The Running Mate

Hailed as “astonishingly powerful” by The New York Times, and “written perfectly” by The Washington Post, Primary Colors, with over one million hardcover copies in print, was the most- talked-about political novel of the past century. The brilliant portrait of a charming, ambitious, amoral young Southerner on his way to the White House struck an instantly recognizable chord, and catapulted Anonymous–aka New Yorker Washington correspondent Joe Klein–into the public eye as a novelist of the first rank.

Now, in The Running Mate, Klein takes the reader on an exuberant, wicked, and unerringly wise political journey with Senator Charlie Martin, a decorated veteran of the war in Vietnam. The experience of combat and his easy dominance of home-state politics have made Charlie fearless. He’s a hot, if occasionally reckless, political property–dashing, honorable, and irreverent.

And then Charlie’s life begins to fall apart. He campaigns for the presidency and fails. The wacky father of a volunteer decks him–in front of the cameras; a well-kept secret from Charlie’s Vietnam days is revealed; he reluctantly finds himself at the center of a friend’s cliff-hanging confirmation process for Secretary of Defense….And Senator Martin begins to learn that politics in an era of spin, marketing, and vicious personal assaults can be as treacherous–and life-threatening–as combat was.

Finally, Charlie Martin must confront the two greatest challenges of his life–a political opponent who has no scruples and a dazzling, unconventional woman who loves him but is appalled by his life’s work. Charlie’s dilemma is one that has come to haunt contemporary American politics: Is it possible to be a good politician and a good man? Can you live in the public glare and still construct a habitable life?

No observer of contemporary politics has a clearer eye than Joe Klein, or can so effortlessly show the moral complexities that arise when public and private lives intertwine. Here, in his superb new novel, he takes a good man’s attempt to come to terms with the harsh new realities of the modern political arena–and gives us a book that reverberates with truth about ourselves.