Long before the real action of the Presidential election there lies an incredible part of the democratic process. This is a time before the race really starts cooking, before normal people even think about tuning in, and where those ambitious enough to run for president pander to crowds at pancake breakfasts and make speeches in living rooms to crowds of thirty or less. It happens all across New Hampshire and Iowa in a time author Walter Shapiro calls the "Invisible Primary".

Shapiro's latest book, One Car Caravan: On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In is exactly as it is titled. An exploration of the much under-analyzed time period of the presidential campaign before anyone other than a few reporters, editors, insiders, and political junkies take any notice.

The book's premise is a novel one. Writing a definitive book of the early days of the election before anything is decided. It's certainly the hard way to write a history of the 2004 election, but decidedly more interesting and with a degree of difficulty not often seen in this business. Shapiro, a political reporter for USA Today, peppers the book with more than enough politics, but the real power of the book, as in many things, is in the details. With a passionate eye for the actual art of the process Shapiro leaves few stones unturned.

"I love New Hampshire living rooms," writes Shapiro. "No setting bettor conveys the wondrous intimacy of the Invisible Primary. It seems outlandish that in the twenty-first century a candidate theoretically can go in little more than two years from standing in front of a fireplace addressing seventy-five voters to governing a nation of 280 million."

How the process takes someone, who most people could scarcely conceive of as 'president', make them press hands at every little stop in the crucial early days only to miraculously plump them into the White House two years later is anyone's guess. At first it may have you wondering if this is any way to select a prospective president at all.

"Yes, in the beginning, there was one candidate, one car and one reporter. But in the end, there will be one Democratic nominee, armies of deadline-driven reporters waiting for a gaffe or a stumble, motorcades that snake across the landscape like freight trains, dozens of anxious Secret Service agents murmuring dark forebodings into their headsets and cheering crowds penned up with rope lines."