PRIMARY COLORS HAS OBSESSED Washington, especially its Democrats, for the last week or two. Not only because it’s a roman a clef of the 1992 Clinton campaign, or because its author’s identity is unknown — but because the very people it’s supposed to be about are vouching for its verisimilitude. George Stephanopoulos, clearly the model for the book’s African-American narrator Henry Burton, called the book “a great read” in the New York Daily News. According to Newsweek, “Stephanopoulos is particularly obsessed with the book. The president’s aide is startled by how his character’s thoughts — from wonderment at his boss’s skill to disgust with his pandering — mirror his own.” Mandy Grunwald, the Clinton ’92 ad wizard who appears in the novel as Daisy Green, is also obsessed. Responding to an allegation in the Washington Post that Primary Colors was actually the work of her novelist-sister Lisa, Grunwald replied, “Feel free to spread the rumor.”
Which leads to a mystery even bigger than the identity of the book’s anonymous author: Why are Bill Clinton’s friends hyping Primary Colors in the first place? For this is a relentlessly negative book that portrays a presidential candidate even more prone to satyriasis than we know his nonfiction counterpart to be.
The subject of Primary Colors is not politics but one politician’s lechery, and the efforts of a dedicated campaign staff to keep that lechery from public view. Jack Stanton is a sweet-talking southern governor and presidential candidate who has an irrepressible sexual appetite, a wife who’s a ruthless bitch, and a desire to move the Democratic party in a new direction (in that order). The action starts on page 61:
“Well, we sure as hell planned the shit out of the next few months,” Richard [James Carville] muttered. “Except for the woman thing.”
“WHAT woman thing?” Lucille Kauffman [Susan Thomases] asked, too loud, too sharp; the entire table went quiet.
This woman thing: When Henry first meets the governor, Stanton is speaking at an adult-literacy event and charming a young librarian with tales of new initiatives from the southern states. At their next meeting, some hours later, the governor is coming out of the shower with the same librarian. As the candidate emerges in the early campaigning, so does news of his various adulteries, first with Cashmere McLeod (Gennifer Flowers), the governor’s wife’s hairdresser. Next, a black barbecue owner named Fat Willie tells Henry his 15-year-old daughter is pregnant and that Stanton is the father. Libby Holden (Arkansas fixer Betsey Wright, except that here she’s a crazed lesbian) comes in to do “dustbuster” work — keeping a lid on Fat Willie’s daughter and rooting out other potential bimbo eruptions. Libby makes a failed attempt to get the governor and his wife to concentrate more on their political ethics (they are dirty campaigners, too, and are using opposition research to “out” Stanton’s most formidable opponent). She winds up committing Vince Foster-esque suicide-by-gunshot, driven to distraction by having to lie for the Stantons.
Nor is that all. Sexual predation apart, this is a book that consistently derides the president’s liberal supporters. The consultant Arlen Sporken (Frank Greer) has the “un-ironic liberal fervor common to Southern Baptists who’d had conversion experiences during the civil rights years.” Lucille Kauffman is “dowdy and awful.” Most embarrassing of all, however, is Daisy’s mother, a New Deal-era socialist from the Outer Boroughs, who cringingly apologizes for her race to Henry by quoting from Langston Hughes, “‘I’m so ashamed of being white.’ . . . This is such a racist country.”
Henry thinks, “I have stumbled into Negro Poetry Month.”
However much of this book is based on fact, it’s all plausible and therefore harmful to the president. Why, then, has it met with such gaga public approval from the handful of younger people who feature in it?
Take Grunwald, who likes the book so much she won’t even deny that her sister wrote it. One could cite vanity — Daisy is the book’s best-drawn and most likable character. Even so, you’d expect Mandy to shut down the rumor of her sister’s authorship as quickly as possible, if not on privacy grounds, then on political ones. For Grunwald, who once told a profile writer, “I have to feel I’m working for the good guys,” is portrayed in Primary Colors as working for a decidedly bad guy, even as roping credulous zeroes into believing the guy is good. Grunwald’s saying “feel free to spread the rumor” about her sister’s potential authorship is tantamount to her saying: I urge you to believe that I am the only conceivable source of information for a novel that portrays the man ! helped elect president as having statutorily raped a 15-year-old girl.
Now take Stephanopoulos. Twice, the character based on him has the revelation that, well, yes, the presidential candidate probably did sleep with the 15-year-old:
I never really thought it through . . . sitting there, beginning to freeze a little in the Bronco, I suddenly realized why: ! could not allow myself to believe that Jack Stanton would take advantage of Fat Willie’s teenage daughter; and yet I couldn’t believe he hadn’t.
“Never really thinking it through” means the kind of doublethink by which the entire campaign staff adopts a see-no-evil attitude towards the boss and an attitude of imperious omniscience towards the public. “The campaign would proceed under the assumption that the story was trash,” says Burton/Stephanopoulos. “The official posture would be outrage: who could take such garbage, sold to a supermarket sheet for money, seriously?”
Is this one of the places where Stephanopoulos’s thinking supposedly mirrored his fictional counterpart’s? If so, it’s particularly damaging because this is where the book is most plausible — even unmistakable — as thinly veiled nonfiction. It tracks real life almost word for word and gesture for gesture. When news of the candidate’s philandering comes out, the first response of the governor’s wife, Susan (she of the big hairbands and bad moods), is to slap her husband’s face. Her second is to assemble the campaign staff, blame these untruths on his political foes, and demand a show of loyalty: “Is there anyone here who thinks these attacks on us haven’t been orchestrated, part of a plan to wipe out the strongest Democrat before he took off?.” The governor’s wife agrees to appear with Stanton after the Super Bowl on 60 Minutes. On the air, the two admit that their marriage has had “tough times,” and touchingly she takes his hand. When the lights go off, she drops his hand “as if it were a dead rat.”
There’s something in this whole affair that reminds one not of All the King’s Men or The Last Hurrah — the books to which Primary Colors is being compared — but of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. For Primary Colors is a not-too-well-written potboiler-cum-expose that gets all the facts slightly wrong yet conveys the meat of the matter tellingly. The chorus of applause from actual veterans of the Clinton campaign is shocking. Silence on their part would be the least one could ask of loyalty: Why aren’t they denouncing this thing?
Perhaps they haven’t read it. Or perhaps Clinton is not wearing well with them — there’s a school of thought, after all, that the Clintons are now in the trouble they’re in because neither of them knows how to repay a favor or honor a promise, and the president has gone through speechwriters the way Jack Stanton goes through women.
A more likely reason is that these staffers have fallen prey to the Clintonire worldview: Appearance and reality have merged for them, and spin has become a conditioned reflex.
After four years of saying the president is up when he’s down, or that he’s strong when he’s weak, or that he’s telling the truth when he’s lying, they now look at a demeaning portrait of their boss and call it a flattering one: Because Governor Stanton is recognizable as Clinton, he’s good. Because we’re recognizable as his loyal retainers, so are we. Because the book is about us, it’s a good book.
by Christopher Caldwell
