Young Henry Burton, a former congressional aide of mixed race and the grandson of a legendary civil rights leader, is going through a precocious midlife crisis. Tired of the back-scratching and back-stabbing and back-watching of legislative politics, he's wondering what to do next with his Beltway experience and abilities when Jack Stanton, the governor of a small southern state who has set his sights on the presidency, half flatters, half shanghais him into a campaign-staff job.

What follows for Henry - and the reader - is an education in modern American electoral politics that in dramatic power, humor, psychological acuity, and insider knowledge beggars a hundred textbooks and a thousand lectures.

Henry hopes against hope that he has at last found a leader he can believe in. He then wa...

Young Henry Burton, a former congressional aide of mixed race and the grandson of a legendary civil rights leader, is going through a precocious midlife crisis. Tired of the back-scratching and back-stabbing and back-watching of legislative politics, he's wondering what to do next with his Beltway experience and abilities when Jack Stanton, the governor of a small southern state who has set his sights on the presidency, half flatters, half shanghais him into a campaign-staff job.

What follows for Henry - and the reader - is an education in modern American electoral politics that in dramatic power, humor, psychological acuity, and insider knowledge beggars a hundred textbooks and a thousand lectures.

Henry hopes against hope that he has at last found a leader he can believe in. He then wa...