America’s Last Great Political Novel
In anticipation of the Democrats’ Convention in Chicago, a look back at Joe Klein’s splendid 1996 novel ‘Primary Colors’—a fascinating snapshot of Democratic Party politics at the end of the 20th century.
I.
America has produced plenty of high-quality political novels. Few American mystery novelists have ever investigated a real-life murder, and few contemporary Western novelists have ever participated in a cattle drive. But plenty of political professionals—presidents, vice presidents, governors, senators, journalists, campaign managers, political appointees, government insiders—have written political novels, and many of them are very good.
William Safire, a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, wrote four novels, including Full Disclosure, which is about a US president who is blinded in a terrorist attack and soon finds his own cabinet members trying to remove him from office via the Constitution’s 25th Amendment. Hillary Clinton co-wrote (with Louise Penny) a pretty good 2021 political thriller called State of Terror, which deals with a US secretary of state’s attempts to save America from a terrorist plot and a dangerously unhinged ex-POTUS (clearly based on Donald Trump). Former senator and secretary of defence William S. Cohen has written several political thrillers, as have former Massachusetts governor William F. Weld, former FBI director James Comey, former US senator Barbara Boxer, and CNN political correspondent Jake Tapper.
Even while he was steering the country out of the depths of the Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt found time to write a political thriller (well, he came up with the idea and someone else wrote it). That novel wasn’t any good but, fortunately for FDR, his political reputation remains strong. The same can’t be said for Spiro Agnew, a vice president who resigned in disgrace and then penned (or had someone ghostwrite) a novel called The Canfield Decision, about a vice president who is thinking of running against the sitting POTUS. Agnew was a weaselly politician whose name, appropriately, was an anagram of GROW A SPINE (although some anagrammists prefer to arrange the last five letters more coarsely.)
The idea of a sitting US vice president challenging his boss for the party’s presidential nomination seemed extremely far-fetched back in the 1970s. So did the idea that a sitting president’s own cabinet members might, as in Safire’s Full Disclosure, challenge his fitness for the job. But 2024 has brought us some plot twists straight out of popular fiction—a president whose advancing cognitive decline only becomes fully apparent to voters after he has won all the delegates he needs for renomination, an iron-willed former speaker of the House who firmly tells the old man it is time to pack it in, and a (relatively) youthful vice president who steps in and scoops up all of her party’s delegates without having competed in a single primary.
Some political thrillers, such as those co-authored by former president Bill Clinton and James Patterson, are commercially successful but not very good. Others, such as former Nixon administration official John Ehrlichman’s The China Card, were very good but not commercially successful. The Hillary Clinton/Louise Penny collaboration managed to be very good and commercially successful. But even that book couldn’t match the commercial or critical success of what is probably the best and most successful American political novel of the last fifty years.
II.
Primary Colors was published in 1996 and credited to “Anonymous,” although the author was later revealed to be political journalist Joe Klein. (Klein may have been inspired by Henry Adams, whose 1880 novel Democracy was also published anonymously.) The main characters—fictional US state governor Jack Stanton and his long-suffering wife Susan—are clearly modelled after Bill and Hillary Clinton, which means that the Clintons are the only politicians who have made the fiction bestseller list as both the authors and the subjects of a bestselling novel (they have made the nonfiction bestseller list in the same way).
Klein’s book was the eighth bestselling novel of 1996, and the reviews were stellar. Kirkus Review has called it, “A marvelously down-and-dirty chronicle of a presidential campaign that will make your eyes water, and some more famous eyes burn in recognition.” The New Yorker enthused that it was “the best political novel in many years … rewarding at every level.” The Washington Post called it “the first try at a serious political novel about the compulsive world of the campaign staff, and this oddest of professions may finally have found its laureate.” “The author knows politics,” said the Boston Globe, “and writes like a dream.” Many reviewers compared it favourably to Robert Penn Warren’s classic All the King’s Men, which was inspired by the career of one-time Louisiana governor Huey P. Long. Primary Colors was the last serious novel about American politics to land on a Publishers Weekly yearend bestsellers list.
