May 5-11, 2005

book quicks

Spanking the Donkey: On the Campaign Trail with the Democrats

by Joel Tannenbaum

Spanking the Donkey: On the Campaign Trail with the Democrats
By Matt Taibbi
New Press, 331 pp., $24.95

Those of you who pay attention to these sorts of things will recognize Matt Taibbi as the New York Press columnist whose recent cover story "52 Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope" earned wild condemnation all around. The piece was grotesque and hilarious and, to anyone remotely familiar with the author's work, its target was clear: not the pope but the news media, whose vacuous, nonstop coverage of the event failed to even superficially address the enormous divisions and dysfunctions within the Catholic Church.

Spanking the Donkey is a collection of Taibbi's writings from the Press , The Nation and Rolling Stone, all chronicling the last presidential election. Taibbi starts out covering the Iraq war protest in D.C. and marveling at the gulf between what he sees there with his own eyes and the descriptions he reads the next day. Then come his diaries from several months covering the run-up to the New Hampshire primary. Taibbi tries to play nice at first but is so disgusted by the major candidates that he descends into maneuvers like attending John Kerry rallies in a gorilla suit. ("Your costume," remarks Kerry. "What costume?" replies Taibbi.) A stint as a Bush campaign volunteer in Orlando follows and, finally, a remarkable exercise called "Wimblehack!" in which he sorts 32 of the biggest journalistic names covering the campaign into pairs and has them face off against each other, single-elimination. Each week the contestants are assessed by the election-related stories they file. Whoever's work is more self-congratulatory, shallow or derivative advances to the next round. The final tournament was timed to end with the election, allowing Taibbi to select the biggest hack in American journalism. More importantly, "Wimblehack!" suggests that America's most important journalists not only didn't encourage the candidates to speak honestly but actually discouraged them most of the time.

There are so many moments of genuine political insight in Spanking the Donkey that the reader is liable to be a little frustrated by the end: The book is as good a candidate as anything out there right now for a first-draft history of the 2004 presidential election, but it only begins to hint at a comprehensive understanding of what it all meant. Read it anyway to catch one of the funniest and most honest American political journalists argue that the electoral system is seriously, seriously busted.