Review: 'Van' good trip with Hillary campaign

"The Girls in the Van"
By Beth J. Harpaz
St. Martin's Press
Nonfiction/Politics
320 pages

By L.D. Meagher
Special to CNN

(CNN) -- A generation ago, the reporters who covered major political campaigns were virtually all men. In 2000, the reporters who covered Hillary Clinton on her quest for political office were predominately women.

Beth J. Harpaz of the Associated Press was one of them. She recalls the experience in "The Girls in the Van," an account of nearly two years on the campaign trail with the First Lady.

If the title sounds familiar, there's a good reason. Harpaz takes many of her cues from "The Boys on the Bus," the eye-opening chronicle by Timothy Crouse of how journalists really spent their time during the 1972 presidential campaign. There have been so many campaign chronicles published since then that some of what happened in the Hillary campaign retinue seems a bit old hat -- the carping about access, the long days without news or food, the irreverent song parodies.

What makes this campaign account different is that the people complaining and singing are, for the most part, women.

Juggling demands

"The Girls in the Van" is, above all, the story of a working mother -- not Hillary Clinton, but Harpaz herself. She devotes as much attention to her personal juggling of career demands and family needs as she does to recounting the events of the campaign.

A particularly trying day in the weeks before the election underscored the strain she was under:

"If I'd had any illusions that I was leading a glamorous Brenda Starr-type existence," she writes, "they crashed right then and there with the realization that my life was a lot more like Erma Bombeck's. I wasn't chasing deadlines; I was chasing third-grade homework, bubble baths, and dinners that could be made in fifteen minutes or less while a screaming toddler grabbed on to my leg."

Good effort

Harpaz leaves the broader themes of the Hillary candidacy for others. She doesn't try to plumb the depths of the candidate's psyche in an effort to discover why she ran for the Senate. Nor does she attempt to explain why the campaign was as successful as it was.

The book is about the challenges facing the largely female press corps that trooped around New York State in the First Lady's wake. (In truth, Harpaz didn't spend a lot of time upstate during the campaign. She works out of the AP bureau in New York City and, generally, stuck to covering events within the metropolitan area.)

Harpaz writes in a simple, nuts-and-bolts style that would make her wire-service editors proud. As a result, "The Girls in the Van" is easy, sometimes fun, to read. The book doesn't pretend to be the final word on the phenomenon of the Hillary campaign. But as a first word, from an interesting vantage point, it's a commendable effort.