Flack Attack

By John Skow

Political consultants used to tell simple, childlike lies -- that their candidates were honest and hardworking and would get your laundry whiter than white. Now, of course, these flacks hold their client's opponent up before the cameras and assure us that if elected, he or she will cause the rapid onset of the next Ice Age.

With so much organic waste, there must be a pony somewhere, and Stuart Stevens' new novel may be it. Scorched Earth (Atlantic; 276 pages; $21) is a funny, eye-rolling, knee-walking story of an incestuous Senate campaign in one of those nameless Southern states -- somewhere between South Carolina and Georgia, perhaps -- that turn up in political novels. Incest is not a metaphor here. When political consultant Matt Bonney engineers the testimony of three black drag queens who say they have had sex with Congressman Luke Bonney, who is the opponent of Matt's candidate and also happens to be Matt's brother, Luke makes it known that he will counter the deadly charge of homosexuality by confessing to a love affair with Congresswoman Lisa Bonney, who is Matt's wife.

It never becomes clear which of these abominations is true. Perhaps all of them are, as seemed to be the case in the recent Virginia mudfest between Oliver North and Charles Robb. The author, a political consultant, produces muck of a good, gooey consistency and characters who chuck it at each other with vigor. The best and most rascally is Matt's candidate, Governor Solomon Jawinski, a fat, Polish-Jewish carpetbagger from Detroit who drives an old El Dorado convertible and knows how to talk redneck. In a TV debate he points out that his opponent is too lean and too handsome. "When everybody in this country looked like me," he says, "our farmers were rich! Everybody ate white bread and red meat! We drove big cars and ate big breakfasts!" Jawinsky could have beaten Robb and North together.