Show Time:: The American Political Circus And The Race For The White House

The Story

Show Time is about seduction - the seduction of a system, the seduction of a people, the seduction of a nation. It is also a riveting, rollicking, behind-the-curtain peek at the greatest show on earth: the modern American presidential campaign. 'This is not a country that elects an entertainer in chief', Newt Gingrich said at the beginning of the last presidential campaign. He could not have been more wrong. The candidate who refuses to entertain is doomed to defeat, a lesson that is already influencing the 2000 campaign. In 1996, no detail was too small to escape the attention of the Clinton juggernaut, from the height of the stage the president stood on (four feet, so people could wave signs and not block the TV cameras) to the color of the pom-poms people waved (orange for Arizona, green for Oregon) to the length of the debates with Bob Dole (ninety minutes instead of sixty to keep Dole up past his usual 10 P.M. bedtime). But despite the carefully constructed facade, campaigns are still about power, money, and manipulation - and no one is better equipped to reveal their underbelly than Roger Simon, whose Road Show was called by Time magazine 'the most fun you can have with a political book'.