![]() ![]() Federal Election Commission: Money changes everything, from our gilded White House to the battered Main Streets of democracy's hometowns.Īs he travels to South Carolina to do his devious work, Andre reveals the full force of what secret cash can buy: phantom social media attacks, local heroes bribed into puppets, manipulative polling, slogan-selling ads with hidden consequences paid for by phony front groups, patriotic rhetoric that has zero to do with what's really on the ballot.Īndre is a strong but narratively flawed character, a 30-something black man deployed to a largely white county in the former Confederacy, a scrappy D.C. While the novel's antihero is a Washington D.C.-based "political consultant" named Toussaint Andre Ross, the story's true villain is Citizens United v. Those who pick up the book get a view of how the sausage of today's politics gets made: from grinding up the hearts and minds of ordinary American citizens. ![]() This is riveting stuff, though not at all far-fetched. ![]() In "The Coyotes of Carthage," the former Justice Department trial attorney and Wisconsin Innocence Project leader imagines a political campaign that manipulates the unsuspecting citizens of a flag-waving South Carolina county into selling their public land to toxic mining. Steven Wright's debut novel reads like a "how to" book that thousands of K Street connivers and Wall Street warriors don't want the rest of America to see. ![]()
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