For years, I’ve been bombarded with the message that given my interest in politics, I HAVE TO READ WHAT IT TAKES. Truth be told, I was prepared to be disappointed given all the hype. Turns out this book is just as striking and illuminating as advertised.
Richard Ben Cramer put immense effort into digging into the lives and characters of six contenders for the presidency in 1988, how their experiences led them to conclude they were capable of running for, winning and being the president of the United States, and how all of that fed into the successes or failures of their campaigns. It is simultaneously biography, history, psychological study and sharp commentary on the way politics worked in this country in this time (and to some extent still does still does). It is a day-by-day, blow-by-blow behind-the-scenes look at the defining moments of that election cycle told by the people who lived them with amazing candor to Cramer, buttressed by his penetrating insight into them and the decisions they made. It is truly astonishing how much he got the candidates, their families and the players around them to share with him, to the point where I would be fascinated to know how many of them reacted to the portrayals of them by someone with whom they must have developed a great amount of trust.
Cramer’s ultimate case is that winning a presidential campaign requires a candidate to set aside their essential self and give themselves totally to being who they need to be to win. (This is less about policy positions, to be clear, than it is about character.) We insist they make their entire lives subordinate to us, leaving not all that much room for mistakes… or their humanity. The process rewards the willingness to bend and change and rationalize and deny yourself, and makes it difficult for us to see them clearly. And moreover, it becomes a serious problem as far as selecting the best person for the job goes because as Cramer outlines, they actually govern more or less like the people they’ve been their whole lives. By forcing the candidates to adapt to what we want of them on the campaign trail, we make it difficult to make a realistic assessment about what they’ll be like in the Oval Office.
(And yet, while Cramer clearly highlights some areas like mistakes in personal conduct in which their place in the sum total of people’s lives and personalities and their overall importance are not taken into consideration, it is difficult upon reflection to see how it would be otherwise. In a democracy, and especially in the structure of American democracy, there is always going to be incentive to mold your image into what the people want to win an election, and that’s always going to obscure your real character to the voters. As Richard Gephardt observes: “People in this country look at politicians like physicians… they don’t really know about the gall bladder, so they want to know something about the doctor.” Except that they don’t actually want to know anything about the doctor, they want to know the doctor is who they envision a doctor to be.)
It’s an irrational world Cramer sketches, and one in which the greatest mistake can be assuming that people are going to act rationally. He highlights the often negligible impact public policy questions have on primary campaigns in particular and how much in politics reality is what we believe it is. He further offers a take on how hard it can be to give up on a presidential campaign after coming so close to the brass ring and how that can actually change someone’s fundamental approach to politics and their lives in a way that struck me as particularly interesting in the midst of our current election cycle.
Some of Cramer’s most capturing work here focuses on the role of the press in 1988. He is sharply and specifically critical of some other “definitive campaign histories” for not examining the impact the media; their choices, assumptions and values; and the media environment and the nebulous Washington culture of consultants, wise guys and flacks have on how the campaign is conducted. He fleshes out how their agendas interacted with the candidates and shaped the course of events, painting a brutal portrait of a world where the press (and the consultants and wise guys) develop conventional wisdom, create the necessary conditions for making that conventional wisdom part of their narrative and force any subsequent events that might contradict that conventional wisdom into that framework – often in a way that seems to the candidates not only wrong, but essentially based on personal impressions rather than any sort of reasoned political analysis. This seems particularly important for this particular election cycle, in which the media to his telling forced out both Gary Hart and Joe Biden based on scandals that the voters may not have particularly cared about simply because the press obsession with Hart’s adultery and Biden’s plagiarism scandal would have prevented them from ever getting their messages out. One can’t help but wonder how much different this campaign would have gone conducted in the Twitter era, where Hart, Biden and other candidates would’ve gotten their wish and been able to go “over the press’ heads, directly to the people.”
(Interestingly, Cramer takes himself out of this story, and adopts the position of pure objectivity/omniscient narrator, telling it like it is and unburdened by his own preconceptions, which is a striking choice given his media criticism and given that he frequently writes as though he is inside the mind of his candidates. We mainly get the story of the Hart and Biden scandals from what looks like the perspective of Hart and Biden. We do not get much perspective on whether or not their analysis of what voters really care about is accurate, or any case made for the legitimacy of approaching these scandals as windows onto the character of these two men. After all, Hart and Biden know where these things really fit in the grand scheme of their lives, and neither of them think they’re important.)
One aspect of this race I could not help but notice was not a big part of Cramer’s analysis was the money question. Obviously we are in a very different place as far as campaign finance goes today, and in light of the populist campaign run by Richard Gephardt I did wonder if he would have been more successful with, for instance, the tools Bernie Sanders has available (as well as some of the diminishing power of television advertising). But more broadly, for all of Cramer’s intense focus on who the candidates are and how that shaped the race and in turn how the race shaped them, he does not explicitly explore a conclusion that seemed quite clear to me from my 2016 perspective: while it would have been a different campaign with Biden and Hart in it to the end, the ultimate nominees triumphed in large part not because they became who they needed to be but because they were the best funded and thus the best prepared to succeed as the race moved from individual small states into multiple contests on the same day. He does not ignore this reality, but he does give it short shrift and does not attempt to reconcile it with his broader themes. It’s a gap I would have liked to see filled.
I may be the first person ever to come to this conclusion, but this book, at Infinite Jest length, may actually be too short. As someone who’s pretty far removed in time from and too young to have much memory of the 1988 election, I felt as if Cramer presumed upon a familiarity with the campaign and its twists and turns that I didn’t really have. In particular, he basically wraps up the book well before both parties hit their conventions and consigns Bush v. Dukakis to high points described in the epilogue, and I believe he spent a lot of time with Bush and Dukakis offering causes for implied effects that a political junkie in 1992 would’ve had at the front of their mind but that a reader in 2016 simply doesn’t. Or maybe I just would’ve liked to continue this sort of week-by-week analysis.
If you’re invested in American politics, this is absolutely a must-read. If you’re not, it may be too much of a commitment given its length.
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Top reviews from other countries
dr stanley goldstein
knowledge of 1988 election helpful
Reviewed in Canada on November 20, 2018pregethwr
Like Hunter S Thompson's classic account but without the clearly ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 4, 2016