All's Fair: Love, War, and Running for President.

If you're like me, you find it almost irresistible to be suspicious of a book like this. After all, most memoirs that are so heavily trumpeted don't live up to the fanfare, and All's Fair is, well, being trumpeted blaringly. James Carville and Mary Matalin received almost a million dollar advance to tell the story of their oddball romance and to wax about their roles in opposing camps in the 1992 presidential election. Capitalizing on the Hatfield-and-McCoy quality of their marriage, rivals Simon & Schuster and Random House are making a big deal about their co-publishing the book. And in keeping with the circus atmosphere surrounding their book's release, Carville and Matalin have even posed for publicity photos with a live donkey and elephant.

I think my suspicions were merited. First off, All's Fair tends to be disappointingly short on the kind of insider gossip that makes politico memoirs so much fun. Sure, Carville takes a few shots at longtime Clinton campaign aide Betsey Wright for screwing up the Clinton response to George Bush's charge that he raised taxes 128 times. And Matalin piles on John Sununu, bashing the already-pummeled former chief of staff for being dictatorial. But there's nothing here so interesting as, for example, the nugget in Donald Regan's memoirs that Ronald Reagan took political counsel from Nancy's astrologer.

More important, the book does only a modest job of explaining the Carville-Matalin relationship and why it works despite their political differences. As you read the book--which is divided into chunks marked "Mary" and "James" and (ghost)written in their respective voices--some things about their relationship do make sense. Their politics aren't all that far apart. She is prochoice, for instance. He despairs about liberal elitism in the Democratic Party on issues such as arts and abortion funding. Both are basically moderates. Beyond politics, other things bind them. They share a blue-collar, hard-knocks kind of background. He grew up in tiny Carville, Louisiana, the son of a postal worker dad and a mom who sold encyclopedias. Carville reminds us constantly that it was only after a series of botched careers--Marine, science teacher, small-time lawyer--that his life hit an upward trajectory. In one hard luck scene set in 1984, he is crying on the platform of Washington's Union Station, 38, completely broke, with nowhere to go after Gary Hart's presidential campaign, itself broke, said it couldn't pay him for the office work he was doing at its headquarters. Matalin's rise was not much different. The granddaughter of Croatian immigrants, she grew up in ethnic Chicago and went through several career miscues--including a stint as a beautician--before rising in politics.

Their marriage is bound, too, by a sassy lightheartedness. There's James in the now-in-famous Clinton campaign War Room, offering volunteers $100 if he can crack eggs over their heads; there's Mary leading a conga line down the aisle of Air Force One. When the two describe their terse 3 a.m. phone calls during the campaign or their pre-celebrity days when they first started dating, it's easy to see that they're much alike. The problem, though, is that Carville and Matalin don't offer much of a guide for the rest of us about how to relate to people with whom we have political differences. Such unions face real and complex hurdles, but Carville and Matalin are too frenetic to explain how they work it out.

Perhaps one reason their marriage works is that their first love isn't the governing part of politics but the campaigning. That would make sense because they're at their best explaining the zaniness of daily life during a campaign. Zillions of gallons of ink are spilled analyzing American political races, but Carville and Matalin's book does the rare thing of explaining the addictive quality that draws so many people into a life of campaigns. There are thousands of people who go from campaign to campaign with little interest in sticking around for the governing part. For Carville, it's the same need to be needed that draws people into volunteer work. "Folks wonder why it's always the same people volunteering," says Carville. "The person who does the church fairs is the one who does the United Way drive is the one who does the Heart Association picnic. It's because people come down from being a part of something, from being needed, and have to move on to something else to get that feeling." Both of them love the rush of working 18-hour-days amid the whirl of fax machines and cellular phones.

