In the tradition of “The Selling of the President” by Joe McGiniss, and Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72,” New York Press columnist and Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi has written “Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches From the Dumb Season” (New Press). In an appearance Thursday at Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side, he told of his experiences on the campaign trail with Democratic candidates in 2004 and while working for 10 weeks undercover in the Bush campaign.

On the campaign trail, he said, reporters are sealed off from the outside world, do not have a good sense of where they are, and see the same people over and over. He said a “Stockholm syndrome” occurs, where journalists end up identifying with the candidates.

Once, when listening to John Kerry speak at a training center in Wausau, Wis., “I was bored out of my mind,” Mr. Taibbi said. He spied two kids on a balcony trying to spit on one of the reporters, and asked them what was worth seeing in town. They took him to a dairy farm with a very advanced milk-producing facility. The cows were herded through a door to individual stalls where they were milked by electronic machines. Mr. Taibbi said this was analogous to reporters on the campaign trail.

He found the campaign trail was like elementary school: When at one point he was videotaping reporters, he was told if he continued, they would tell on him. Mr. Taibbi did not fit into the “closed club” of national political reporters, in which there is a pecking order and the large press outlets are the “popular kids” who get to sit in the front.

He said alternative journalism doesn’t have access to a candidate once he’s a national figure. In addition, he said, the candidate’s handlers try to figure out what kind of story you are writing and say “we’ll get back to you” but don’t.

“When you’re on the campaign trail, you just about never come into contact with real people,” he said. The people one meets at the campaign stops are largely brought to the event by the candidate himself.

Mr. Taibbi said he would read press accounts of campaign appearances and apply “the Blair test,” a reference to Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who fabricated several news stories. The test was: “Could this story have been written in a crack house 2,000 miles away?” Mr. Taibbi said about a third of the stories passed this test. Those stories quoted campaign aides and used geographical details one could pick out of an accompanying photo.

He spoke of the difficulty of asking a question of a candidate when other reporters jump in and ask their questions. He likened the candidate responding simultaneously to several reporters to “a kung fu movie” with the candidate “swatting away the questions.”

He also noticed how reporters get six to eight catered meals a day. “Campaign handlers don’t want reporters to be grumpy,” he said. The campaign handlers, it seems, prefer the press to be lethargic. Mr.Taibbi proceeded to go on a hunger strike, “rejecting the logic of the campaign.” he traveling press was treated “like the aristocrats,” often with their own separate room and better hors d’oeuvres than the local press, he said.

Mr. Taibbi said the journalists soon got to know the stump speeches by heart. He had broken down Howard Dean’s stump speech into about 20 sections, and when he gave the speech, Mr. aibbi would refer to it by number, calling out, “7, 4, 3…” After Mr. Taibbi’s talk, one man in the audience, who works in government, said if this is the picture of how candidates are selected in America, then “the joke is on us.”

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A ‘STRAND’ OF POLITICAL HUMOR

At the Strand Bookstore last Tuesday, Nation publisher Victor Navasky appeared with artist and caricaturist David Levine to speak about various topics, including political cartooning. Mr. Navasky is author of “A Matter of Opinion” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Mr. Navasky read from a portion of his book recalling a flare-up ignited by a provocative caricature of Henry Kissinger drawn by Mr. Levine. The cartoon depicted the former secretary of state in bed atop a woman whose head was the Earth’s globe. The pair is writhing under bedsheets made of the American flag. If you want to know the outcome, read the book.

Mr. Levine explained that he felt there are races and genders of people who have been attacked, and “the only way I can even the score is to caricature the powerful.” One audience member asked Mr. Levine if he knew any cartoonists on the conservative side of the political spectrum. “No,” he said. “Can you think of a rightwing folksinger?”

Here Mr. Navasky recalled that Mr. Levine had in fact once provided the artwork for the cover of a Goldwaterera satirical record album titled “Folk Songs for Conservatives.” One such song began, “I thought I saw Roy Cohn last night.”

In attendance were Nation senior editor Richard Lingeman and Benj DeMott of the newspaper First of the Month. As a line of book buyers assembled at the speakers for autographed copies, Mr. Levine added a caricature of himself as a stylus.