Richard Ben Cramer is that man. What It Takes: The Way to the White House (1,047 pages. Random House. $29) is a bizarre, belated, often brilliant, defiantly egregious (that’s right, 1,047 pages) work. It is bound to cause a fair amount of controversy among the political and media priesthoods, as it blithely skirts the boundaries of responsibility and good taste (Cramer cites no sources; a long line of victims will, no doubt, claim to have been done wrong). But, even if only semi-journalistic, this is still great fun and–despite the author’s breathless New Journalismo machismo–far more insightful about pols and political tradecraft than the common run of campaign effluvia.
Cramer’s game is to turn upside down the cynical subtext of recent political reporting–that anyone who runs for president is probably so damaged and egomaniacal as to be a threat to the republic. He tries to see the process as the pols do, a near-impossible challenge, since these men tend not to be introspective souls. But they are humans, after a fashion, and Cramer–who spent long hours over the course of six years interviewing the candidates and their families–has done them a service: restoring their humanity and, in the process, a certain balance to our perception of the electoral obsession.
He has chosen to focus on six of the 14 who ran in 1988, which turns out to be several too many. The four Democrats–Joe Biden, Dick Gephardt, Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis–are an unexceptional lot, especially the eventual nominee. “I don’t like that guy … he’s mean,” Jesse Jackson whispers to Gary Hart, regarding Michael Dukakis. Cramer continues: “It was a good word, Hart thought. Mean was the word they used in Ireland for small, ignoble…they used it for cheap, or stingy, narrow…” Hart emerges, rather unconvincingly, a hero (and the reporters who made his “womanizing” an issue are broadbrushed as comic-book villains), but even Dukakis is pardoned in the end: he comes across as a limited man who loves his wife and tomato patch and doesn’t understand that “what it takes” to win is a complete surrender of privacy and humanity.
George Bush may not understand it either, but he seems most willing to “do anything it takes” (as he recently said) to complete his mission. Bush and Bob Dole, Cramer’s two Republicans, are far more compelling than any of the Democrats. They are a remarkable pair–bookends, war heroes, rivals for 20 years, darkness and light. Bush, all sunshine, good humor and a 30,000-name Christmas-card list, is the inevitable winner. But Dole, a hard, dark and unlucky man who can’t quite swallow his anger for the greater good, steals the show. His voice, all barks and grunts, is a harsh, gritty prairie gust; the conflict between Dole’s fierce ambition and his inability to rein in his humanity is titanic, an unlikely–but perfect–memorial to a tawdry campaign.
