An Open Book on Life in Politics : Tell-All Novel by Ex-GOP Aide Stirs Publishers’ Interest

He looks far too young to have caused all of this fuss.

Tom Lowe sits up straight in his chair, blond hair curling above brown-gray eyes, a nervous smile on his smooth face. He’s just returned from New York and a meeting with editors at Simon & Schuster about whether they’ll make a bid for his new novel, “Spin,” a naughty tell-all about his whirlwind career in California politics, thinly disguised as fiction.

His Beverly Hills agent is downright gushy about the book, describing it as no less a breakthrough work in capturing the pitfalls of carelessly ambitious youth than Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City.”

The June issue of George magazine predicts it will rival “Primary Colors,” the controversial tale that cast a fictional light on the 1992 Clinton campaign. The London Times wrote of a bidding war likely to erupt for the roman a clef when it goes to auction this week in New York.

“This whole thing seems unreal to me,” says Lowe, 25. “I didn’t have any reservations about writing the book. It’s a work of fiction and I admit it really gets out there at the end. I wanted to capture a part of American political life that people don’t know about and tell a good story.”

The book chronicles the fictional life of Jim Asher, a political neophyte who begins his meteoric career by stepping off a surfboard and into the campaign office of Edward Winston, a phenomenally wealthy businessman running for U.S. Senate. Asher starts as a volunteer but quickly is drawn into the campaign’s inner circle by Winston’s vivacious European wife, Mariella, and his tough-as-nails New York consultant, Bud Raper.

It doesn’t take much deducing to figure out who he’s really talking about: Lowe himself, 1994 Senate candidate Michael Huffington and his wife, Arianna, and GOP consultant Ed Rollins.

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But that’s just the start. The Asher character takes over as speech writer for up-and-coming legislator Kent Peters of Orange County, whom he helps become speaker of the Assembly. He does it by rigging a special election to boost the favored Republican candidate’s chances by getting a second Democrat candidate to stack the winner-take-all ballot.

Sound familiar?

Friends and former colleagues say the structure fits loosely with recent political history. But the more salacious details--the nude massage scene, the steamy hot-tub sex, the booze, back-stabbing and lack of either morals or mission--are things they say Lowe either made up or lived in his brief political life without letting anyone else in on.

“That must have happened just before I came on the campaign,” joked Matt Cunningham, who worked in Huffington’s Orange County office during the 1994 campaign and now works for the 1998 Senate campaign of San Diego businessman Darrell Issa.

“A lot of things in the book happened, they just didn’t happen the way he said they did,” Cunningham said. “Tom is a talented guy when he sets his mind to it. He’s like the mad monk--he gets himself into something and throws himself into it completely. I’m genuinely happy for his success, but I resent the way he’s achieved it, by using others and twisting the truth.”

Lowe is aware that, in two short years, he managed to earn the enmity of some of California’s most influential Republicans. Former Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove) won’t talk to him, and won’t talk about him. Pringle’s deputy chief of staff, Jeff Flint--who appears in the book as Scott Flynn--declined comment on the book. So did Arianna Huffington.

“I can’t help how people are going to react,” Lowe said. “People knew exactly how I was living. They’re acting like it was all right if I was just living my life but if I was the one to write about it, I broke the cardinal rule. I know some people will be mad. Hemingway had someone follow him around Paris with a handgun after ‘The Sun Also Rises’ came out.”

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Actually, Lowe’s life resembles Hemingway’s less than that of a mayfly--an insect that emerges from its egg in a frenzied mission to mate and then dies within 24 hours.

Born on Christmas Day, Lowe graduated at 16 from Canyon High School in Anaheim Hills, joined the Army at 17 and ended up in the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment during Desert Storm--the same unit featured in the film “Courage Under Fire.” After the Persian Gulf War, he came back to Orange County and one day was intrigued by a Huffington television commercial. He volunteered the next day.

That campaign led to Washington, where Rollins arranged a researching job for him at the McLaughlin Group. He lasted a few months there before returning to California, eventually taking a $75,000-a-year speech-writing job with Pringle that he left after six months. An acting career, as an extra in “The Fan” and “Jingle All the Way,” also was brief--all of two weeks.

Political veteran Ken Khachigian of San Clemente described Lowe as a low-level volunteer for the Huffington campaign who seemed eager and bright. It helped that he was an Army veteran and professed a strong allegiance to conservatism.

“Once in a while, you get a wild card, a rogue, and it’s unfortunate when that breach of trust happens,” Khachigian said. “On one hand, you get mad at yourself for having trusted someone who’s really a stranger. But you’re all in the trenches together and fighting for the same end.

“Maybe Tom has a future in movies and screenwriting because he won’t have lunch in this town anymore,” he said. “He’d just be radioactive.”

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This actually is the second time Lowe’s literary efforts have drawn fire. Last year, he rocked the state GOP establishment with a confessional piece in OC Weekly headlined, “I Was a Gigolo for the GOP.”

The title referred to the alleged congratulations that greeted Lowe at the Huffington campaign the morning after his wild limousine ride to Hollywood with an attractive television reporter armed with Huffington’s tickets to a Rolling Stones concert. The reporter, unnamed in the story, was furious at the implication--not about the obvious but because she hadn’t paid for the tickets.

David Lowe, a communications major at National University in San Diego, was at his brother’s side most days during the month it took Lowe to write the first draft of “Spin.” The book was composed over endless 16-ounce tureens of coffee at Aroma Italiano Coffee and Fine Cigars near the Mall of Orange, just around the corner from where Lowe grew up and where his mother still lives. His father lives in Huntington Beach.

“He had a laptop with him and we’d give him free refills,” said Ricardo Bosco, the coffee shop’s owner. “He’d be there for five, six, seven hours at a time.”

David Lowe said his parents know “about half” of what’s in the book--a high-speed junket with little remorse or remediation until it climaxes with Asher’s inevitable comeuppance.

“They know that when he decides to do something, he just does it,” David Lowe said. “Most people get an idea and it’s a daylong thing and they call it quits.”

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Lowe said he has become more sanguine about the current hubbub over the book.

“When I left politics, I didn’t feel good about what I was doing or the people I was working with,” he said. “I couldn’t run for office myself because my lifestyle isn’t consistent with that, to live in a political fishbowl. I just want to grow up, get married, try to live my life and be happy.

“I realize this is all a bit of hype. The next thing after this is to write the screenplay [for ‘Spin’]. I’d really want to write, direct and star in it.”