Their enthusiasm for their job, even when it's hard, is pretty infectious. In one of the funnier scenes in All's Fair, Carville describes the fights over Clinton's crowded campaign schedule. Everyone is angry at him. Hillary and her pal, the notoriously tough New York lawyer Susan Thomases, are bellowing to Carville over how Clinton is overbooked, tired. Clinton is calling from the campaign plane to Carville in Little Rock to complain about exhaustion. Meanwhile, Louisiana Senator John Breaux is on line two, livid that the campaign has cancelled a Louisiana event that he had labored to assemble. Other political types are yelling at Carville to get Clinton out around the country to visit more states that look shaky. "The phone slips," says Carville, "are stacked up like unpaid bills and you were always calculating which to get to first." For her part, Matalin offers a funny account of trying to set up an "impromptu" visit of Bush to a bingo hall that ends up with the presidential motorcade getting lost.

Still, there is a phoniness to much of the book and, in some ways, to Matalin and Carville. First, there are some misstatements of fact. I didn't cover George Bush's campaign, but I did cover Clinton's, and I know that Carville is dissembling when he says, for instance, that Clinton's Sistah Souljah speech was not intended to be a big deal. (Even Matalin herself accuses Carville of being disingenuous on this point. The authors obviously felt no compelling need to sort out all the facts before going to press.) In the hours leading up to the speech, Clinton aides made it quite clear in asides to the press that it was going to be a very big deal and, of course, by challenging Jesse Jackson so directly it proved to be a huge event. Likewise, Matalin understates the involvement of British conservatives in spreading rumors about Clinton's Oxford days. And in other ways small and large facts are fudged. Carville uses quotation marks promiscuously when it's clear that he's not quoting people exactly. That's a forgivable transgression, but it has no place in a book that lambastes the press for its ethical flaws. More important, you walk away from the book not knowing how much of Carville and Matalin's life is pure schtick. Carville admits that a lot of his kinetic Cajun routine is, simply, hype.

Running mates

Most irksome is their attitude toward celebrity. At one point Matalin complains about a dinner she and Carville have with reporters at a fashionable Washington restaurant named I Ricchi, "this loud, to-be-seen kind of Washington restaurant. I hated this scene." But it happens that Carville and Matalin eat almost nightly at The Palm, a loud, to-be-seen kind of restaurant across the street from I Ricchi. The couple's dining habits are, of course, their own business. But her posturing that she hates the Washington glamour scene is grating and unnecessary. Why not just admit that they like it?

When it comes to dealing with the press, Carville and Matalin are particularly squirrely. They rip into the press as an institution--but pull their punches by refusing to lash out at any individual reporters. In a reverse spin on the press tendency to cultivate sources, Carville and Matalin throw bouquets to individual members of the Fourth Estate, even as they skewer them as a whole. Mary on Newsweek's Joe Klein: "He's very hip, a lot of fun to banter with." Carville dispatches valentines to institutions: "The L.A. Times distinguished itself in this campaign and clearly belongs in the pantheon with the leading East Coast newspapers." And he tosses them to individuals: "David Von Drehle and David Maraniss [of The Washington Post] and Maureen Dowd [of The New York Times] were probably the best writers on the campaign and did the funniest, most interesting pieces."

When it comes to critiquing the press in general, however, Carville and Matalin can barely contain their rage. "We didn't get into a lot of intellectual discussions about the future of America," Carville says of his chats with reporters. "They'd never ask you about what Bill Clinton was trying to do for the country, they'd want to know how he was going to get there." The press, in the Carville-Matalin view, is The Beast. Always foraging, it must be fed a daily does of pictures and soundbites and anecdotes, otherwise it will write nasty stories about the candidate.

To some degree, this rap on political reporters is right. Matalin is particularly on target when she talks about the pack mentality of the press and its tendency to get a line on something and not to let go. And it's no doubt true that personality, conflict, and campaigns tend to soak up more of the press' collective energies than issues stories. But it's unfair to say that issues tend to get ignored during a campaign. Political scientists such as Samuel Popkin, a Clinton consultant, have shown that most voters, by Election Day, do have a pretty good sense of where the candidates stand on the basic issues. Besides, the campaign strategists themselves are obsessed with photo ops and strategy, as this book makes clear.

