Matt Bai: Why no one has produced a great campaign book since Richard Ben Cramer's
I remember exactly where I was sitting when I started reading “What It Takes,” Richard Ben Cramer’s 1,000-page, tiny-print history of the 1988 presidential campaign. It’s not a hard thing to remember, because I couldn’t sit anywhere else: I had mangled my knee in a touch football game, and all I could do was sit on the couch with my leg strapped into a motion machine. Like a lot of young journalism school graduates then and now, I had come to see political journalism as a lesser form of the craft, populated mostly by the effete and the unindustrious, while the real reporters were out there braving crack corners and foreign wars. “What It Takes” showed me something else entirely.
From the first unforgettable pages, when he described in minute detail the logistics needed to move George Bush, who was then vice president, out of his field box at a Texas Rangers game (accompanied by his hotheaded and ambitious son, George W.), Cramer told his obsessively reported campaign story not just from the inside, but from inside the heads of a half-dozen painfully human and complex candidates: Bush, Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis, Richard Gephardt, Gary Hart and Joseph Biden. “What It Takes” was the ultimate campaign book. And now, 20 years after Cramer rode the bus, and as a lot of us head back to Iowa to cover another campaign, I’ve found myself wondering why no one else has come close to equaling it.
At the time it was published, “What It Takes” was just the latest entry in a series of increasingly postmodern dispatches from the front lines of electoral politics. The recognized father of the genre was Theodore White, the journalist whose “Making of the President” series took a generation of readers inside the machinery of a modern presidential campaign. Joe McGinniss, in “The Selling of the President 1968,” exposed the emergence of an industry of political TV pitchmen. (McGinniss, then an unassuming young reporter, simply asked these Madison Avenue guys if he could hang around while they figured out how to package and distribute Richard Nixon like so many cans of tomato paste, and they said sure, why not.) In 1973, the journalist Timothy Crouse turned the lens on his own kind in “The Boys on the Bus,” and Hunter S. Thompson weighed in with “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72,” a howl of disdain for Nixonian politics that showcased Thompson’s manic, hilarious voice.
Cramer, a newspaper journalist turned magazine writer who was just 36 when he started working on “What It Takes,” didn’t think much of White’s seminal work. It had led, he told me in a recent conversation, to an unhealthy focus on process rather than the true natures of the candidates. So Cramer began researching detailed psychological profiles of the contenders, visiting their families, their college roommates, even their first-grade teachers, if he could find them. After more than a year of this, the candidates themselves began gradually letting him hang around. Cramer captured the way they moved, the way they spoke (“Hey, Bob Dohhhll!”), the personal tragedies that often drove them (Bush’s loss of a daughter to leukemia, the death of Biden’s wife and young daughter in a car crash), the wounded way they saw the world. “When a clever, vicious line occurred to him now, he’d swallow it, or maybe say it in the car, where it couldn’t come back to haunt him,” Cramer wrote of Dole. “But no one was going to convince Bob Dole he should turn the other cheek, when they were kicking him in the face.” There were unforgettably vivid moments: the young pilot Bush splashing frantically in the waves near the wreckage of his World War II plane, the enigmatic Hart struggling awkwardly to win the acceptance of his only son, who recoiled from political life. Over the years, I’ve had the chance to talk with dozens of people who worked on those campaigns and contributed to the book. Remarkably, I have never heard a single complaint about its accuracy....
Read entire article at NYT
From the first unforgettable pages, when he described in minute detail the logistics needed to move George Bush, who was then vice president, out of his field box at a Texas Rangers game (accompanied by his hotheaded and ambitious son, George W.), Cramer told his obsessively reported campaign story not just from the inside, but from inside the heads of a half-dozen painfully human and complex candidates: Bush, Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis, Richard Gephardt, Gary Hart and Joseph Biden. “What It Takes” was the ultimate campaign book. And now, 20 years after Cramer rode the bus, and as a lot of us head back to Iowa to cover another campaign, I’ve found myself wondering why no one else has come close to equaling it.
At the time it was published, “What It Takes” was just the latest entry in a series of increasingly postmodern dispatches from the front lines of electoral politics. The recognized father of the genre was Theodore White, the journalist whose “Making of the President” series took a generation of readers inside the machinery of a modern presidential campaign. Joe McGinniss, in “The Selling of the President 1968,” exposed the emergence of an industry of political TV pitchmen. (McGinniss, then an unassuming young reporter, simply asked these Madison Avenue guys if he could hang around while they figured out how to package and distribute Richard Nixon like so many cans of tomato paste, and they said sure, why not.) In 1973, the journalist Timothy Crouse turned the lens on his own kind in “The Boys on the Bus,” and Hunter S. Thompson weighed in with “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72,” a howl of disdain for Nixonian politics that showcased Thompson’s manic, hilarious voice.
Cramer, a newspaper journalist turned magazine writer who was just 36 when he started working on “What It Takes,” didn’t think much of White’s seminal work. It had led, he told me in a recent conversation, to an unhealthy focus on process rather than the true natures of the candidates. So Cramer began researching detailed psychological profiles of the contenders, visiting their families, their college roommates, even their first-grade teachers, if he could find them. After more than a year of this, the candidates themselves began gradually letting him hang around. Cramer captured the way they moved, the way they spoke (“Hey, Bob Dohhhll!”), the personal tragedies that often drove them (Bush’s loss of a daughter to leukemia, the death of Biden’s wife and young daughter in a car crash), the wounded way they saw the world. “When a clever, vicious line occurred to him now, he’d swallow it, or maybe say it in the car, where it couldn’t come back to haunt him,” Cramer wrote of Dole. “But no one was going to convince Bob Dole he should turn the other cheek, when they were kicking him in the face.” There were unforgettably vivid moments: the young pilot Bush splashing frantically in the waves near the wreckage of his World War II plane, the enigmatic Hart struggling awkwardly to win the acceptance of his only son, who recoiled from political life. Over the years, I’ve had the chance to talk with dozens of people who worked on those campaigns and contributed to the book. Remarkably, I have never heard a single complaint about its accuracy....