As he did in ''American Hero,'' the book that became the
1997 film ''Wag the Dog,'' Beinhart takes a president eager
to be re-elected, adds a lot of cynicism and creates a
colorful farce that sounds either like barely fictionalized
political reportage or like near-libelous Republican
bashing, depending on your point of view. The novel's
president is not named George W. Bush - he's Augustus
Winthrop Scott - but might as well be: he is a man from a
privileged family, with a dubious record of National Guard
service and rich and powerful business backers.
One of those is Alan Carston Stowe, an aging developer who
wants to leave a record of himself when he dies. To that
end he retains a personal librarian, David Goldberg. Our
hero.
Goldberg begins going through Stowe's papers just as
President Scott's re-election bid is heating up. Scott's
opponent is John Kerry in a dress: Anne Lynn Murphy, who
did heroic service in Vietnam, not on a boat but as a
nurse. She isn't given much of a chance.
But then, late in the campaign, everything changes.
Beinhart, in one memorable, metaphor-rich chapter,
describes a bizarre gathering at Stowe's horse farm at
which guests first watch a prize stallion breed, then watch
a televised presidential debate. The breeding goes well but
the debate doesn't: the unassuming Murphy, in a scene that
reads like every Democrat's dream, catches the cocky
president off guard, and suddenly Scott's lead in the polls
vanishes. That's when the Scott campaign puts its
emergency, steal-the-election plan into effect, and only
Goldberg and his librarian pals can stop it.
The story is outlandish fun, but it carries with it a
serious critique of the electoral process, the American
power structure and the real-life conduct of both President
Bush and the news media. Beinhart's descriptions of the
machinery of politics can be devastating. (''They all
understood that the Federal Elections Commission was a
Lewis Carroll rabbit hole: things went in and disappeared
for arbitrary lengths of time and encountered strange and
curious events and came out, oh, years later, and sometimes
someone was nominally fined, but nobody was ever stopped
from doing anything and nobody had their office taken away
because they violated the rules in winning it.'')
But most devastating of all is his characterization of what
he calls Fog Facts: bits of truth (for example, that big
oil owns the White House) that are in plain sight but
somehow invisible. Thus:
''In the information age there is so much information that
sorting and focus and giving the appropriate weight to
anything have become incredibly difficult. Then some fact,
or event, or factoid mysteriously captures the world's
attention and there's a media frenzy. Like Clinton and
Lewinsky. Like O. J. Simpson. And everybody in the world
knows everything about it. On the flip side are the Fog
Facts, important things that nobody seems able to focus on
any more than they can focus on a single droplet in the
mist. They are known, but not known.''

Sometimes, it takes a librarian to see these Fog Facts.
What a pity that soon the only place to find one will be at
the Living History Museum, alongside the mule skinner and
the wheelwright.

Neil Genzlinger is a staff editor and writer for The New York Times.