Since then, the few massively successful American political novels have been pure escapism. You have to go back to Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, the tenth bestselling novel of 1984, to find a serious political novel that was as successful as Primary Colors—and Vidal’s book was mostly nonfiction. Americans generally prefer their political fictions to be Hollywood-style thrillers in the manner of David Baldacci’s Absolute Power or Vince Flynn’s Term Limits. And who can blame them? In reality, American politics is often shallow, cynical, corrupt, performative, unproductive, or downright detrimental to the country, if not to the whole world.
Joe Klein managed to pull off an almost unheard-of feat. He made it onto the yearend bestseller list with an anonymous novel about the grinding and often tedious work of running a presidential campaign. Every other name on the list that year was a bona fide literary rock star. The only books that outsold Primary Colors were two titles by Stephen King, two by Danielle Steel, and one each by John Grisham, Michael Crichton, and Tom Clancy. Tom Wolfe is often remembered as the most successful journalist-turned-novelist of the 1980s and ’90s, but he wasn’t the only one. Carl Hiaasen, Thomas Harris, National Book Award-winner Pete Dexter, Pete Hamill, and, of course, Joe Klein, also made the successful leap from journalist to bestselling author.
Wolfe, however, is a good reference point for a discussion of Primary Colors, because it is just the kind of book Wolfe might have given us had he been allowed an insider’s look at the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign. Klein’s novel lacks Wolfe’s irritating tics—the excessive use of exclamation marks and onomatopoeia—but Klein has irritating tics of his own, such as his overuse of “y’know” and a tendency towards EXCESSIVE CAPITALISATION. Still, Klein shares Wolfe’s gift for drawing characters with a few sharp details. Here he is describing Jimmy Ozio, the smug young son of Orlando Ozio, a New York governor obviously meant to be Mario Cuomo:
Jimmy Ozio was sitting atop a desk in the middle of the Big Room, taking a very intent look around. He was a big guy, curly hair, handsome in a lurky kind of way. He was wearing a black suit, white shirt, gray tie. We shook hands. His was a cruncher.
In early 1992, President George H.W. Bush was still riding fairly high on the success of the Gulf War and he looked unbeatable. A lot of Democrats were hoping that Cuomo would run for the Democratic nomination and give Bush a fight, but like Hamlet, he hesitated, unable to decide. And while he waited, Clinton began to steal the nomination from under his nose. The same scenario plays out in Primary Colors, and Stanton has trouble raising money from the usual wealthy Democratic backers because they are all waiting for Ozio to jump into the race. Ozio sends his son to Stanton headquarters, supposedly as a gesture of goodwill but actually to spy on the operation and see whether it has a chance of winning. Young Ozio thinks the Stanton operation is paltry and liable to collapse soon. Cuomo probably thought the same thing about the Clinton campaign.
Primary Colors is ambitious enough to satisfy anyone longing for the days of Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair, authors who wrote big books that attempted to wrestle with the grand panoply of the American scene. It is a hefty novel (507 pages) without being excessive, peopled by a handful of fascinating main characters and dozens of interesting secondary ones. The narrative moves across the American landscape—from New York and New England to the Deep South and Los Angeles—and Klein gives speaking parts to labour leaders, librarians, restaurateurs, drug dealers, war veterans, and a vast array of other Americans. It captures something important—not just about American politics but also about American life itself as the end of the 20th century approached. The book is funny, as it would have been had Wolfe written it, but it also has a lot of heart and benefits from the kind of complex female characters that Wolfe seldom bothered to write.
Nonetheless, the similarities between Klein’s book and The Bonfire of the Vanities led a number of Washington insiders to speculate that the anonymous author was, in fact, Tom Wolfe. The top reader review of Primary Colors at Amazon.com notes that:
After starting the 1990s by publishing Bonfire Of The Vanities, Tom Wolfe wrote an essay decrying the state of fiction, how too many authors wrote convoluted, esoteric novels designed to win elitist approval and be ignored by the masses: Why oh why can’t some journalist swoop in and write a novel that’s really about life and people we know, like the great Frenchman Zola had? Joe Klein seemed to notice this, if Primary Colors, the book he had published under the moniker “Anonymous,” is any indication. Primary Colors reminds me a lot of Tom Wolfe, vibrant, flashy, but well-thought out all the time. Waggish, too; Klein even uses “mau-mau” as a verb. Most important, it’s entertainment at its highest level, and something worth remembering long after the rest of the circus has passed us by.
