We know how the story ends. But the best campaign lit blends the thrill of the race with a deft pulling back of the curtain, ushering the candidates and their wiles into the unblinking light of the masses — grand finales be dammed. The treasure of primary sources is that they offer what nothing else can: the zeitgeist of the then that shapes the now. These narratives are our connective political tissue, linking benchmarks we use to create our political mythology.

The best writings — from a macho lot — reveal new facets of the machine. Joe McGinniss' The Selling of the President 1968 is the bible of political marketing, laying out the calculating details that helped Nixon win the game, while Terry Southern laid bare the kooks of the '68 Democratic convention. The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse (a Hunter S. Thompson crony in '72) diagnosed herd journalism for the first time, and Richard Ben Cramer's riveting version of the 1988 campaign in What It Takes: The Way to the White House digs deep into the psychology and motives of presidential material. But two classics of the campaign trail, Superman Comes to the Supermarket , written by Norman Mailer and published by Esquire magazine in 1960, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson, bring two moments — the nomination of Kennedy and the fog of war — into prescient focus for 2008.

In the current political year, the mystique of Senator Barack Obama is often, perhaps carelessly, compared to that of John Kennedy. His youth, physical presence, and inexperience make the parallel plausible; he represents the same open tableau, unsullied by multiple rounds in the political ring. That is, as it was for Kennedy, both his strength and his weakness, and it could be the antidote to the very non-Hollywood ending the American project appears to be taking under President Bush. "Of necessity the myth would emerge once more because America's politics would also now be America's favorite movie, America's first soap opera, America's best seller," Mailer wrote of Kennedy. When we read his account of the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, we witness the tide change and nearly gullible insistence that Kennedy's star power and slick sheen would make the quiescent heaviness of the Eisenhower years disappear. But the welcome for the deus ex machina was not without reserve. "With such a man in office the myth of the nation would again be engaged, and the fact that he was Catholic would shiver a first existential vibration of consciousness into the mind of the White Protestant [...] who would have the pain and creative luxury of feeling himself in some tiny degree part of a minority." Kennedy's otherness was unmistakably powerful in 1960. What he was not — a work-horse like Adlai Stevenson, bullish like LBJ, or dark like Richard Nixon — defined him as much as what he was. And indeed, it's Obama's otherness that appears to have cast a similar magic in a way that Hillary Clinton's otherness has not. It is the same double-punch appeal, we see through Mailer, that Kennedy pioneered so well.

Even as Nixon lost to the Kennedy glamour in 1960, he got his way in 1968 and was barreling toward his final stretch by 1972. The country that Thompson sees when he takes to the campaign trail for Rolling Stone magazine is skidded out, hungover, and depressed. It's not the antiwar Democrat George McGovern winning that's inconceivable, but the prospect of Nixon losing. Perhaps the history lesson extends better to 2004, when Bush's entrenchment was immovable. However, Hillary Clinton's familial incumbency and the well-oiled machine have labored to make her nomination appear a foregone conclusion. In some respects, a Clinton loss would appear more astonishing than an Obama or Republican win.

Fear and Loathing showcases Thompson's gonzo chops at their best, fueled by buckets of gin and primo Mexican speed (long stretches of the book were transcribed after the Doctor suffered a series of mysterious seizures in November). He chews the fat with Nixon over football, sidles up to McGovern at a urinal, infiltrates the freakish ranks of the Nixon Youth, and gives us a primer in Ibogaine. Though Thompson is a fervid McGovern supporter, we watch through his dilated pupils as the campaign unwinds over the summer of 1972, veering not closer to its peace-loving base, but into politics as usual. Thompson delivers a scathing report by September: "The McGovern campaign appears to be fucked at this time. [...] He has crippled himself with a series of almost unbelievable blunders that have understandably convinced huge chunks of the electorate, including at least half of his own hard-core supporters, that The Candidate is a gibbering dingbat."

The cautionary tale here is that even a peace platform in a time of wartime disillusion can't overcome bad politicking. Nine months away from the critical 2008 vote, the message to Democrats is: don't fuck it up.

-Catherine New