Via Political Wire, USA Today is publishing some excerpts from Walter Shapiro's book on how the campaign trail looked in 2002. Pretty interesting stuff, even though we're still not done:

A long, lonely road between ambition and the Oval Office

...I asked, how did you decide to run for president? ''The answer should be that I deeply care about it, and I thought it all out,'' Dean replied. ''But the way it happens is that I'm very intuitive, so I was driven toward running before I knew why I was doing it. I know that doesn't make any sense. It sounds like I'm just a very ambitious person who wants to be president.''

Naked ambition, of course, has spawned many other candidacies. But after an obligatory tour of his ideological orientation (''I want to balance the budget, I want a decent foreign policy . . . ''), Dean opted for something more personal. ''My choice basically was that I decided in August (2001) that I wasn't going to run again (for governor),'' he said. ''It then quickly came to me that I had a choice of joining boards and swearing at The New York Times every morning and saying how outrageous it was. Basically, I was in a position where I thought I could run for president, so I decided that I was going to.''

You'll find interesting Kerry and Edwards anecdotes there, too. (The Gephardt and Lieberman ones weren't that revealing.)

The book is: One-Car Caravan: Running for President Before America Tunes In.