Gothic Man

Shelton Stiles is not your average roofer. He weaves himself deeply into the lives of his customers, asking them what single small improvement in their immediate environment – street, neighborhood, village – would make them happier. He then devotes his full energies to getting these things for them, thus creating unshakeable bonds with them. Seeing that bonds of this type can transform politics, he persuades a few politicians to leave their desks, abandon policy debates, ideologies, and programmatic solutions, and join him in this prosaic task of asking and providing. The simple idea catches fire across the nation, ultimately leading to the somewhat rebellious idea among voters that their happiness would increase if somehow a president who adopted this mode of governing could be elected.

This is of course dismissed by the more hidebound political leaders who figure such an idea is tantamount to government by idiots, until they discover that millions of these idiots actually want to “write in” a presidential candidate that’s not on the ballot (read: hasn’t paid his dues). The people build a movement to “write in” Stiles, whom the power brokers fear will win as the rabble’s favorite. The power brokers figure the best way to kill the movement is to destroy Stiles’s character, which they do with apparently well-substantiated claims that he has for years laundered money for drug cartels in his home state of Florida. Stiles has to not only disprove the accusations, but prove to Americans that the rabble, in making their choice, are not quite the idiots they were feared to be.