Plenty of Juicy Plot Twists in a Thriller of a Race

Right now, we are busily tracking down guilty associations, figuring out which candidates were in which rooms with which agents of evil. We need to know about these agents of evil because a thriller needs villains as well as heroes. You might think that finding the villains would be easy: There are people in the world who like to blow Americans up. But this is a political thriller, and the conventions of the genre require us to seek villains here at home.

To the Democrats, the unpopular incumbent president is Voldemort. The wicked spell that binds the country is NAFTA. Hedge-fund honchos were villains for a while, but they kicked up their contributions to Democrats and vanished from the story. The Republicans, alas, haven't found the right villain yet, but some of them seem to think that Jeremiah Wright's auditions for the part have been impressive.

Which brings us to what Alfred Hitchcock used to call the MacGuffin -- no decent thriller is complete without one. The MacGuffin is the thing everybody's looking for, the diary or computer chip whose whereabouts drive the plot. In an election, the MacGuffin takes the form of a scandal. The media will spend most of the novel mucking around in each candidate's past, searching for the MacGuffin that will blow the campaign wide open.

In a better novel, the media would be an admirable minor character, the aw-shucks, self-effacing narrator whose keen eye for detail would enable him to explain the candidates' positions on issues to the reader. In a better novel, the media might even decide to give more air time to the contenders' views than to the views of various talk show hosts and pundits. But this is not a better novel. This is a thriller, and in a thriller surprises, not explanations, are the order of the day. The plot twists can be contrived, implausible, even impossible, but they are also what keep us turning the pages.

Of course, no thriller would be complete without red herrings. The media have lately been taking seriously McCain's proposal, endorsed in part by Clinton, to lower the federal gas tax during the summer. (Obama has not signed on but has agreed that gas prices are too high.) Economists everywhere are fainting. Our problem is that we consume too much fossil fuel, not too little, and no one has ever found a way to make people use less of a resource by reducing its cost.

Another current fave, repeated endlessly on the talk shows, is that McCain has insisted that the Iraq war could go on for a century. No, he hasn't, and people saying he has know that he hasn't. Sooner or later, one of the potential Democratic heroes has to tell the surrogates to cut it out.

And there are the mysteries. Do Clinton and Obama really believe that they can pay for everything they've promised with the paltry $40 billion they'll raise by allowing President Bush's tax cuts on high earners to lapse? If not, where will they get the money? Does McCain really believe that the war in Iraq is still winnable? If so, how? And the biggest mystery of all, the one that makes baby boomers like my wife and me tremble in our boots: Just how solvent will Social Security and (especially) Medicare be when we retire? So far, alas, our would-be heroes have little to offer on that one.

Well, give them time. Maybe when we turn the page, we'll find the answer. They say that when you walk into the White House, everything you thought you knew changes. Samantha Power, late of the Obama campaign, tried to make this point in an interview with the British press; nobody can predict today, she argued, what the situation on the ground in Iraq will look like in January 2009, so every promise to withdraw the troops is necessarily contingent. Grownups already know this, of course. The children we tend to turn into at election time, however, would rather pretend that we can predict the future.

The truth is, we haven't found our hero yet. We've caught glimpses. Some think it's McCain, the gritty, straight-talking veteran. Others have been drawn to Obama's message of change and hope. (I have given Obama money myself.) Still others support Clinton, the policy wonk and comeback kid, a living link to an era many Americans look at with longing. Each, I suspect, would be a good president. But none will be heroic without stepping beyond the bounds of safety, embracing rather than evading tough questions, confounding and sometimes even angering the interest groups that laud them.

How, then, does the story end? When we reach the final chapter, which villain stands there confessing the whole nefarious scheme while our hero still has time to plan the clever switcheroo that will save the world?

Sorry. Can't spoil the story. Even in November, we'll know only who the winner is. Learning whether the winner is also a hero sometimes takes longer.

Stephen L. Carter is a professor at Yale Law School. His third novel, "Palace Council," will be published in July.