III.
Curiously, Primary Colors and A Man in Full are both, in important ways, African-American novels, despite having been written by white guys born in the 1930s (Wolfe) and ’40s (Klein). Primary Colors is narrated by a young man named Henry Burton, widely thought to have been modelled on George Stephanopoulos, albeit with one important difference. Stephanopoulos is white but Burton is black, and his blackness isn’t incidental to his character. He is the child of a white mother and a black father, but he didn’t grow up poor or underprivileged. His mother’s family is wealthy and his father is the son of the Reverend Harvey Burton, a Christian civil-rights activist who was assassinated in the late 1960s (no points for guessing who inspired that portrait). Just as Roger White, a major black character in Wolfe’s A Man in Full, is often referred to by other blacks as Roger “Too” White, in Primary Colors, Burton is referred to as Henry “White Man’s” Burton—a political strategist who tends to carry water for white politicians.
Kevin Mims
As a mixed-race American, Burton has a unique perspective on Jack Stanton, who has an Ivy League education but speaks fluent redneck. Like Clinton, Stanton is the governor of a small southern state, although the name of the state is never mentioned (its capital city, Mammoth Falls, is fictional but clearly meant to represent Little Rock, Arkansas). And like Clinton, Stanton grew up poor and fatherless in the Deep South. He doesn’t have to put on a fondness for black Americans because he seems to genuinely enjoy their company. He is as comfortable in a black-owned southern barbecue joint as he is in a New York fine-dining establishment.
But Stanton is also a consummate politician, and Burton suspects he’ll sell out black voters without thinking twice if it will help to get him elected. I don’t know how African-American readers responded to Henry Burton, but I find the character convincing on the whole. Klein’s narrator sounds like what he is—a well-educated twenty-something New Yorker who comes from a prominent African-American family. He’s capable of code-switching and talking in different ways to different listeners, but he doesn’t enjoy it. When he meets another black campaign worker, a woman named Laurene, he is relieved that she doesn’t expect him to be performatively black: “Laurene was cool, a real pro. She didn’t feel the need to do the, ‘Hey bro—ain’t these white debbils fucked up!’ routine with me. Our thing—Laurene’s and mine—was that we were above all that defensive shit. We were very uptown.”
When Henry complains about white people, it isn’t generally because he finds them too mean, but because he finds them too condescendingly nice. At one point he notes:
Most white people do this patronizing number: They never disagree with you, even when you are talking the worst sort of garbage. It is near impossible to have a decent, human conversation with them. They are all so busy trying not to say anything offensive—so busy trying to prove they aren’t prejudiced—that they freeze up, get all constricted, formal. They never just talk.
Mercifully, Burton is not a saintly caricature forced to live in the shadow of a clueless white man. In some ways, he’s as duplicitous as Stanton. He wants to climb the career ladder as much as his boss does, and where sex is concerned, he has a tendency, like Stanton (and Clinton), to stray from the path of righteousness. Most white writers fashioning an intellectual black character like Burton would be tempted to fill his book shelves with books by Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King, Jr. But Joe Klein makes Burton a fan of Thomas Mann, Doris Lessing, Alice Munro, and world cinema.
Both Primary Colors and A Man in Full could add a great deal to any university course on African-American fiction, but I doubt that either novel will ever appear on such a reading list. Both authors are more likely to be accused of “playing in the dark,” which is what Toni Morrison accused many white authors of doing when they wrote about black characters. On the other hand, it was Morrison who once described Bill Clinton as America’s “first black president.” Clinton, she added, “displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.” Morrison made those comments in 1998, but in Primary Colors, published two years earlier, Burton seems to feel the same way about Jack Stanton. He insists that Stanton, for all his faults, is genuinely colourblind and “will argue with you, yell at you, treat you like a human” regardless of your race. He also notes that “the governor’s egregious empathizing wasn’t just for public consumption, but had some basis in his own life.”
