[In the following mixed review, Neumann contends that Primary Colors follows the conventions of classic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romance novels.]

Reviewers must sometimes make their biases clear. I am, like my father before me, what my fellow Americans call a “yellow-dog Democrat,” meaning I would vote for a yellow dog if they ran it on the Democratic ticket. Primary Colors by Anonymous, the best-selling American roman à clef about Bill Clinton's 1992 primary campaign for the presidency, is a novel of yellow-dog Democrats, for yellow-dog Democrats, and, I feel sure, by a yellow-dog Democrat.

Put this another way: Primary Colors is about the romance of politics, written by someone who loves politics, about characters who are themselves in love with politics. Appropriately enough, Primary Colors follows the classic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romance-novel plot. The heroine—or in this case the first-person male narrator Henry Burton, a hot-shot young political adviser—falls in love at first sight, in this novel of politics, with presidential candidate Jack Stanton, a thinly disguised Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas. Henry succumbs to “TB” or “True Believerism,” the absence of which is supposed to separate consultants like him from lower-level staff: “You wanted to keep perspective. You wanted to see the horse as a horse and not Pegasus. But I couldn't.” In typical romance-novel fashion, Henry's love is tested to the utmost. His faith is strained by Stanton's record on Vietnam, by his “bimbo factor” (including a possible paternity suit from the under-age black daughter of family friends) and, finally, by his apparent willingness to use dirt against a seemingly invincible opponent. For a time, also in approved romance-novel fashion, this formidable opponent, Fred Picker, ex-Governor of Florida, threatens to rival Stanton in Henry's political affections. Things look bleak. But, as in all romance novels, the rival love collapses. Henry learns that, though Jack Stanton has feet of clay, Fred Picker has cold feet. He has neither the fire in the belly nor the love in his heart: “He had a parlor trick; he could perform—brilliantly, instinctively—for the cameras.” But “He didn't seem to have any higher purpose than that,” and “he didn't seem to know much about politics.” In short, Henry's apparently perfect potential partner is not a True Believer, not the committed pol he pines for. As in the romance novel, however, Henry's first love, Jack Stanton, turns out to be worthy after all—nearly as worthy as Henry believed. He turns over the damaging information to Picker (it was his lawyer-wife Susan—read Hillary Clinton—who really wanted to use it). And he promises to withdraw from the race, only to learn that Picker himself is planning to withdraw. The novel ends with the promise that Henry will reconsider his resignation and return to the revived Stanton campaign, perhaps a more effective consultant because less “worshipful.”

As this romance-novel framework may suggest, the greatest weakness of Primary Colors lies where it differs most from real life, because it differs, unfortunately, in the direction of implausibility. For example, Fred Picker enters the primary campaign to replace a Paul Tsongas-like ex-senator who suffers a massive heart attack while Stanton is destroying him on talkback radio. And the dirt on Picker involves not just possible bribe-taking but a cocaine habit and a homosexual liaison. (As to whether Stanton's liabilities match Clinton's, let me hasten to say, for Australian readers not up on the latest American dirt, that, whatever Clinton's problems with bimbos and alleged sexual harassment, he has not seemed drawn to seducing teenagers.)

These romance-novel echoes also suggest one of the books greatest strengths, however. In this intricate political “faction,” whose major characters nearly all match known figures on Clinton's staff or among his political rivals, the evidence of fictional shaping provided by the romantic echoes raises Primary Colors itself above a cheap parlour trick. Fictional shaping turns this roman à clef into political and moral allegory. If politics is the art of the possible, as Lyndon Johnson confirmed, Primary Colors artfully explores what might be the best politician we can possibly expect. Fred Picker's counter-example proves that we can't expect lack of ambition: “We gotta figure out how to communicate what we love about what we do. We gotta show them we're doin' this not for ambition or glory,” Jack Stanton says. “Not just,” Susan Stanton adds. “Not just,” her husband concedes, “but because we love doin' for the folks, finding things that work.” And if love of “folks” is essential in our ideal politician, we may have to expect bimbos: “You want a guy who's got juice, right? A human being … You should only work for guys who fuck around, Henry,” advises our hero's stepfather. Nor can we hope to free politics of televised parlour tricks. After his campaign gains momentum, Stanton laments, “How do we move this thing from retail to wholesale? How do we do the stuff we did in the malls and the union halls … if we're hopping from tarmac to tarmac in a big plane, shut off from the folks by Secret Service? … How do you do politics in a country that hates politicians? How do we show 'em who I really am?” The art of politics, paradoxically, is finding the artifice that shows the real: “You ever think about the fact that the riffs we do started with George Washington?” Stanton marvels. “Andrew Jackson massaged it some, and Lincoln—and then Boss Murphy here in New York, and FDR, Bilbo and George Wallace in the South. All of them, the giants and the shitheels, have massaged it, moved it, pushed it ahead.” Now the game is “too ornate and bullshitty … But you don't wrench the art of politics away from its roots so drastically without paying some sort of price. All the bullshit we do is there for a reason.”

In short, Primary Colors is a novel of political morality. But, written about thinly disguised real people by an author wholly disguised in anonymity, is it itself moral? Since I read it as allegorical praise of the ideals Clinton represents—since it acknowledges the feet of clay only to rekindle the faith—I find myself enthusiastically approving an endeavour I might otherwise condemn. Perhaps anonymity is more in this case than a clever marketing ploy, more than the tantalising possibility that we are reading an insider exposé. If we knew Primary Colors was written by a Clinton staffer, as many have speculated, we might discount what I am convinced is its defence of Clinton. Or, if we knew it was written by a nobody who read newspapers, its praise would have less influence than I, for one, hope it will.

But should Australians, who will never vote for or against Clinton, read Primary Colors? Yes, I think so. Primary Colors is both hilarious and endlessly fascinating. Of course, many of the abstruse insider details that intrigue Americans may irritate Australians, who cannot be expected to know why Stanton will never win the “Nina Totenberg vote” in the New Hampshire primary (listeners to a political commentator on American public radio) or that “Ted, Dan, and Tom” are the prime-time news anchors on the three commercial networks. Nor can even many Americans judge the accuracy of all the novel's political insights—for example, that eastern mine workers had less luck organising out west because “Western labor guys tend to be scary, anarchists—Wobblies, gun nuts. The guys from Brooklyn go out there to organise, they figure they've gotta be Wyatt Earp.” Nevertheless, Primary Colors should help Australians understand American idealism—at least the idealism of yellow-dog Democrats (I cannot speak for Republicans). And, if some Quadrant readers therefore fear that Primary Colors is awash in sloppy, bleeding-heart liberalism, they may be interested in Clinton/Stanton's long-term membership in the moderate Democratic Leadership Council and his belief that we cannot have “a new American spirit of community … without an equal sense of responsibility, without asking the same standard of moral behaviour from the less fortunate that we demand of each other—and which we should demand of the wealthiest Americans as well … It is as patronising as our opponents who say—well, usually they don't have the courage to say it, they merely imply—that it's useless to help the poor, there's nothing we can do for them.” This far-sighted compassion, this sensibility moderated by sense, this romantic idealism founded on prudential realism, is the real moral message of the eighteenth-century romance novel. I think it plays pretty well in any century, on any continent.