cover image Rough Edges: My Unlikely Road from Welfare to Washington

Rough Edges: My Unlikely Road from Welfare to Washington

James E. Rogan. William Morrow & Company, $25.95 (352pp) ISBN 978-0-06-058059-9

Raised by a single mom on welfare and food stamps, the author of this colorful and engaging autobiography dropped out of high school and misspent his youth hanging out with druggie friends and touring the fleshpots of L.A. as a bartender and porn theater bouncer. Perhaps not surprisingly, given his penchant for busting up inappropriate public trysts, he wound up a conservative Republican Congressman prosecuting Bill Clinton's impeachment case. The byproduct of this surprising career trajectory is that rare politician's memoir rife with sentences like""Fleabag...whipped out a switchblade, clicked it open and lunged at me"" and""Joanne placidly complied with this vague request by raising her tank top and thrusting forth her bare breasts."" There is, of course, a political subtext that occasionally surfaces as glib Republican boilerplate. Along with the funny, profane anecdotes about fending off angry biker chicks and selling vacuum cleaners in whorehouses, Rogan slips in parables about the evils of drugs, unions and campus radicals, as well as the social benefits of concealed firearms. In describing his political journey from youthful admirer of Hubert Humphrey to Reaganite conservative, he invokes his street cred as a scion of the working class to justify right-wing policy nostrums on welfare reform and school vouchers. But he mostly keeps the ideology in the background and his outrageous stories and warm, self-deprecating authorial voice up front. Rogan writes like a P.J. O'Rourke with a Capra-esque streak of political optimism, and this hilarious, crowd-pleasing memoir will probably make him a major conservative media celebrity. Photos not seen by PW.