IV.
Although it is set in the early 1990s, Primary Colors still feels relevant. Consider this passage, in which Burton tells Stanton that he was drawn to politics by a desire to help America recover its sense of pride and purpose:
It couldn’t always have been the way it is now, the feeling of—of blah. Swamp gas. Stagnation. There had to be times when it was better. The other guys [Republicans] had it with Reagan, I guess. But, to me, he was just floating with the flow. He didn’t try for anything hard. … I’d kind of like to know how it feels when you’re fighting over … y’know—historic stuff. I didn’t have Kennedy. I got him from books, from TV. But I can’t get enough of him, y’know? Can’t stop looking at pictures of him, listening to him speak. I’ve never heard a president use words like “destiny” and “sacrifice” and it wasn’t bullshit. So: I want to be part of something, a moment, like that.
At this point in the novel, Burton is so fond of Stanton that another campaign consultant warns him not to contract a case of TB—“True Believerism.” Eventually, Burton will see Stanton misbehave in rather unforgivable ways, and he will lose his starry-eyed view of the governor. Until a few weeks ago, young Americans looking at the options on offer during this year’s presidential election saw two tired old men who represented swamp gas and stagnation, and they may have found themselves identifying with Henry Burton’s yearning for youth and idealism. Even the gap between JFK and his nephew Robert Jr. looks like an illustration of American decadence writ large. JFK, like Stanton and Clinton, was a gravely flawed man, but at the age of forty, he seemed to have a lot more gravitas than RFK Jr. has managed to accrue in his seventy years. At the age of 29, JFK was running—successfully, as it turned out—for a seat in the US House of Representatives. At 29, RFK, Jr. pled guilty to heroin possession and entered rehab.
The recent addition of 40-year-old JD Vance to the Republican ticket and the elevation of 59-year-old Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket may be evidence that ageing Baby Boomers are finally losing their grip on the levers of power. Clinton was only 45 years old when he began his primary campaign and Stanton is roughly the same age in the novel (Clinton is now 77, younger than either Trump or Biden, who are 78 and 81 respectively). One of Stanton’s Democratic opponents is Senator Charlie Martin, a “hippie Vietnam vet,” probably based on Bob Kerrey (Stanton, like Clinton, avoided military service during the Vietnam era). But the character who represents the old guard of the Democratic Party is the senior senator from Wisconsin, Barton Nilson, of whom Burton writes:
He seemed ancient at sixty-two, slower, less hungry. … He gave grand, juicy speeches in a voice made for crystal radio sets—a dry, crackly, distant American voice. It was like running against a museum. We were ignoring him, hoping he’d go away before we hit the big midwestern primaries. He showed no signs of disappointing us.
Ancient at 62? Nilson eventually suffers a heart attack and is forced to drop out of the race. But he is nineteen years younger than Joe Biden is now and sixteen years younger than Donald Trump. In fact, he is just three years older than Kamala Harris, who seems like a spry young thing next to Biden and Trump. Primary Colors captured America just as the Baby Boomers were coming into their own politically. Twenty-eight years after the book was published, and 32 years after the events it describes, those damn Boomers are still clinging to power with their wrinkled hands. Running against them is more like running against a mausoleum than a museum.
Supporters of Donald Trump might occasionally find themselves sympathising with Henry Burton’s plight in Primary Colors. Stanton, like Clinton and Trump, endures a lot of embarrassing disclosures on his way to securing his party’s nomination for president. One campaign worker tells Burton not to worry about all the turmoil engulfing Stanton’s campaign. He believes it will eventually work to the candidate’s benefit. “We can turn it to our advantage, y’know? Shit happens. He’s calm in a shitstorm. Use that in our ads, y’know? Jack Stanton: A Man You Can Trust In A Shitstorm.” Burton is unimpressed. He thinks to himself: “But what if they don’t want a candidate who seems to carry his own portable shitstorm along with him?”
