Author shows his "dream candidate" reaching the Oval Office, but do we care?
Written: Mar 26 '01
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Pros: Common-sense fellow is elected U.S. President!
Cons: Now that I've told you that, do you really need to read the novel?
The Bottom Line: Only read it if "political fiction" has a great appeal for you as long as the style is at least mediocre. Don't bother buying a copy, though.
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| lorendiac's Full Review: Man of Destiny Books |
Third party Presidential reform candidate seizes the heart of the American people! It could have been a great novel, but that would have required a great storyteller be involved in the project. What we got was a political novel by a sociopolitical commentator who, unfortunately, is only a mediocre storyteller in my opinion. Not disgustingly bad, just mediocre.
Charlie Palmer, successful businessman in Ohio, ran for office when the local Congressman died suddenly, leaving a vacancy that had to be filled. He made it in and, on his first day sitting in the office he inherited from his predecessor, slashed a few hundred thousand bucks off that office's annual operating budget to show he was a true believer in smaller government. (For example, he cancelled the newsletter his predecessor used to send to everybody, largely full of self-serving hype and printed and mailed at the taxpayer's expense, of course.) He made a bit of a fuss at the party's presidential convention when he loudly objected to the way the party leaders were trying to get the delegates to hastily rubber-stamp their personal pick as the one and only possible VP candidate (who the Presidential candidate would be was already a foregone conclusion). One influential Senator in attendance actually started making noises about nominating Charlie Palmer to be the VP candidate instead, then mysteriously dropped the idea just as Charlie was starting to take it seriously. Still and all, Charlie attracted enough attention that after the convention an eccentric old self-made zillionaire (I'm not sure if he had actually cracked a billion or not in net worth) asked him to lead a third-party reform movement to run a presidential candidate with one hundred million dollars of the zillionaire's money backing his campaign.
It's painfully clear to us that the zillionaire wants Charlie himself to be the reform candidate, but Charlie spends weeks investigating the political stances and backgrounds of several more experienced politicians from both major parties who might be willing to strike out on their own before finally giving up all hope of finding a knight in shining armor, and the zillionaire patiently explains what he really had in mind.
Charlie runs on the "campaign finance reform" issue. He harps on that issue. He gives lectures on talk shows about that issue. He drones on and on about that issue at the slightest excuse. I admit it's conceivable that I would have found all this more interesting if I had thought his proposed "reform," as explained to us, had at least one chance in a hundred of actually working even if Congress agreed to turn it into law. He's also in favor of slashing the federal budget, consolidating several of the Cabinet-level departments into a much smaller number to eliminate duplicate functions in duplicate bureaucracies, and otherwise doing "sensible" things, but the subject of campaign contributions is his obsession. His basic thesis seems to be that if a candidate accepts a large contribution from a corporation or individual, he has just sold his soul and will only vote in ways that will make that contributor happy in the future. That strikes me as a bit too broad in its accusations. Isn't it possible that sometimes cause and effect works exactly the other way around and a candidate receives a large contribution from someone because that someone has correctly analyzed the candidate as already believing in the same sort of government policies which the contributor hopes to benefit from?
Of course, Charlie's case (as he explains in a TV interview at some point) is entirely different, since he only accepted that silly hundred million dollars in order to put himself before the public, independent of the vested interests attached to either big party, and loudly explain why the current rules for campaign contributions need to be changed drastically in order to create a more level playing field for people who don't have guarantees of millions of dollars from "special interests" but still want to run for high office. Heaven forbid that we should suspect him of being unduly influenced by the man who gave him that money! (I admit he wasn't unduly influenced by it. What bothered me was his holier-than-thou attitude toward all other politicians who accept sizable contributions from other people.)
Meanwhile the vested interests are carefully investigating his background for anything dirty to confuse the issue. For some reason, the stuff they come up with seems to catch Charlie offguard, suggesting he's a bit naive. One man in particular, referred to as Patriot, is a true fanatic on the subject of maintaining the status quo, even prepared to stoop to murder to get what he wants. Patriot's identity was supposed to be a secret but I figured it out in nothing flat and I was proved to be right at the end, so I can't call this book a mystery novel. Patriot happens to be friendly with an attractive socialite who lives in the D.C. area and is firmly attached to the social circle that runs things in one of the big parties (in Gross's view of the world, it doesn't seem to make much difference whether someone is a Republican or a Democrat - it's all just as lazy and corrupt either way). She starts having an affair with Charlie during the campaign season. He is shocked and angered when one of his staff suggests this is not the smartest possible thing he could be doing - given her long-standing ties to other politicians, she could be intending to spy on him! I'll give you one guess whether or not his staffer had a point. Then I'll give you one guess on whether or not some of the socialite's friends manage to get hard evidence of their affair and leak it to the press to tarnish Charlie's image. Then I'll give you one guess on whether or not she finally ends up admitting she's really fallen in love with Charlie and his idealism by the end of the novel! What's that you say? Yes, yes, and yes? Amazing! You got them all right! How did you manage that?
I'm not really giving anything away when I tell you that Charlie wins. No more than you could figure out by skimming the first few pages of the book in the store, I mean to say. You see, the very first scene in the story is set shortly after the inauguration of the brand new President of the United States. In this scene the man is only referred to as "the President," but when that scene ends and we immediately start a very lengthy flashback dealing with the rise to fame of clean-cut American boy Charlie Palmer during a presidential election year, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what the connection with the introductory scene will turn out to be, eh? How he manages to win is a bit complicated - nobody secured a majority in the electoral college, this being the first really close three-way national election the USA had seen in a loooong time, but we knew he was going to pull through in the end.
Of course, the hook that is planted in the first scene, the thing that is supposed to make you buy the book after you've flipped through those opening pages in the store, is that the new President is on his way to secret midnight rendezvous with a briefcase full of cash to pay off a blackmailer. Embarrassing, eh? It doesn't get much better when he arrives at the address he was given, only to discover that someone else has already entered, killed the blackmailer, and departed again. Thus, we now have what will apparently be a murder mystery, and I suppose it qualified as one in a way, except that since so much of the book was a flashback to the previous year, we had nearly forgotten about that dead body by the time it became an issue in the plot again. By that time I had already figured out which of the cast of characters was destined to be the murderer, meaning that technically I solved the murder "before" it happened, something that doesn't happen to me very often!
As I suggested at the start, Gross knows quite a bit about American politics and I suppose his heart is in the right place, but I wasn't nearly so impressed by his idealized version of a "Man of Destiny" as he obviously expected me to be. His dialogue is not revoltingly bad, but it didn't strike me as brilliant either. The plot stayed fairly predictable, especially given the great big clue of the opening scene with a brand new President, but predictability does not always ruin a book. (How many times has the happy ending of a romance novel actually surprised you? But romance novels keep selling and selling!) If you like political novels and spot this in the library where you can read it for free, it's no worse than average. But if you want to know if I recommend it in the sense of urging you to actually spend money on it, the answer is No.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
lorendiac
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Location: Indianapolis
Reviews written: 148
Trusted by: 123 members
About Me:
"Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories." (Arthur C. Clarke)
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