there's all this guilt associated with sex, and S/M feeds on that. And hypocrisy.

You told me that your next book may be a novel told from the perspective of a human shield in Iraq. You even thought for a brief time that you would go over and join them.

I felt this was masochism in the political process: This is the way masochists protest, lying spread-eagled on top of a building while waiting for a bomb to fall on them. You just go to this place where you sit and you wait -- a month, two months, maybe the bomb comes. And there's something weird and beautiful about that, I think. I just thought, Wow, I can understand that. I was a hair away. But it was too great a sacrifice. I wanted to protest -- but you have to have a life to come back to.

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