As with formerly closeted, formerly Republican Right, David Brock, the formerly closeted, former Democratic Governor of New Jersey James McGreevey has taken the opportunity of his coming out as a gay man to also out some of the dark secrets of the world of electoral politics in the United States.

I haven't read the book yet, but The New York Times has excerpts on its website. Despite that this is blatantly a promotional tool for the book, I have to admit that I found the passages riveting. McGreevey manages to weave the personal and the political illicit together, comparing his personal pain and ego to the corruption of electoral politics. There's a tone of self-pity to them--e.g. the description of an appointment that he claims was not motivated by financial contributions; McGreevey was brought down in part because he appointed his lover to a post and at a salary for which the man wasn't qualified. However, the stark detail that McGreevey provides makes up for the self-indulgence, at least for the purposes of the published excerpts.

Here's one of several passages I found really intriguing:

An intense and inevitable thing happens after you win a big election. The jostling for power is wild. Republicans had controlled the governor’s mansion for sixteen of the past twenty years, and now we were overwhelmed by pressure to bring Democrats and their supporters in from the cold.

All my financial contributors were vying for payback as well. My goal had been to raise $40 million for the campaign, which, unless you’re a Clinton or a Bush, is an obscene amount to pull out of pockets. You can’t take large sums of money from people without making them specific and personal promises in return. People weren’t shy about saying what they expected for their “investments” — board appointments to the Sports Authority or the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, for example, which were coveted not just for their prestige but because they offered control over tremendously potent economic engines, with discretionary budgets in the tens of millions. The plum was the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; directors there controlled a multibillion-dollar budget. I tried to stay as naïve about this horse trading as possible. But I allowed my staff to intimate things to donors. This is the daredevil’s dance every politician faces.

There are others that go into love, sex, spirituality, his relationship with Golan Cipel that eventually brought him down, and the disgusting financial dealmaking and powerbrokering that apparently goes into the ordinarily business of electoral politics.

You can read them here.