Primary Colors does a good job of skewering America’s mainstream press corps, the prurient priorities of which drive the campaign to distraction. Political reporters are often referred to by members of the Stanton campaign as “scorps” (short for scorpions and an anagram, in the singular, of “corps”). Burton and the other campaign workers want to talk about issues that affect the lives of real Americans, particularly the most vulnerable. But the press corps mainly wants to discuss the governor’s alleged affairs with various bimbos. “I worked the phone in the back of the room,” Burton complains, “talking to bigfoot scorps back in Washington and New York. Telling them, ‘The campaign isn’t about this garbage. You should come up [to New Hampshire] and see what the folks really care about.’”
V.
Stanton’s main problem is that he can’t stay focused on the big picture. Like Bill Clinton, he tends to get caught up in the personal stories of the people he meets on the campaign trail. Fortunately, he has a secret weapon—his wife. Susan Stanton may not be an exact replica of Hillary Clinton but they share a lot of the same DNA. Susan is cold and calculating in a way that is necessary to win a national political campaign. Stanton is squeamish about dishing dirt on his political opponents, but there is nothing squeamish about Susan. She is the backbone of the campaign, and Klein makes it clear that Stanton would never have got as far as he has in either life or politics without Susan’s firm support.
However, Susan Stanton is not a hapless “Stand by Your Man” kind of wife. She can dish out the abuse as well as take it. She hurls profanities at her husband after his many unforced errors, but she usually finds a way to pull him out of the hole into which he’s dug himself. Hillary often did the same for Clinton. In 1992, when her husband’s affair with Gennifer Flowers (thinly disguised as Cashmere McLeod in Primary Colors) became fodder for the national press, Hillary sat with him during an excruciating interview for 60 Minutes, during which Clinton famously confessed to causing “pain in our marriage.”
Hillary also gave an interview to Vanity Fair in which she just happened to mention that Clinton’s opponent President George H.W. Bush had engaged in a decades-long affair with an aide named Jennifer Fitzgerald that nearly drove his wife to commit suicide. That disclosure helped neutralise some of the dirt that had been flung at the Clinton campaign and discouraged the Bush campaign from leaning too heavily on the adultery angle. Bush’s 91-year-old mother, Dorothy, blamed Hillary for her son’s defeat. As the Daily Mail noted, “Bush angrily denied it but it was a factor in him losing to Bill Clinton and making him a one-term President.” (The difference between Jennifer, a proper Ivy League name, and Gennifer, its Southern trailer-trash variation, perfectly encapsulated the differences between Bush and Clinton.)
During the Cashmere McLeod scandal, Stanton’s prospects appear to be bleak, and the campaign’s top staffers are called to a meeting with Susan in her hotel room:
Susan floated above the mayhem. When we met that Friday morning, she sat at the head of the table in the suite, carefully put together in a blue Armani blazer and gray slacks, with a very cool lime silk blouse, drinking tea. Her eyes were clear, the least bloodshot of anyone’s in the room; she was wearing mascara—and lipstick. She was making a statement. The rest of us were a mess. “Leon, when do you think we’ll have some sense of how this is playing?” Susan asked.
When consultant Richard Jemmons mentions the affair as if it is a settled issue, Susan loses her cool and lets the room know that the campaign’s official policy will be to deny that it ever took place:
“He didn’t fuck Cashmere McLeod!” she said with a vehemence that was impenetrable and startling. The room was silent. Susan was standing, leaning, hands planted on the table, staring us down; no one, so far as I could see, had the courage to stare back. “If you can’t handle that simple fact, you can leave right now,” she said.
