THE OUTSIDE STORY
How Democrats and Republicans Elected Reagan
Richard Brookhiser
New York: Doubleday, 1986
299 pp., $17.95
WAKE US WHEN IT'S OVER
Presidential Politics of 1984
Jack W.Germond and Jules Witcover
New York: Macmillan, 1985
567 pp., 19.95
CAMPAIGN JOURNAL
The Political Events of 1983-1984
Elizabeth Drew
New York: Macmillan, 1985
783 pp., $ 24.95
CAMPAIGN FOR PRESDENT
The Managers Look at '84
Jonathan Moore
Editor Auburn house, Massachusetts, 1986
292 pp., $ 16.95
We now stand midway between the 1984 and 1988 presidential elections: a perfect perch from which to reflect on the past and future of America's two major political parties. The last presidential election proved a slaughter, but Ronald Reagan can't run again. Reagan's forced retirement hands Democrats a chance they haven't earned, and forces Republicans to confront prematurely crakes in their seemingly invincible political fortress.
A new book by Richard Brookhiser, managing editor at National Review, describes the 1984 spectacle with wit, humor, and insight and gives us a glimpse of 1988s impending combat. The Outside Story: How Democrats and Republicans Elected Reagan is not just another collection of campaign dispatches, like most books written about recent campaigns but is in original investigation of the subject. To understand why Brookhiser's method recharges the reader for another look at a campaign that, after all, has been dead for two years, we must remember a bit of the history of campaign books.
Histories of Struggles Past
Until the 1950s, campaign journalism consisted mostly of reports on events and speeches. Such writings almost never became books. Even H. L. Mencken, whose reporting for the Baltimore Evening Sun turned the campaigns into comic opera, only once compiled his campaign dispatches into a book. His publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, cajoled him into putting out Making a President, covering the 1932 campaign that elected Franklin D. Roosevelt. The book sold poorly, and the quality of the final product so dismayed the meticulous Mencken that he never attempted a sequel. Read today, Making a President has its moments, but remains one of the dullest things the Baltimore humorist ever wrote.
The spread of television in the 1950s changed campaign reporting. Now Americans could see candidates "live" - as broadcast jargon puts it - night after night after…For the first time since the
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