Mind-reading novelist Christopher Buckley traveled to the future to predict how America would react to Sarah Palin

Stop me if you've heard this one: Against the backdrop of a President with record low approval ratings, a Senator from a Northeastern state with a penchant for blustery speeches and an attractive, wise-cracking, thinly vetted good-ole-girl with questionable experience and some family issues square off for one of the highest governmental positions in the land.

Of course it sounds familiar - it's the plot of Christopher Buckley's latest comic novel, "Supreme Courtship."

Reviews of Buckley's new book were written and/or published before John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate (the book was released the week of the Republican National Convention), so they weren't able to comment on the fairly astonishing similarities between Palin and Pepper Cartwright, "Supreme Courtship's" protagonist, the popular host of a TV-judge series who is recruited by President Vanderdamp as a nominee for the Supreme Court. Senator Dexter Mitchell would like that seat on the Court himself, but, as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is determined to keep any of Vanderdamp's nominees from getting approved.

Mitchell, apparently, was based on Joe Biden, so those similarities are less of a surprise. Of the character, Buckley writes, "He had uttered his first full sentence at the age of fourteen months and hadn't stopped since" and "(C)ampaign advisors had tried without success to get him to give briefer answers, but nothing had stemmed he logorrheic tide, the tsunami of subordinate clauses and parenthetical asides, the inexorable mudslide of anecdotage."

But the mind fairly boggles at the Pepper/Palin parallels. True, Pepper's from Plano, Texas, not Alaska, and she doesn't believe in God, whereas Palin most decidedly does. But her outsized character, and the cynical strategy behind the choice itself, could almost lead one to believe McCain's people had Buckley's book in their war room.

One aide tells Pepper, "You might as well be yourself. That's presumably why the President asked you in the first place. The real America. Ah, the real America. That elusive thing..."

The aide later tells the President, "I don't know why you're always carrying on about the so-called 'wisdom of the American people.' Half the population seems to me to be demented. Belong in cages..."

The media weigh in, approvingly: One editorial writes that the President "finally appears to have done something politically astute - almost certainly by accident." A TV pundit notes, "(A) striking majority of people favor Judge Cartwright's nomination. They like this lady. ... (I)f nothing else, they tell us that we've reached the point - for better or worse - where being a TV personality is a qualification for the Supreme Court."

(Is that a gun strapped to your thigh or are you just happy to see me?)

During her confirmation hearings, Pepper's straight-shooting betrays a pride that she's underqualified for the job for which she's being considered. She says, "I've spent the last couple weeks cramming my locomotive with suggested answers Mr. Hayden Cork and his folks supplied me with. ... They gave me these briefing books. Great big pile of 'em. Looked like a back-to-school sale at Wal-Mart. You'd need a forklift to carry 'em all. Anyway, I memorized all the answers. I warn you, though, Senator. They're pretty darn dull."

As whimsically insightful as Buckley can be about the political process, he's curiously disinterested in bringing that same verisimilitude to his evocation of the TV world. Pepper's show is a prime-time hit, while all judge shows are syndicated afternoon programs, none with an audience remotely large enough to have a character as universally beloved as Pepper. There's a reference to "sweeps week," when in fact sweeps come in month-long increments and no longer carry much weight, anyway. And Buckley misses a great bet at humor in declining to depict cable-news talking heads apoplectically debating the merits of her nomination.

I haven't finished the book yet, but I've read a number of Buckley's other political satires ("Thank You For Smoking," "Little Green Men," "Florence of Arabia") and they all start off with an inspired premise and clever skullduggery and snappy dialogue. But they tend to go soft in the end; Buckley lets his characters wriggle free from their plights too easily. But boy, he sure hit the Zeitgeist square on the nose with this one.