By the end of the meeting, “One thing was clear,” Henry writes. “Susan had—suddenly and not very subtly—taken charge. She had decided how we’d respond to the Cashmere situation (and that there wouldn’t be any internal debate about it).” When Stanton and his wife decide to go before a network TV audience and talk about the difficulties in their marriage, it is Susan who has to do most of the work. “But up till that moment I hadn’t realized how absolutely crucial Susan’s presence was going to be,” Henry notes. “She would be watched as closely as the governor. She would have to strike the right chord—vehement but not too defensive. I wondered what she really thought about all this; I realized I didn’t have a clue, not a scintilla of an inkling.”
But Susan isn’t just portrayed as a ruthless political wife and all-purpose ballbreaker. In Henry’s telling of her story, she can be kind and funny, too. When Stanton tells her that he has met with a supporter who was wavering after the Cashmere McLeod scandal and that he has won back her vote, Susan drily remarks, “Now all you have to do is personally meet and greet the other two hundred and fifty million Americans.” Henry Burton is the narrator of Primary Colors; Jack Stanton is the protagonist; but Susan Stanton is the book’s most compelling and formidable character. If this were Jaws, Susan Stanton would be the great white shark. She is a force of nature and we eagerly await her reappearances.
VI.
I voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. I read Primary Colors shortly after it was published and it didn’t discourage me from voting for him again in 1996. I would go on to vote for Hillary in her two unsuccessful campaigns for the presidency. Primary Colors may not have offered a flattering portrait of the Clintons, but in an odd way, it humanised them and made them seem more relatable. I found that I liked them more after reading it than I had beforehand. And, having just reread the book, I feel the same way now. I have never fallen in love with a political candidate in the way that Obama’s supporters did in 2008 and 2012, or the Bernie Bros of 2016 and 2020 did, or the way that many Trump supporters have. But after reading Primary Colors, I sort of fell in like with the Clintons, and I still find them more admirable than not.
Back in the 1990s, their marriage struck a lot of critics as transactional—a cynical arrangement held together by their respective political needs. It was Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, who was always portrayed as a true family man, and his marriage to Tipper was portrayed as ironclad. But the Gores’ marriage ended in 2010 after forty years. The Clintons have been together since 1971 and married since 1975, even though their political careers are now effectively over. Klein portrays the Stanton marriage as more than just transactional, which suggests that he understood that the relationship was built to endure despite its many problems. A lot of pundits got it wrong, but time has vindicated Klein on that count.
When the novel was published, the Monica Lewinsky scandal had not yet broken. Clinton was nearing the end of a relatively successful first term as president and was poised for re-election. Pop-culture fans were happy to embrace a roman-à-clef that portrayed their president as a flawed but fascinating figure. Alas, the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in January 1998 and instantly became the biggest news story of the year. By the time Mike Nichols’s film adaptation of Primary Colors was released two months later, Americans were wearying of their flawed president and his tawdry personal scandals. Nichols’s film is entertaining and reasonably faithful to the novel—much of the dialogue comes directly from the book—but the movie bombed at the box office, earning a paltry $52 million on a $62 million budget.
Americans were now getting 24/7 reports about Bill Clinton’s misbehaviour on their television sets for free. Why drive to a theatre and pay good money for a fictional version of it? Today, the film seems tame, knowing what we do about the Lewinsky scandal. It is noteworthy primarily for John Travolta’s performance as Jack Stanton. Travolta clearly did his homework. His voice and facial expressions almost perfectly mimic Bill Clinton’s. Occasionally the performance veers into parody, but for the most part, it is remarkably restrained considering what a larger-than-life character Stanton is.
Emma Thompson fares less well as Susan Stanton. Even with a running time of 143 minutes, Elaine May’s script doesn’t develop the main characters fully. Nichols and May seem to have decided that Jack Stanton, though less cerebral than either Susan or Burton, was a far more charismatic presence. Or maybe Travolta’s contract stipulated that his character would get the most screen time. Whatever the reason, Susan is short-changed. Thompson is given an opportunity to portray her as a hot mess and as a cold and calculating political wife, but we never see the warmth between those two extremes.