Carville is at his weakest when he declares that the press are scandalmongers, willing to pick up any rumor and run with it. This is the lowest common denominator theory of journalism, the idea that the tabloid papers publish sleazy stories which in turn force the mainstream media to latch on. Naturally, he cites the Gennifer Flowers and draft stories as examples of the press running amok. There's no question that the press gave Gennifer Flowers a lot of air time. But given what had happened to Gary Hart, it was inevitable that the press would report Flowers' story. All said, I think reporters handled the episode pretty well. They dutifully noted that she was getting paid and that there were holes in her story; if anything they spared Clinton by making less of the Flowers-Clinton tape. While there was some evidence that the tape had been doctored, Clinton nevertheless apologized to Mario Cuomo for saying on the tape that the New York governor acts like a Mafioso--proof positive that at least parts of the tape were accurate. And as Carville noted, the Flowers episode caused only a temporary dip in Clinton's polls. It was the volatile combination of Clinton's evasiveness on the draft and Gennifer Flowers' accusation that created the Slick Willie problem. To say that the media over-played the draft story is a mistake. The Vietnam War was one of the great moral issues of the late 20th century and the question of how Bill Clinton in 1992--or Dan Quayle in 1988 or Dick Cheney in 1996--dealt with it is a key issue, one that Americans eventually resolved, at least last time around, in his favor.

Besides, we reporters ought to get some credit for all the garbage we don't print. Throughout the Clinton campaign I had lots of accusations about Clinton land in my lap that I looked into and did not touch because they seemed groundless in the extreme. Similarly, U.S. News, my employer, received a tip late in the campaign that George Bush may have violated the Geneva Convention and strafed surrendering Japanese soldiers when he was a pilot during World War II. U.S. News examined the charges, which include some official U.S. documents, but they seemed too ambiguous to publish--especially during the crucial final days of a campaign. The magazine held on to the story, as did Newsweek and other outlets. Justifiably so.

The strongest charge against the campaign press is, as Carville and Matalin both note, its unrelenting negativity. The fear of being labeled "in the tank" is the deepest fear any political reporter lives with, and it leads to a harder edge than is often appropriate. Part of the negativity, though, comes from being spun constantly by a White House communications operation, whether it is Bush's or Clinton's, that is rarely willing to be candid or acknowledge the obvious. As Mickey Kaus notes, the best way to deal with today's cynical press is not to moan like "a dinosaur trapped in a tar pit" but to deal with it. Kaus notes that Barney Frank's brutal honesty in dealing with his relationship with a male prostitute helped stave off what seemed like a certain death knell to his career.

Interestingly, the book offers a contrarian and provocative defense of political consultants. It is conventional wisdom, of course, that consultants are bad for America. They're said to trivialize politics, coarsen debate. The 1972 film "The Candidate" was the apotheosis of this belief. In the last line of the film the suddenly successful Senate candidate, Robert Redford, asks: "What do we do now?" The grim consultant offers no answer over the rising cheers of the crowd. The scene symbolized how vacuous the modern American campaign had become. Not surprisingly, Carville and Matalin reject this view; theirs is basically a sanguine view of politics--as relentlessly upbeat as Matalin's nightly talk show on CNBC, on which she interviews guests on a set that looks more like "Saturday Night Live" than "Meet the Press." They argue that all consultants do is help a candidate clarify and hone his message.

Much of the time this is true, but there are also examples in this book that show consultants at their worst. Carville is particularly pround of the way that the Clinton campaign crushed Paul Tsongas on issues of sacrifice such as the gasoline tax and cutting entitlements. Such positions are elitist, says Carville, favored by the media, but insensitive to the needs of the middle class. Perhaps. But the problem for Carville is that they are now President Clinton's positions. He raised the gas tax and made more of Social Security income taxable. Given the mood of the country and Congress, more cuts are on their way. By clobbering Tsongas with such vehemence, Clinton later looked foolish when he adopted some of those very same positions. Carville did a disservice to the public debate and made his boss look bad. All's fair in politics. But it isn't always smart.