THE RUNNING MATE; by Joe Klein; The Dial Press; 403 pages; $26.95.
Remember "Primary Colors"? The runaway hit political novel back in 1996? The one that pretended to be the inside story of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, but changed the names so we could guess the guilty?
One of the big reasons for its success was that it was written by "Anonymous," which also ignited a huge guessing game as to the author's true identity. Turned out he was political journalist and TV commentator Joe Klein, who initially denied he had written it, then came clean in a rancorous news conference.
Klein has stayed pretty low-profile until now, mostly writing long political pieces for "The New Yorker." But in April, his second novel surfaced, seemingly a sequel to "Primary Colors," with almost an identical cover of red, white and blue.
"Sequel" is not really accurate, however. The main character is a Midwestern bachelor senator, Charlie Martin, an idealistic Vietnam veteran who engages in a quixotic run for president against Jack Stanton, then a difficult run for re-election to his Senate seat. If Stanton strongly resembles Bill Clinton, Martin bears an uncanny resemblance to Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., who once ran briefly for president and who is leaving politics this year to enter academia.
If this book were a TV sitcom, it would be a spinoff. But at least it occupies the same parallel universe as the first novel, although there is a lot less politics in this one, a lot less campaigning, with greater emphasis on the private life of Martin, who just happens to be a politician.
The writing style is very similar to "Primary Colors," with its breezy, irreverent dialogue, often punctuated with profanities — except that most of the characters are more likable than Jack Stanton and his cohorts.
If Stanton was revealed to be an immoral politician in the first novel, Martin in the second is idealistic but still caught in the disastrous national publicity commonly besetting today's politicians. A perfectly innocent association with a young female campaign worker, for instance, results in a full-blown sex scandal for Martin, despite his best efforts to refute it. The discovery that Martin fathered a boy named Calvin with a Vietnamese woman is treated by Klein with compassion, the expected result of a wartime romance common to some veterans. Yet Martin must pay for it on the national stage.
While Klein seems to be telling the flip side of the more cynical Clinton/Stanton story, he also often waffles. If Martin/Kerrey is a more admirable figure, he has small flaws, for which he is forced to pay in this political system. Klein seems to be saying that we are paying for our pressure-cooker political campaigns by losing out on many leaders who, though imperfect, have many admirable qualities for leadership.
The hard edge that made "Primary Colors" a lively read is missing in "The Running Mate." It's a story that seems to run out of steam somewhere in the middle. It is a strangely unsatisfying combination of comedy, tragedy and real life. Although Klein clearly loves the political life, he does not quite succeed in getting the reader to feel the same way.
Maybe if it were written by "Anonymous" . . .
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com