Customer Reviews

The Last Debate

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This book, although its plot is a bit predictable, raises an important ethical issue: is the role of the media to merely report the news passively, or do reporters ever have an obligation to become active participants in the electoral process. In light of the current tabloidization of the news coverage in this country, there is much meat for discussion in the actions of the reporters portrayed in this book.

Lehrer writes from the perspective of a journalist writing a non-fiction book about the debate. The style suits the story, which is not overly complex. But, the story is really just a vehicle for the greater issue: The issue of journalistic ethics and the media's role in our society.

Lehrer does a masterful job of looking at the issue from all sides, and I agree with the majority of his conclusions. Presented any other way and this book becomes a textbook instead of an intriguing look at the future of journalism.

The biggest problem with the book is that the characters are a little two-dimensional. The minority characters, Henry and Barbara wear their ethnicity on their sleeves. After a while, it becomes cumbersome. I got tired of hearing Henry, a Hispanic, compare things to tacos and say ole all the time. As for Barbara, everything hinged on her being a black woman.

Overall, worth a read if you are interested in politics or the role of the media in our society.

Lehrer writes from the perspective of a journalist writing a non-fiction book about the debate. The style suits the story, which is not overly complex. But, the story is really just a vehicle for the greater issue: The issue of journalistic ethics and the media's role in our society.

Lehrer does a masterful job of looking at the issue from all sides, and I agree with the majority of his conclusions. Presented any other way and this book becomes a textbook instead of an intriguing look at the future of journalism.

The biggest problem with the book is that the characters are a little two-dimensional. The minority characters, Henry and Barbara wear their ethnicity on their sleeves. After a while, it becomes cumbersome. I got tired of hearing Henry, a Hispanic, compare things to tacos and say ole all the time. As for Barbara, everything hinged on her being a black woman.

Overall, worth a read if you are interested in politics or the role of the media in our society.

Days before the election, the moderator of the presidential debate (Lehrer has of course moderated many presidential debates) is given some secret, damning info on one of the candidates (the right-wing Republican who all the press realize is a truly evil man who will ruin the country) and has to decide whether to step over the journalistic line and use this info in a way that will damage the candidate in the eyes of the voters and so change American history.

It's an interesting moral question but because it is set up so weakly, a lot of the impact is lost. The candidate's character is somewhat like Pat Buchanan, but the situation is more like that of when Ross Perot first came on the scene, and he seemed such a wonderful guy, until we all found out about the steel-tip-booted way he ran his businesses, and how badly he took criticism, and saw the guy he chose for V.P. Everybody said, "Whoa! and I was going to vote for this guy?!"

In "The Last Debate," though, the American public still doesn't know about the man's real character 8 days before the election. It just seems awfully unlikely that nothing would have come to light before that time. And even then, why couldn't the journalists bypass the moral issue by just giving the damning info directly to the press to report it as news? Lehrer does kind of explain these things, in a way, later on, but these kinds of doubts gave the premise a tinge of unreality which weakened its impact for me.

You have to read this book, also, with the assumption that Lehrer is being very loose and imaginative here, probably aspiring to something a la Jonathan Swift, because the characters do express themselves in very simple, repetitive, often stereotypical ways, and say a lot of things out loud that you would never expect such people to say. But he might have done that to simplify things, and of course, ambitious people are, sometimes, extremely simple and childish, underneath it all.

And you can't really call all the characters superficial. The Democratic candidate is kind of a dummy, but he's not really a nice guy, as we see in how he treats his campaign manager. (Is Lehrer telling us they're all like that?) And I thought the contrast between the narrator (a young journalist) and the "hero" moderator (from the old school) was very interesting. And also the contrast between the somewhat opportunistic narrator and the deeply moral and patriotic private investigator.

(Lehrer also leaves open the interesting question of whether the American public is better off with the dumb Democrat rather than the crazy Republican.)

Lehrer writes with a sort of Southern lilt which is kind of nice, but then, he has everyone - the narrator of the story and most of the characters - talk that way off and on, which is a bad idea if you're trying to keep characters separate. For instance, the narrator and several characters frequently do what I give an example of above in my title: use 4 nouns or adjectives in a row. There's no point building up verisimilitude by using all sorts of place and brand names, but then making this sort of sloppy error.

Still, the book is interesting if you watch the Newshour and want to read about the Washington scene. The pacing is nicely done, and Lehrer is an honest and good man, so you do trust what he says about his world.

An aside: I couldn't help remembering Stephen King's "The Dead Zone," which also involves an evil politician and a hero who knows the truth about him. That book had a great solution to the problem, a little more physical, of course. A major flaw with King, in my opinion, is that he's lived up there among the pinecones, watching TV and reading paperbacks too long, and a lot of his plots nowadays are too far from reality, even for his genre. And I thought, wow, wouldn't it be great if Lehrer and King teamed up for a novel or two?! Or is that a little TOO Swiftian to hope for?

Mr. Lehrer writes very well of course, but the entire basis of this book is that some very dirty laundry in a candidate's past is unknown to anyone except a secret source, and the journalists bring it up in the debate. Just couldn't happen. Such dirt would have been easiliy unearthed. The jounalists become media stars for their daring expose. The plot needed to be much more subtle or complex. It is a quick read, but not satisfying.

"The Last Debate" is a page turner, an easy, quick read, good for the beach or a night of insomnia. Even though much of it was predictable, I was tantalized enough at each stage to continue on. That said, however, the plot is hardly realistic. Any decent journalist (and the hero Howley was characterized as such) or news organization possessing the "explosive" goods on one of the candidates, would check it out carefully unlike the four debate panalists. Furthermore, it is hard to believe that a candidate who behaved as the Republican candidate did could get as far as he did without at least one or two of his accusers (and there were many!) not going public much earlier on, i.e., during the primaries. Look what happened to Clinton in 1992 -- not to mention 1998. The "minority" journalists are one dimensional and stereotypical. Still, given the weaknesses in the plot, it was an interesting read, and I'm trying one more Lehrer fiction piece to see if he does any better.

I've read a bit more than half of this book, and I can already say that it is probably the most RACIST book I've ever read. While trying not to make race a big issue in this novel(I think that's what Lehrer was trying to do by having a diverse debate panel), the author made the fact that Barbara Manning(African-American) and Henry Rodriguez(Hispanic) were minorities THE central issue inadvertently. Every time these two characters are mentioned in the novel, their ethnicity is brought up. Even worse, the character of Henry is a stereotype of Mexican people. On page 111, it is mentioned that Henry's favorite food is a bean burrito. Nearly every time Henry makes a statement in the novel, he uses the word "Ole`". I'm still waiting for him to break out and start refering to people as "Essay"(which, I'm sure is coming up) I think that the only thing Lehrer knows about Hispanic people is what he learned by listening to Cheech from Cheech and Chong! I'm not even going to start on the fact that every Republican in the novel is portrayed as a Neo-Nazi-type of supervillan. This is a book with weak characters that use poor dialogue.

I am not quite done with the book, but it is so predictable. It is proving a truth I already know: journalists care less about the news. They are leftist muckrakers who only want to advance their agendas.

The Republican candidate is exposed as an extremist, racist, violent woman and child beater. The Democrat, of course, is a lovable dumb fool. I know I should finish once I started, but I don't know if I can. I know it is only fiction, but I see the biased news everyday; I don't need it in fiction too.

I like Jim as a writer. White Widow was exceptional. But this clearly was different. I recommend this book only to those who don't understand the liberal news media. Even though it is fiction, it paints the picture very well. To everyone else, no shocker.