The Campaign: The Art of Local Politics as Learned from the Cross-Dresser, Cookie Baker, Sugar Slammer, and Other Lecturers

From the trenches of urban political warfare comes this dispatch from Mandery, a Manhattan attorney who was research director for Democrat Ruth Messinger's unsuccessful 1997 mayoral campaign against incumbent Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. His day-by-day log of his nine-month stint will interest all readers, including non-New Yorkers, concerned with the degeneration of politics into spin over substance. For Mandery, the campaign's galling irony was that Giuliani, who cut public school budgets, spent the largest portion of his advertising dollars portraying himself as a friend of education, while Messinger, an outspoken liberal, was massaged by her handlers (including the author) into a centrist. Mandery makes his personal biases clear: Messinger, in his eyes, is principled, brilliant, appealingly quirky and compassionate, while Giuliani is arrogant, egotistical, bullying, mean-spirited, ""an effective leader with bad priorities."" Yet Mandery, whose job it was to generate issues and to dig up dirt on opponents, admits that Messinger failed to articulate what she'd do if elected. Also, his own gaffes (like putting Messinger on Howard Stern's radio show) justify the conventional appraisal of Messinger's campaign as inept. Enlivened by nimble line drawings and political cartoons, this incisive journal offers a candid and often darkly funny picture of the uneasy cohabitation of idealism and cynicism that defines political life. (Dec.)