How a G.O.P. Senator Quietly Became a Best-Selling Author

Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, has long been known for his zany turns of phrase.

Despite being an Oxford-educated lawyer, his folksy quips, delivered with a lively twang, are so common that he was once the subject of a quiz: Readers were invited to guess whether a given quotation was uttered by him or Foghorn Leghorn, the loudmouthed, Southern-accented Looney Tunes rooster. Mr. Kennedy is perhaps most famous for a political advertisement in which he suggested that critics of law enforcement “call a crackhead” the next time they found themselves in danger.

Now, somewhat improbably, he is one of the best-selling authors in the country.

“How to Test Negative for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will,” may be one of the least buzzy books in Washington. Yet the witticism-laden journey through the absurdities of life at the Capitol has quietly sat atop The New York Times’s top 10 best-seller list for 13 weeks, with three consecutive weeks in the top slot. Mr. Kennedy has sold close to half a million copies.

The senator has excelled beyond much bigger political names. President Trump’s son Don Jr.’s first book, for example, lasted eight weeks on the list, and was accompanied by the dreaded dagger symbol, indicating that bulk purchases of the book — in this case from the Republican National Committee — had boosted its ranking.

Mr. Kennedy has also outpaced the book sales of a long line of senators with White House aspirations who have routinely released staid, policy-heavy tomes to lay the foundation for presidential runs, only to see them flop.

Mr. Kennedy’s book has a decidedly different flavor; it is neither an angry conservative screed (though he has his moments) nor the soaring “Profiles in Courage” written by the former senator and late president with whom he shares a name. Now in his second term in the Senate, Mr. Kennedy happily presents himself as Virgil in a Washington-style inferno, guiding readers through the Capitol’s nine circles of quirks and dysfunction.

“This is not a place,” Mr. Kennedy observes of Congress, “where you’re supposed to say the quiet part out loud.”

The success of the book appears to be driven in part by the reputation Mr. Kennedy has cultivated outside of Washington in clips of Senate hearings and Fox News appearances that go viral for his blistering, zinging quotes. “How to Test Negative for Stupid,” much of which Mr. Kennedy dictated using a hand-held recorder at his kitchen table in Louisiana, reads in that same voice.

“I’ve written law books before, and I’ve written a bunch of law review articles, but in terms of writing a book-book, this is a new experience,” Mr. Kennedy said in a brief interview. “I had no idea what people would think about it.”

“Some people are going to like the book,” he said. “Some people are going to not like the book. I concede that some of the stories are bizarre; some of the stories may make you want to day drink; but all of the stories are true.”

His goal, he said, “was to try to show people what Washington and the Senate and, to some extent, Louisiana politics is really like from the inside.”

On that front, he succeeds. Mr. Kennedy walks the reader through what he describes as the vast weirdness of the Senate: the arcane legislative procedure, rules prescribing that water and milk are the only beverages allowed on the Senate floor; meticulously litigated “time agreements” that lay out who can speak when and for how long on each bill; and senators delivering impassioned speeches to an empty chamber for the benefit of the C-SPAN cameras.

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He dishes up vivid descriptors of his colleagues, recalling the times he witnessed Republican senators trade profane insults during stately luncheons. He saves his most evocative description for Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, whom he writes is “experienced, whip-smart, and can talk intelligently on just about anything.”

“If you want to stump Lindsey, just ask him to name a country he wouldn’t bomb,” Mr. Kennedy writes, adding later that the South Carolina senator is also unpredictable. “Invite him to dinner, and you don’t know if he’ll sit down for an intelligent conversation or get drunk and vomit in the fish tank. But that’s why I like him.”

There is no shortage of choice words for Democrats. He derides the staff of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., saying that he surrounded himself with as “tofu-eating wokerati,” whom he describes variously as “bizarre,” “one-dimensional” and “moral snobs.”

Other members of his party — in particular President Trump — get noticeably gentler treatment, though Mr. Kennedy allows some peeks behind the curtain.

“Trump can be cruel, sometimes he is wrong, and he and I are unalike in many ways,” Mr. Kennedy writes. “I’ve acknowledged that. But we are alike in our appreciation of candor.”

One example, he writes, came during the peak of the Department of Government Efficiency’s power in Washington. Mr. Kennedy recalled speaking with Mr. Trump about Elon Musk, the agency’s founder.

“Isn’t Elon something?” Mr. Trump asked him. “You know he’s on the cusp. You know what I mean by that, don’t you, Kennedy?”

In case he did not, Mr. Trump shared a story about how he was once speaking at a campaign event and turned around to find Mr. Musk doing jumping jacks behind him. “I had to tell him to cut it out,” Mr. Kennedy says the president recounted.

In another, Mr. Kennedy cites an instance when he broke with Mr. Trump over the passage of the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill championed by the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. When Mr. Trump got wind of the fact that the senator planned to appear on a Sunday morning news program to criticize it, he called Mr. Kennedy and asked him to change his position.

When Mr. Kennedy declined, Mr. Trump replied: “Fair enough, but I want you to do me a favor: Don’t go on that Sunday news program.”

Mr. Kennedy said he was “taken aback” by the request, but felt that nothing he would or wouldn’t say on television “would matter that much.”

“His request was fair and it was important to him,” he wrote. “He never threatened me. He just asked. So I complied.” Later, when Mr. Kennedy asked Mr. Trump to increase funding for a critical levee in his state, the president quickly agreed, overruling his own budget director.

“People who say that Trump is hard to work with have had experiences that are a lot different from mine,” Mr. Kennedy wrote.

Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.

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