Henry Burton, portrayed by Adrian Lester, gets shafted even more than Susan. He might just as well have been played by a white or an Asian actor since the significance of his race is carefully avoided. The character is not only deracinated, he is also, metaphorically, gelded. At the beginning of the film, we find him in a bedroom with his girlfriend and they appear to be breaking up. Later on, we will see him in bed with Daisy Green (Maura Tierney), another campaign aide. But these scenes produce no real heat. In the book, Burton is almost as sexually active as Stanton. He even has an impulsive one-night stand with Susan. The movie suggests that this might have happened, but unless you’ve read the book, you’ll probably miss it.
Burton is a complicated character in the novel. In the film, he is just a bystander, doing whatever Jack Stanton tells him. Curiously, ten years later, Ryan Reynolds would play a similar character in the rom-com Definitely, Maybe. But Reynolds’s character, a campaign staffer for the Clinton team, is much sharper than Lester’s and experiences a more satisfying transformation. As the Monica Lewinsky scandal breaks, Reynolds goes into a tailspin and loses his last vestige of fondness for Clinton. That film made $55 million on a $24 million budget.
Still, Mike Nichols’s Primary Colors is not a creative failure. It gets a lot of help from its supporting cast, particularly Kathy Bates as a longtime friend of the Stantons, and Larry Hagman as an ex-Florida governor who jumps into the presidential primary late in the game. Billy Bob Thornton plays campaign advisor Richard Jemmons, who seems to have been inspired by Clinton campaign manager James Carville. But Jemmons, in both the book and the film, is a bit of a degenerate, and Carville has never been accused of anything like that. Rob Reiner, Allison Janney, and Tony Shaloub all make the most of their fairly small roles.
With the passage of time, Nichols’s film seems to have cooled a bit without its hot-off-the-presses topicality. Neither of the Clintons really inflames the passions of many Americans anymore. So, it is now possible to appreciate Primary Colors as an entertaining snapshot of American politics in the late 20th century. It’s not a classic, but it is worth watching for those who enjoy that kind of thing. As for Klein’s novel, I reread it a few months ago and found it more enthralling than most American presidential races of the last few decades. But since then, we’ve been treated to a cascade of real-life melodrama.
We’ve seen the Republican presidential nominee survive an assassination attempt and raise a defiant fist at his supporters as a cadre of incompetent secret-service agents tried to remove him from the stage. We've seen the sitting president mumble incoherently through a nationally televised debate for which he’d had weeks to prepare. We’ve learned that said president has apparently been slipping into senility for a couple of years now, a fact that his wife, his handlers, and a complicit press corps have all been hiding from us. We’ve seen a Republican National Convention at which former wrestler Hulk Hogan tore off his shirt during his keynote speech and declared his allegiance to Donald Trump. We’ve seen Trump select a running mate who rose to prominence as the author of a bestselling memoir that has since been made into a film by uber-liberal Ron Howard, and we’ve seen the tail end of that running mate’s transformation from political moderate into servile cheerleader for the man he once compared to opioids and Hitler.
Perhaps most remarkable of all, we’ve seen Nancy Pelosi use her legendary skills as a backroom brawler to orchestrate the withdrawal of her party’s incumbent from the presidential race, despite fierce opposition from the White House. For a while we were teased with the possibility of an open convention in Chicago at which top-ranking Democratic officeholders would slug it out for their party’s nomination. That possibility vanished when party support rallied around Vice President Kamala Harris, even though she didn’t enter or win a single Democratic primary. And finally, we’ve watched an embattled Israeli prime minister try to use the US House of Representatives as a bully pulpit for his own political agenda, and we’ve seen nearly half of the Democrats in Congress conspicuously skip work that day, despite the fact that this is an election year and support for Israel is usually something that both Democratic and Republican lawmakers are eager to demonstrate.
Three months ago I would have told anyone in search of exciting political drama to read Joe Klein’s classic novel. Today, I would recommend just tuning in to your favourite news program. Had Joe Klein written a plot as outlandish as the last few weeks’ news cycles, it would surely have been marketed as an airport potboiler, not a serous political novel. On the other hand, perhaps we shouldn’t be all that surprised. This is America, after all. And as Jack Stanton would be happy to tell you, America is a land of infinite possibilities.
