I stayed up far later than I hoped or intended to watching the final votes on health care reform last night. Which I suppose is as good enough occasion as any to encourage folks to read Joe Klein's The Running Mate. Primary Colors is a superior work by a great deal, and if I were to make a list of my favorite novels, that would likely be on it. But The Running Mate is unjustly forgotten, perhaps because the blood and treachery of the political campaign are interesting to more people than the vast and abiding strangeness of Washington, DC (it's also another one of Klein's wonderful love stories between actual grown-ups. My one regret about the movie adaptation of Primary Colors is the extent to which that book's romance was excised.). The Running Mate is chiefly concerned with that strangeness, though it's also powerfully about Vietnam, the Midwest, and Iowa as well. But mostly it's a useful reminder of the stakes of politics, of the fact that it is not as...hopelessly corny as a lot of legislators make it sound to have this ambition, and also that we might all be better off if some folks knew when to walk away. As one character says at an Inaugural dinner party for an administration he is to be shut out of, to a group of people he has been profoundly close to since they were together in Vietnam, and who are moving on without him:
"This is what we dreamed--and sometimes schemed--about for nearly thirty years. And no, I'm not scared. Because I also rememember what we were like back then, even what you were like, Lanny. I remember how clearly we saw what was happening to Vietnam, how hard we worked to change the result, how anguished we were by our inability to do so. I know we carry those lessons with us--lessons, not scars, as some would have it. Lessons that will inform the way we conduct diplomacy and, God forbid, military action. I hope you act wisely, I know you will act honorably. I salute you."
Terrible, right? Sort of embarrassing. And yet true, and heartfelt. A reminder that politics is not, as one character says to another in Primary Colors, "a fucking game." It's not. It really never is.
(That, or you could listen to this, which uber-reporter Dave Weigel tweeted last night as reflective of Democratic mood in DC last night: