It's kind of remarkable that in spite of the intense media scrutiny to which we subject our Presidential hopefuls these days, when election day rolls around we remain unlikely to know them very well or understand them at all.  In something of a paradox, this is actually the media's fault to a significant degree.  Since at least the 1960 race, with the success of Teddy White's first Making of the President book and the ascension of television as the dominant provider of news coverage, we have come to understand the quadrennial campaign for the White House as a narrative drama, replete with fascinating heroes (the candidates), colorful characters (typically the consultants), devious villains (the "Special Interests"), turning points (Iowa & NH), huge set piece scenes (Conventions), showdowns (the Debates), and the thrilling climax (Election Day).

Of course, the most obvious thing missing from this plot line is ideas, but pick up a newspaper during a campaign and you are much more likely to read about the process itself than about anything the candidates actually said.  The other major problem with this whole scenario is that it tends to favor, not the better candidate, but often the candidate who best fits the elements of the plot.  Take a couple of perfectly competent but colorless men like Bob Dole and Mike Dukakis, surround them with professional but low key staffers and let them run serious campaigns on the issues, and the press will proceed to pummel them into submission, not necessarily for any ideological reasons, but because they make it hard to draw an audience to the show, refuse to follow the conventions of the predetermined script.  Only later, long after the dust has settled (the confetti been swept, so to speak), will an accurate picture begin to emerge of who the contestants actually were.

In recent years we've gotten some particularly insightful books about men who became president, but only after the subject campaigns had ended.  Though it concerned the 1988 campaign, What it Takes : The Road to the White House (Richard Ben Cramer) served as an excellent guide to both George Bush as he ran for re-election in 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996.  And in 1996, voters interested in Bill Clinton had two really revealing portraits to choose from : in nonfiction, the excellent biography First in His Class (David Maraniss) and a superb fictional treatment in Joe Klein's Primary Colors.  In fact, it's arguably true that, for anyone willing to do the reading, there have never been two presidential candidates about whom it was possible to know more about who they really were, as opposed to their public personae, than Bob Dole and Bill Clinton in 1996.  It's also hard to believe that had voters taken the time to read these books Bill Clinton would still have won.

The Maraniss book remains unsurpassed as an overall depiction of Clinton's path to power, but Primary Colors is invaluable for the insight it offers into how Bill Clinton seduced his followers.  Joe Klein, as George Stephanopolous revealed in his memoir, All Too Human, was one of the first members of the press corps to believe in the Clinton candidacy and so was in a unique position to author an account of that campaign from it's earliest days in the snows of New Hampshire to the candidate's improbable victory.    In fact, when the novel was published anonymously, many folks simply assumed that Stephanopolous was the author.  Indeed, the narrator, Henry Burton, is pretty clearly modeled on Stephanopolous, though in a twist which perhaps reveals all too much about the sensibilities of folks like Klein, in this case he's black.

Fittingly, the key moment in the book is the first page, when Henry meets the Clinton doppelganger, Governor Jack Stanton, for the first time :

    He was a big fellow, looking seriously pale on the streets of Harlem in deep summer. I am small
    and not so dark, not very threatening to Caucasians; I do not strut my stuff.

    We shook hands. My inability to recall that particular moment more precisely is disappointing: the
    handshake is the threshold act, the beginning of politics. I've seen him do it two million times now,
    but I couldn't tell you how he does it, the right-handed part of it--the strength, quality, duration of
    it, the rudiments of pressing the flesh. I can, however, tell you a whole lot about what he does with
    his other hand. He is a genius with it. He might put it on your elbow, or up by your biceps: these
    are basic, reflexive moves. He is interested in you. He is honored to meet you. If he gets any higher
    up your shoulder--if he, say, drapes his left arm over your back, it is somehow less intimate, more
    casual. He'll share a laugh or a secret then--a light secret, not a real one--flattering you with the
    illusion of conspiracy. If he doesn't know you all that well and you've just told him something
    "important," something earnest or emotional, he will lock in and honor you with a two-hander, his
    left hand overwhelming your wrist and forearm. He'll flash that famous misty look of his. And he
    will mean it.

    Anyway, as I recall it, he gave me a left-hand-just-above-the-elbow plus a vaguely curious "ah, so
    you're the guy I've been hearing about" look, and a follow-me nod. I didn't have the time, or
    presence of mind, to send any message back at him. Slow emotional reflexes, I guess. His were
    lightning. He was six meaningful handshakes down the row before I caught up. And then I fell in, a
    step or two behind, classic staff position, as if I'd been doing it all my life. (I had, but not for
    anyone so good.)

There is Bill Clinton, his undeniable appeal and his ultimate deceit all served up in three paragraphs.  Early in the century E. M. Forster admonished us : Only connect.  As if human problems would somehow succumb if only we could all share something of ourselves.  The particular genius of Bill Clinton lies in his uncanny (perhaps even frightening) ability to convince people that they have connected with him in just such a sense.  This has served to create almost unbreakable bonds of loyalty not merely between him and his absurdly loyal staff, and fellow Democrats, but also (and it pains me to say it) with the American people.  For all of the horrible things that he has done and for all of the really big things that he might have achieved had he only tried, there is still a core level on which most people feel that his presidency has somehow been an experience in which they shared.  No matter how much his critics may belittle that dewy-eyed look, the lip biting and that wretched phrase, "I feel your pain," there simply is some level at which people buy the whole act, accept that he really does understand them and care about their problems.  I used the word genius above and I do not think that characterization is too strong; Bill Clinton has a political genius, is a Genius.  That I feel his gift to have been wasted in the service of his own personal aggrandizement does not change that galling fact.

The book goes on to depict a series of scandals, mostly involving women, which the candidate, his wife and his staff are forced to defuse, with varying degrees of truthfulness and savagery.  Eventually though, when crunch time comes, Stanton shows himself willing to sink to almost any level to cover up the sins of his past, but also capable of relating to the pain of another candidates past failings.  Whether this latter is a moment of genuine empathy or not, it suffices to convince Henry that the governor is ultimately a man worth serving and his other doubts are set aside.

Several matters of note arise regarding the scandal.  First, to Henry (and seemingly to Klein) the fact that the governor fathered a child upon the teenage daughter of a friend is weighed in the balance against his capacity to "feel" the pain of others and is found to be of lesser import, somehow less revealing of his true character.  Second, it is not the governor who is really required to make the soul killing moral compromises here; it is his staff who are called upon to do the dirty work.  Though willing, they too are ultimately victims of his appetites (in fact, one of them, like Vince Foster, ends up killing herself after the compromises finally become unbearable).  Finally, though even back then the rumors of much worse behavior than this were rampant, it is revealing that Klein's imagination extended so far and no further.  One wonders how the Kleins and Stephanopolii of the world can reconcile their service to Clinton with the reasonably credible charges of women like Juanita Broadrick, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey.  Is there some level of sympathy for and empathy with the people as a whole that justifies in their minds his predatory behavior towards specific women?  One hopes not, but the failure of a single Clinton aide ever to resign in protest at his various pathological behaviors at least raises the question.

Primary Colors does not aspire to, nor does it achieve, the lofty heights of Robert Penn Warren's great novel of Huey Long, All the King's Men.  But it certainly takes it's place among the better political novels ever written.

(Reviewed:29-Oct-00)

Grade: (A-) Orrin C. Judd

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