THE RULES OF THE GAME

Though former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. earned distinction as one of the nation’s finest newspaper editors, who knew that he was clairvoyant? Downie, who recently left the Post, has written a debut novel to be published in January 2008. Titled The Rules of the Game, it introduces a surprise pick for a vice-presidential candidate: a young, attractive woman selected by her much older running mate. “I didn’t think you’d have the guts,” says a political operative to the presidential nominee, whose health and advanced age are issues in the campaign. “She’s such a big risk…The country loves her, but that’s People magazine stuff.”

The woman selected is 41 years old and inexperienced, having won her first election just two years earlier. Yet she quickly becomes the campaign’s “rock star.” “I can’t remember a presidential nominee being upstaged like this at his own convention,” remarks one reporter. Sound familiar? “You couldn’t sell that scenario to the movies,” writes Downie, who could hardly have known that such a similar scenario would be marketed to voters this fall. This fictional candidate’s name is Susan rather than Sarah. She’s a California senator rather than Alaska’s governor. And she’s a Democrat rather than a Republican, which provides delicious irony when she’s savaged by “a blond, model-thin, right-wing provocateur, a wildly successful author,” here named Crystal Malone rather than Ann Coulter, who is in turn attacked by the “acerbic” New York columnist Sally McGuire (Maureen Dowd). Ultimately, the plot goes way deeper than the eerie similarities between Downie’s fiction and the political developments that only a crystal ball could have predicted. The novel’s protagonist is a young investigative reporter named Sarah Page, who works at the Washington Capital. She has trouble keeping her love life separate from her work life, as she stumbles into a conspiracy that makes Watergate look like a school board meeting. Downie’s command as a novelist can’t compare with his editorial leadership (or his unlikely prognosticative powers). The novel opens with so much who’s-sleeping-with-whom scorekeeping that it makes Washington seem like a political Peyton Place, and it ends on an oddly anticlimactic note. In the middle, there are a lot of dead bodies. But there’s also a lot that rings true about how investigative reporters work, how newspapers work, how lobbyists work and how politics works. It’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys, as cynicism runs rampant, corruption leaves a bipartisan stain and elected officials are merely a shadow government for the powers that really run the country. Most of the characters in the novel play by their own rules; some play by no rules at all.

While the layers of revelation should captivate readers, if the rest of the novel proves even a fraction as clairvoyant as the selection of the vice-presidential candidate, Americans across the political spectrum should be very, very afraid.