Fake Fiction Political Tract Masquerades As A Novel
“The Campaign” By Marilyn Tucker Quayle and Nancy Tucker Northcott (HarperCollins, 478 pages, $22)
The Tucker sisters Marilyn Quayle, spouse of former Vice President Dan Quayle, and Nancy Northcott, a former teacher who lives in Tennessee with her family have concocted their second political “thriller,” a sequel to 1992’s “Embrace the Serpent,” again featuring U.S. Sen. Bob Grant.
The senator, unlike every other politician in the known world, possesses absolutely no flaws. He is a conservative Christian Republican from Georgia who is African American (Quayle apparently doesn’t oppose fictional affirmative action).
To recap “Serpent”: Fidel Castro dies; a cabal that includes the Democratic president and the powerful editor of The Washington Herald wants to install another despot; Grant almost single-handedly thwarts the cabal, ensuring that leadership of the island falls to a God-fearing, democratic-with-a-small-d, “good” Cuban.
Well, this sticks in the cabal’s collective craw. When better to get even than during the senator’s campaign for re-election to a third term? Especially since he’s being touted as the GOP’s presidential candidate two years hence.
The action begins nine days before the election. A Washington Herald reporter is murdered, and Grant is implicated by a sinister new law enforcement outfit, the NIIA. Things begin to fall apart for Grant and his perfect family faster than you can say Trilateral Commission.
Anyone reading the Tucker sisters must accept certain givens: All liberals are bad; Democrats and all media people are liberals, therefore they all do evil things. No exceptions. So it’s the Democrats who have created the National Investigation and Intelligence Agency, combining the CIA, FBI, DEA, U.S. Marshals and Secret Service into one all-powerful organization controlled by the attorney general (the president’s crony, natch). The NIIA, the sisters take excruciating pains to point out, is the federal government run amok, courtesy of Democrats. Yet their attorney general curiously resembles conservative Republican John Mitchell of Watergate infamy more than flaming liberals Ramsey Clark and Janet Reno.
Each day nearer the election brings new scandal for the Grants. The older son is accused of drug dealing. The senator is accused of philandering. Next, he’s charged with buying drugs. The Washington Herald just eats this up. It buys rigged photos and phony letters, puts them on the front page and trumpets the senator’s guilt with nary a bother for double-checking sources.
A mysterious, omnipotent figure named “Bonfire” (seriously) has targeted Grant, too. Only Jimmy Jenks, the proverbial plainspoken Georgia sheriff, and some allies from Grant’s military career stand between the senator and total ruin. In this case, that would be … losing the election. Here’s a family on the brink of destruction, and the top concern is snagging votes for Dad.
But if he lost there could be no threequel, where decent Bob Grant - ensconced in the White House - could again save America from the next dastardly liberal conspiracy. That’s the trouble with political tracts masquerading as fiction. To borrow from Sheriff Jenks, they’re just so dad-blamed predictable.