(FORTUNE Magazine) – Reviewing David Stockman's book objectively is difficult. His advance of more than $2 million consumes the reviewer with envy and, therefore, hostility. Also, he is a major character in his own book. There is a temptation to review Stockman the brilliant budget director or Stockman the lousy team player rather than Stockman's book. Trying to be as objective as I can, I offer this assessment: The Triumph of Politics (Harper & Row, $21.95) is a fascinating book that can make an important contribution to public discourse if it is taken seriously -- which I fear it will not be. Stockman's warning that national policy is governed by dangerous illusions is already being drowned out by irrelevant clamor about his character. The book's story is as follows. By 1980 David Stockman had come to believe that the U.S. needed an economic revolution that would drastically reduce the role of the government as taxer, spender, borrower, and regulator. He joined the Reagan team with enthusiasm, having reasonable grounds for thinking that it shared his view. But even before the 1980 election, he knew that the Reagan game plan was not going to work. The proposed tax cuts and defense increases were inconsistent with the balanced budget promised for 1983; to achieve balance the team needed cuts in the nondefense budget going far beyond the elimination of ''fraud, waste, and abuse'' that was part of the campaign rhetoric. But Stockman believed that, once in office, the Reaganauts could find cuts to bring the plan and the budget into balance. After Inauguration Day in 1981, it was downhill all the way. It turned out that hardly anyone but Stockman, now installed as head of the Office of Management and Budget, really wanted a revolution. His supply-side colleagues, including Congressman Jack Kemp, showed no interest in cutting expenditures and no concern about the deficit. The Cabinet secretaries were just as determined as any previous secretaries to expand their own budgets. The President's handlers in the White House wanted only to keep their champ out of any fight in which he might get hurt. The champ himself entered the fray only spasmodically, like Zeus above the shores of Troy. By 1982 the country was facing endless deficits of around $200 billion a year. Stockman saw no hope of adequately reducing the deficits by expenditure cuts alone. So he turned to proposing fiscal packages that included, along with expenditure cuts, some tax increases, which infuriated his former teammates. In the 1984 campaign, furthermore, the President made commitments -- no tax increase and no cut in Social Security -- demonstrating to Stockman that the gap between reality and pretense would never be closed. So he left in 1985, convinced that the country was headed for an economic disaster because of the deficits. This story has been told before. I told an outsider's version of it in my book Presidential Economics. Stockman himself told some of it in interviews in the December 1981 Atlantic Monthly and later in FORTUNE. But he is now telling the story with a wealth of detail that makes it more compelling. The blow-by-blow accounts of decision-making sessions in the White House make powerful reading. Sitting around the table are intelligent, honorable men who have had successful careers in the real world of business and will have such careers again when they return to that world. But now they are reduced to incoherence and deviousness by the need to operate in an unreal world -- one where tax cuts raise the revenue, where spending increases are represented as savings, and where mounting deficits are seen as the road to a balanced budget. Their economics is reduced to the rejection of economics. Their history is reduced to recollections of personal anecdotes. Their reading of the future is that since everything is unpredictable, everything will be all right. The stories are hilarious -- the Marx Brothers in the White House -- unless you think it matters. DENIALS of the Stockman version of the ''Reagan Revolution'' began to appear as soon as excerpts from the book were published in Newsweek. But some things are undeniable, like a $200-billion deficit three years after the budget was supposed to be brought into balance. Samuel Johnson kicked a stone to prove that matter is real. You can't kick the deficit and the national debt, but you better believe they are real. A major issue, of course, is who did it. The Reaganauts blame Congress for not cutting expenditures as the President proposed. Stockman is naturally critical of Congress. But he is even more critical of the Administration. After all, most members of Congress had not run on a promise to balance the budget. During the 5 1/2 years that Stockman was in office, the President never proposed enough expenditure cuts to bring the budget into balance, even by 1990. The story of the budget negotiations of 1982 is told by the Administration over and over again as proof that the deficit cannot be reduced by raising taxes. The story is that the President reluctantly agreed