Better Than Sex: book review

Any man who has risen religiously at the crack of noon for decades to feast on a strict diet of cocaine, marijuana, bourbon and strong cigarettes ... smoked through an elegant holder ... is bound to produce unorthodox works.

And any man who has so actively followed US politics with relish for as long as Thompson, and written long and hard about it for Rolling Stone magazine and Playboy, among others, is sure to be enlightening, no matter what he's been smoking.

Better Than Sex is an excellent if offbeat account of the 1992 presidential campaign that made Bill Clinton leader of the free world.

It is also a look at the first year of Mr Clinton's presidency and the continuation ... beyond the grave ... of Thompson's hate-hate relationship with Richard Nixon. (The last chapter is Thompson's almost cruel obituary of the man he calls "our Satan".)

Thompson got the title of his book from a female campaign worker in Washington who told him the mad, crazed, brutal game of politics ... particularly in election year ... was better than sex.

Although he goes to great pains at times to say that that just isn't so ...at one point even reproducing a press cutting in which he says this book was going to be about polo ... Thompson is obviously a man who gets his kicks from politics.

Not just his kicks, but also insane rantings, incredible paranoia, drug-crazed insights and marvellously funny pessimism.

Thompson is a man of many parts. Probably most famous for the craziness of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he is a proud card-carrying member of the press corps. In 1972 he was the only reporter on the campaign trail to whom Mr Nixon gave a private audience ... in the back of his limo ... so the two could discuss football.

Calling himself a liberal, but acting at all times like a drug-crazed, gun-toting, totally untrustworthy manic-depressive, Thompson says he supported Mr Clinton because it was the only way to get rid of George Bush ... a man he loathes as a very second rate Nixon ... and put an end to 12 years of what he calls the greed and hatred of the Reagan-Bush era.

And to get as close as he could to the campaign he even signed up as a supporter of Ross Perot and tried to convince the man he labels a loser and a joke that he (Thompson) would make a great Vice-President for Mr Perot.

Thompson has tried to run for public office before. In 1970 he lost the race to be sherrif of his Colorado county by just four percentage points. His campaign pledges included public humiliation in the stocks for any drug dealer who overcharged and a commitment not to let deputies take mescaline on duty.

The book has dozens of reproductions of wonderfully mad faxes and letters Thompson sent to people as diverse as Mr Clinton, the vice-president of CNN, Ed (not Ted) Turner, senior Clinton staff, including press adviser George Stephanopolous and the editors of Rolling Stone with whom he visited Mr Clinton at a disastrous press lunch in Little Rock, Arkansas.

According to Thompson, Mr Clinton would not share the french fries and made sub- human noises and gestures when introduced to Thompson.

Despite supporting Mr Clinton, Thompson finds him a most unattractive proposition, claiming, among many things, that Mr Clinton and his staff are the "new dumb" and that the presidential victory was engineered by Mr Bush'es secretary of state, James Baker, so that the Republicans could sit out four years while Mr Clinton failed to correct the damaged economic legacy of the Bush-Reagan era and then pounce to a win this year.

Thompson, in his loathing for Mr Clinton, even includes what surely is a fabricated letter from a boyhood friend of the president's claiming Mr Clinton, like all teenagers in Hope, Arkansas, did unseemly things with a goat to prove his manhood.
The drug-inspired ravings and paranoia can get too much, dragging the reader into deep depression. But overall Better Than Sex, while not being better than sex, is better than a lot of dry, contemporary writing about politics.

A further word of warning. If you ever thought politicians were worth worrying about then ... abandon faith all ye who enter here.