The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Run Robbie Run by Jon Pepper

Run Robbie Run by Jon Pepper

https://www.amazon.com/Run-Robbie-Jon-Pepper/dp/B0H116JL73

Jonpepperbooks.com

Indelable.com

Jon Pepper’s political farce Run Robbie Run is a razor-sharp satire of an American political party at war with itself— and it’s wickedly funny.

Set during an election year nomination process, the novel follows two spectacularly unfit candidates: Dewey Fenwick, an 87-year-old former president who can barely stay conscious, and his successor Robbie Crowe, a lazy, self-absorbed billionaire who stumbles into the nomination without earning a single vote.

Pepper’s comic gifts are immediately on display.

The opening scene, in which campaign aides frantically try to rouse Dewey from a Golden Girls dream before television journalists arrive, is a masterclass in political absurdity. But the novel’s real engine is Robbie — a man so thoroughly unprepared for the presidency that when asked about his vision for America, he offers a few lyrics from What a Wonderful World and tells his aide to write it down.

The satire cuts in all directions.

The party machine, corrupt billionaire puppet-masters, a fawning media, campus radicals planning “mostly peaceful” firebombings at the Chicago convention — no faction escapes unscathed. The fictional surveillance program “America’s Just Rewards,” essentially a social credit system dressed up in loyalty-points marketing, provides the novel’s chilling undertow beneath all the comedy.

The supporting cast is superb: Dinda, the idealistic campaign intern who slowly realizes the party has no actual principles; Senator Hiram Fry, a straight-talking old warhorse who delivers the novel’s most sobering warnings; Lady Janice, the former First Lady desperate to return to the White House; and Marty, Robbie’s long-suffering aide whose deadpan exasperation carries the humor throughout.

Pepper writes with the confidence of someone who has watched Washington up close, and it shows.