First Among Equals by Archer is an excellent account of the careers of four British politicians seeking to become Prime Minister.
Does it have to be realistic?
Ayn Rand’s ATLAS SHRUGGED
Taylor Caldwell’s CAPTAINS AND THE KINGS
her OOP- THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATES
Edward Mandell House’s PHILIP DRU: ADMINISTRATOR (Forget the Protocols of Zion, THIS was the Conspiracy’s agenda for the 20th century.)
Preferably.
I’m not touching Rand with someone else’s 24.5 foot pole.
Aw, almost all of my favorites have already been mentioned.
*Advise and Consent * is a wonderful look at the clubby U.S. Senate of the late 1950s. A classic of its day, and a time capsule of sorts, as the Senate’s nothing like that now. Haven’t read any of the sequels, but I hear, as Exapno Mapcase said, that they suck.
House of Cards is great, but the TV miniseries is actually far better than the book (and has a different ending, too, permitting the pretty good sequel To Play the King and the so-so The Final Cut). In the series, Ian Richardson is just gripping as the amoral, murderously ambitious PM.
Christopher Buckley’s books are good fun. His White House Mess is about a totally hapless, snakebit administration where everything goes hilariously wrong. My favorite line: “This press statement isn’t just a tissue of lies; it’s an industrial broadloom carpet of lies.”
The Man by Irving Wallace is also pretty damn dated now, and is about the first (by accident) black President of the U.S. I read it in the mid-1970s and remember mostly liking it.
First Among Equals by Jeffrey Archer is just a wonderful, wonderful book. Jeez, I’ve probably read it a half-dozen times. It’s a real page-turner about four British MPs and their rise to power, from the 1960s to the early 1990s… but only one can be PM. Interestingly, the British and American editions have a different man winning in the end (Archer found his friends on each side of the pond were rooting for different candidates).
Who wins in each, you ask? 
In the British edition, it’s Gould, the Labour candidate; in the American edition, it’s Kerslake, the Conservative.
Joshua, Son of None by Nancy Freedman is a fascinating, heartbreaking novel about the cloning of a certain unnamed President assassinated in Dallas; the child is raised in conditions very similar to those of his progenitor and is groomed over decades for the Presidency.
thanks for reminding me of Joshua - I wonder where my copy of it’s gone to? that was a fun read.
It was. I see it came out in 1973, a decade after JFK’s death. There was a battered old copy in the beach house I used to go to, and I re-read it just about every summer. It’s kind of a benign version of the basic plot of The Boys from Brazil. Amazon has some used copies.
Agent of Influence by David Aaron was pretty spot-on. It was one of the last cold war thrillers written before the wall came down, a mildly satirical novel about a KGB colonel’s attempt to buy The Washington Post, from the POV of the Mergers and Acquisitions broker assigned to help him do it. It manages to went its way through every corridor of Washington power.
Also, The Gay Place by Billie Joe Brammer. It’s set in Austin, TX and is a pastiche of th environment that spawned LBJ.
Small correction: Klein was never a Clinton staffer. He covered the Clinton campaign for Newsweek, and those observations formed the source material for Primary Colors.