Election `97: Anonymous figure stalks trail
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Your support makes all the difference.If Tony Blair thought it was bad being shadowed on his campaign bus by dozens of British journalists, he will not have been cheered up by the arrival of the New Yorker's correspondent, Joe Klein.
Mr Klein, aged 50, became known as the bete noire of American politics after he was unmasked as the anonymous author of the best-selling novel, Primary Colors.
In that novel, the author, "Anonymous" wrote with alarming detail about the election campaign of Jack Stanton - a thinly-disguised Bill Clinton - and the antics of his staff.
The book, which has so far netted Mr Klein royalties estimated at $6m (about pounds 4m) caused a furore in Washington, leading to Mr Klein's eventual unmasking. He had been on the real 1992 campaign trail with Mr Clinton for Newsweek magazine.
He arrived on Mr Blair's campaign trail two days ago to write a 10,000- word comparison of the British and American campaign styles - but he will, like British journalists, not be allowed anything like the kind of access American journalists enjoyed with Mr Clinton.
Asked whether he was planning to write a novel on the British campaign, he said no. But he had already been amused by the arrival on Thursday of the Tory chicken.
"You should have seen our campaign in Missouri in 1988," he said. "A whole barnyard menagerie turned up to confront [Michael] Dukakis because the Republicans put it out that he was in favour of repealing the laws against sodomy ..."
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