Review: Diary of a Political Tourist

Saw Diary of a Political Tourist last night on HBO. The capsule review: Alexandra Pelosi comes across as a self-absorbed brat, but the film is fun and absorbing and gets you inside some places you could never enter on your own.

Pelosi goes to a White House summer barbecue and the White House Christmas Party (Republicans eating! Republicans dancing! Republicans mocking Democrats! The weirdest looking backup singers ever!) Pelosi peppers the Democratic candidates with the kind of pesky questions you'd expect from a tagalong kid sister.

All the Democrats treat her with a wary jocularity. She doesn't appear to be much interested in issues, and her camera finds both Kerry and Dean at their respective lowest points of the campaign and kicks them around in a pretty disrespectful way. She actually asks Kerry at one point, "Are you a dead man walking?" To his credit, he doesn't punch her in the face. At a point after the collapse of the Dean campaign, she finds Dean and follows him around making cheap jokes about his vanished groupies.

But for all that I did mainly enjoy the show, especially when the part near the end when she has maneuvered Kerry into an interview on his plane and he takes over her camera and trains it on her, to her great discomfort. Walter Shapiro covered a lot of the same material in his excellent book One-Car Caravan: On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In, with more depth and a much more mature understanding of and sympathy for what the candidates go through in this grueling process. But by just being present, Pelosi's camera picks up more than she seems aware of.