to a tax increase in 1982 as part of a bargain in which Congress would cut expenditures by three dollars for every dollar of revenue increase. In the Administration version, the taxes were raised but Congress never delivered on the expenditure cuts. Stockman's version is quite different. ''Of the spending cuts Congress allegedly owed, $100 billion consisted of savings in debt service that Congress couldn't do anything about; $40 billion was management savings that we had promised to come up with and hadn't; another $30 billion had actually been delivered in Medicare reimbursement reforms and other measures.'' Most of the remainder was a $50billion three-year defense cut that Defense Secretary Weinberger refused to make. Radical supply-siders defending the Administration have their own culprit: they blame Paul Volcker rather than Congress. If only the Federal Reserve had done a better job with the monetary aggregates, they say, the supply-side plan would have worked. Revenue would have increased and there would have been no deficit. Stockman rejects this argument. He explains that the Administration's fiscal policy was inconsistent with certain realities of the American economy that monetary policy could not change. Monetary policy could not make the Laffer Curve work, Stockman argues persuasively. The most that Volcker could have done for the supply-siders was to conceal their failure by causing enough inflation, and enough bracket creep, to prevent the tax cut from being real. Is Stockman going too far in identifying his frustrations as a failure of the Reagan Revolution? After all, haven't ''we'' got the economy moving again, tamed inflation, lowered interest rates, rebuilt the national defense, slowed the growth of nondefense expenditures, and stopped the upward creep of taxes? Stockman deals with this argument, although less thoroughly than he might have. The country has in fact enjoyed an expansion of about average size in output and employment during the Reagan years. The buildup of defense, begun in the Carter Administration, was first accelerated under Reagan but then ran into the revenue limits imposed by the Administration's tax policy, and spending levels are now roughly back to those envisaged by the Carter team. The growth of nondefense, noninterest expenditures has been slowed but replaced by a rapid growth of interest expenditures. The rise of the tax burden has also been slowed for the present, but the debt created under Reagan portends higher taxes in the future. There is now a chance that the budget may be brought into balance by 1991, but if so it will be at the expense of the defense program. The most positive economic achievement of the Reagan Administration will probably turn out to be something else: it supported the Carter-appointed Fed chairman when he was battling inflation. One may, if he wishes, call this a successful revolution on balance. But Stockman is at least equally entitled to call it a failure -- not by comparison with the achievements of other Administrations but by comparison with the extraordinary claims this one made. THE FIGURE who dominates this book, aside from David Stockman, is Ronald Reagan. And yet the President comes through as a mystery. We get more evidence of what we already knew, which is that by the standards of an accountant, economist, or budget director, the President does not rank very high. To be sure, those are not the standards by which you should judge Presidents. A budget director knows many things, a President knows one great thing. Unfortunately, we do not discover in this book what is the one great thing the President knows. Stockman's book leaves some perplexing questions. Does anyone really care that there was no Reagan Revolution? Does it really matter? Stockman himself concludes, at the end of the book, that no one cares. The public wants its taxes cut, but also wants to keep its benefits and subsidies, and that means, arithmetically, that it wants the deficits. But this conclusion comes as an anticlimax. Why has Stockman berated the politicians for 350 pages if they have only been doing what the public wants? Shouldn't the book have been called The Triumph of Democracy rather than The Triumph of Politics? Stockman is not very clear about whether he thinks it matters that there was no Reagan Revolution. Curiously lacking in his argument is a forceful statement characterizing the adverse consequences of this failure. I have used the words reality, real, and really many times in this review. The words seem inescapable because they are what the book is about -- a political process losing its grip on reality and slowly succumbing to show business. The process certainly did not start with Ronald Reagan and has nothing to do with his former profession. All of us, including peanut farmers, lawyers, investment bankers, divinity students, and even economists, become actors when the little red light on the TV camera goes on. Unfortunately, those stubborn real-world problems do not go away when the public gets bored and turns off the set.