The X President

I need someone else to read this book just to confirm it exists and I didn't dream it up after watching one too many reruns of The X Files and The West Wing. This is straight up Bill Clinton fan fiction, and I'm not sure I've ever read anything else quite like it. I mean, whatever: we've all read at least one book where someone time travelled to influence the younger version of an important (real or imaginary) historical personage in order to save humanity. But... maybe what makes this book a marvel to me is that, having come out in 2003, it is a time capsule within a time capsule. It represents what someone in 2003 thought was going to be the problems of the near future, based on an insanely close reading of the Clinton presidency. For all of its political wonkiness, it fails so thoroughly in predicting the political future that the book seems charmingly cartoonish. It's a little like reading a book like Make Room! Make Room! where in the 1960's the author thought by 1999 the biggest issue facing the U.S. would be intense overpopulation. Fortunately, I don't think The X-President takes itself that seriously (a little hard to tell from this distance). Also, line for line, The X-President is way better written than it deserves or needed to be.