E-Mail This Article to a Friend Political fictions (continued)

Elliott managed to thrust himself out the system and into college by applying for a little-known state-custody scholarship to the University of Illinois, and then went to graduate school at Northwestern University to study film. During his 20s, he shot heroin here and there, earned money as a stripper, and did some time as a cabdriver. Meanwhile, he wrote fiction compulsively, even though he’d never had any formal training; he says that by the time he sold his first novel, the slim Jones Inn (Dimensions), in 1988, he’d already written three novels "for his friends." His life story is so fantastic that a San Francisco Weekly writer profiling Elliott in 2001 contacted a director of the Jewish Children’s Bureau, the organization that presided over his group-home years and paid his college tuition, to verify his tale.

Elliott’s street-smart background plays a subtle but critical role in Looking Forward to It, creating moments that could seem jarring for anyone unfamiliar with his past. In discussing the tax plans proffered by Gephardt and Kucinich, he writes, "My father, who quit writing pornographic novels to become a landlord, explained property tax to me this way." Watching Kucinich speak for the first time, he writes, "Kucinich looks like the kid that ratted me out for smoking pot in the detention center when I was 14." And when Elliott takes a break from the trail to stay with an old friend, he notes, "He introduced me to gambling and heroin. We had great times."

"The personal is political," Elliott explains. In the book, he compares the inability of Kerry and Bush to agree on basic definitions of words like "terror" with his own never-ending disagreements with his father. For example, he told an interviewer that his father shaved his head when he was a child; his father insists that he merely gave his son a "haircut." "His insistence on changing the vocabulary I use to describe possibly the most traumatic moment of my youth gives me insight into the way politicians fight with the media," Elliott writes. Over the phone, he adds, "Everything makes sense when you can bring it down to that personal level. It helps me understand [politics], which is a big part of the book, and I think it helps other people understand too. They’re able to relate it into real-life terms."

Of course, the presidential campaign trail has been mined by plenty of other writers. Timothy Crouse tagged along with Hunter Thompson and out came The Boys on the Bus (1973). When novelist Steve Erickson was fired from Rolling Stone while covering the 1996 primaries, he turned his reporting into American Nomad (1997). During the last presidential race, David Foster Wallace spent a week on tour with John McCain; some years ago, essayist Joan Didion was sent by editors to various political conventions and campaign stops in the late ’80s and ’90s, which provided material for her incisive collection Political Fictions (2001).

But Elliott is practically the anti-Didion: personal and accessible, his tone never earnest, his prose never dense, his references never arcane. And his past also gives him a rare vantage point for someone covering the presidential race, one that’s more than likely responsible for his left-leaning politics. "I know the effect of the state on the individual — I’ve been that individual," he says. "I know what you eat when you’re locked up as a child. I know what happens when you underfund education and when you underfund child welfare, so you can give a tax break to IBM. I know the direct human consequences of that because I’ve seen it firsthand. I’ve seen what happened to my friends, very few of whom went to college. Many of them are in jail. [That experience] definitely informs me, the direct human consequences of tax cuts for the rich."

But Elliott didn’t actually care about national politics until his late 20s. Then, he worked in Washington for Ralph Nader, driving "a big van with an enormous sign plastered on both sides that read CORPORATE CLEAN-UP CREW and delivering pro–Green Party speeches throughout the South. In retrospect, Elliott admits he regrets his role in Nader’s 2000 presidential pitch. "But I don’t really blame myself. And I don’t blame other people. I believe that we didn’t know the difference between Gore and Bush in 2000. But in 2004, if you don’t know the difference, then you’re a moron."

As Elliott witnessed during his year on the campaign trail — not only following the Democrats, but also chasing the Bush campaign through the Midwest for a month — the difference between the two candidates is the severity of their lies. "The Bush campaign: they’d just lie all the time. It was outrageous," Elliott says. "The Kerry campaign: they’d lie, you know, a little bit." He’s tired of people reducing the race to a choice between the lesser of two evils. "What happens if one evil is a really, really big evil and the other evil is a little, small evil? And the difference between the evils is like the difference between a department-store fire and a Bic lighter?"

Elliott is still an acquaintance of Kucinich’s: every time they see each other, they embrace. But Elliott doesn’t think Kucinich would’ve made a good president. "You know, he’s like a guy that I really like, and I’d love to have him over to play poker. He’s like lots of people that I love and hang out with, but that I don’t want to be president. You know?"

Since he finished writing Looking Forward to It, Elliott has organized "Operation Ohio," which enlists authors such as Tobias Wolff, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Lethem to call swing-state college students on Election Day and ask them to hit the polls. "The thing about first-time voters, in general, they all say they’re going to vote and they don’t," Elliott says. "They wake up in the morning and maybe they have a test. So giving [them] a push, a phone call from one of their favorite authors, hopefully will help."

Beyond that, Elliott has no clue what’s next. "I look at November second, and all I can see is this big black hole, this cliff. And I’m just going over this edge. I have no idea what’s there, or what I’m going to do to give my life meaning and purpose. It’s very scary." Of course, it’ll be even scarier if George W. Bush wins — but Elliott doesn’t want to go there. "After Kerry wins," he says, emphasizing the word as though it carries all the weight of the world, "I’ll celebrate. Or maybe I’ll just get a girlfriend."

Stephen Elliott reads from Looking Forward to It: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process at the Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass Ave, in Cambridge, on October 20, at 6:30 p.m. Call (617) 661-1515. Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com