Richard Ben Cramer brought us that knowledge and understanding with “What it Takes” and even though he’s now gone, students of politics years from now will benefit from his insight just as much as so many already have. And to know and understand them–to really know and understand them–is to know and understand presidential campaign politics in a whole new way. It’s about six people who happened to run in one race. It’s not really about one presidential race. That’s what makes “What it Takes” a classic. He also wanted to see how someone like that would be changed by the ever-more absurd demands of media age presidential politicking. He wanted to know what kind of life journey could lead a person to say: I want to run for president. He devoted his life to learning their lives, the people, the experiences, the failures that shaped them as kids, students, soldiers, and politicians. His next book, Joe DiMaggio: The Heros Life, was a New York Times bestseller in 2000. Bush, Bob Dole, Joe Biden, Michael Dukakis, Gary Hart and Dick Gephardt–and convince them to give him total access to their worlds. His work as a political reporter culminated in What It Takes: The Way to the White House, an account of the 1988 presidential election that is considered one of the seminal journalistic studies of presidential electoral politics. What Cramer did was pick six candidates who ran that year–George H.W. Come to think of it, some of the candidates who ran are barely even mentioned in the book -and a lot of it isn’t even set in 1988.
If you read it, you won’t learn a ton about what the major issues were, where the candidates stood on them, and where precisely each fit on the ideological spectrum. It’s a little about the 1988 campaign, but not really. It was a rebuke, too, of what this smugness had done to the public - turning them into cynics.Actually, calling “What it Takes” a campaign book kind of misses the point. I do know.] Indeed, the entire book was an implicit rebuke of the kind of cold smugness that had infected so much of political journalism and had denied that politicians were human beings. He called them “Karacter Kops” and “Big Feet,” among other things. He clearly resented how much they resented the people they had to cover. There was, understandably, one group to whom Cramer could not extend his sympathy: the political press. His description of Biden’s intrepid survival after the death of his wife and infant daughter in a car accident reaches a poetic poignancy. Cramer’s accounts of Dole’s recovery from his wounds in World War II or Bush’s Texas oil days are the sort of thing that cynical journalists may despise and view as selling out.
Cramer thought of politics and, more, politicians novelistically. But what many political reporters really lack are the talent and the intention.
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