Last Debate [Paperback]

It's an interesting moral question but because it is set up so weakly, a lot of the impact is lost. The candidate's character is somewhat like Pat Buchanan, but the situation is more like that of when Ross Perot first came on the scene, and he seemed such a wonderful guy, until we all found out about the steel-tip-booted way he ran his businesses, and how badly he took criticism, and saw the guy he chose for V.P. Everybody said, "Whoa! and I was going to vote for this guy?!"

In "The Last Debate," though, the American public still doesn't know about the man's real character 8 days before the election. It just seems awfully unlikely that nothing would have come to light before that time. And even then, why couldn't the journalists bypass the moral issue by just giving the damning info directly to the press to report it as news? Lehrer does kind of explain these things, in a way, later on, but these kinds of doubts gave the premise a tinge of unreality which weakened its impact for me.

You have to read this book, also, with the assumption that Lehrer is being very loose and imaginative here, probably aspiring to something a la Jonathan Swift, because the characters do express themselves in very simple, repetitive, often stereotypical ways, and say a lot of things out loud that you would never expect such people to say. But he might have done that to simplify things, and of course, ambitious people are, sometimes, extremely simple and childish, underneath it all.

And you can't really call all the characters superficial. The Democratic candidate is kind of a dummy, but he's not really a nice guy, as we see in how he treats his campaign manager. (Is Lehrer telling us they're all like that?) And I thought the contrast between the narrator (a young journalist) and the "hero" moderator (from the old school) was very interesting. And also the contrast between the somewhat opportunistic narrator and the deeply moral and patriotic private investigator.

(Lehrer also leaves open the interesting question of whether the American public is better off with the dumb Democrat rather than the crazy Republican.)

Lehrer writes with a sort of Southern lilt which is kind of nice, but then, he has everyone - the narrator of the story and most of the characters - talk that way off and on, which is a bad idea if you're trying to keep characters separate. For instance, the narrator and several characters frequently do what I give an example of above in my title: use 4 nouns or adjectives in a row. There's no point building up verisimilitude by using all sorts of place and brand names, but then making this sort of sloppy error.

Still, the book is interesting if you watch the Newshour and want to read about the Washington scene. The pacing is nicely done, and Lehrer is an honest and good man, so you do trust what he says about his world.

An aside: I couldn't help remembering Stephen King's "The Dead Zone," which also involves an evil politician and a hero who knows the truth about him. That book had a great solution to the problem, a little more physical, of course. A major flaw with King, in my opinion, is that he's lived up there among the pinecones, watching TV and reading paperbacks too long, and a lot of his plots nowadays are too far from reality, even for his genre. And I thought, wow, wouldn't it be great if Lehrer and King teamed up for a novel or two?! Or is that a little TOO Swiftian to hope for?