What It Takes: The Way to the White House

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.

Another reviewer calls this book "ponderous and tedious." At 1051 pages, there's no disputing that it's ponderous. I wondered more than once when I'd see the end and it's hardly a quick or an easy read. Nonetheless, I wouldn't call it tedious; "wordy" is the worst I'd say. But it's informative and entertaining in its own slangy, psycho-analytical style.I have to credit the author with keeping his own politics out of the story. I can't guess how (or even whether) he voted in 1988. And he seems to achieve his goal of showing what it's like to be a candidate for President: what the stresses and strains are for the candidates themselves as they endure the process. At the end, he concludes that the successful candidate must give up any hope of having a private life.Most of the book is focused on the 1988 primary contests between four Democrats (Biden, Dukakis, Gephardt and Hart) and between two Republicans (Dole and Bush - "Bush 1", of course). There's a little, but not very much, description of and comment on the final, inter-party contest between Dukakis and Bush.I'm tempted to say that the book felt gossipy - except that I don't think the author is peddling gossip. I think that's just the way the book reads in places. The book certainly talks a lot *about gossip* and its role in the primary races. But the author's treatment of his subjects is very even-handed, I think. All of the six candidates have mistakes revealed and character quirks exposed. The reader is left to form his own judgment of which combination of mistakes & quirks is the worst - or best. (See some of the other reviews, where such judgments are expressed.)The author covers the six contenders from their early childhoods, focusing on their political development. In effect, he presents six piecemeal, political mini-biographies in addition to describing them during the 1988 race. This is what makes the book so long and, to some, tedious. Had the time frame been limited to just the primary year, this would have been a much shorter book.In his biographies, the author tries to give us some idea of the candidates' motives and thoughts. Naturally, the reader wonders how much veracity there is to biographies that seem to be revealing their subjects' thoughts. The author claims in a foreword that everything he quotes can be attributed and that all quotes were read back to the person quoted for verification. He also claims that he interviewed more than 1000 people and that all scenes in the book come from firsthand sources or from published sources that were verified by participants. So presumably his characterizations are reasonably accurate and weren't disputed by the subjects. This book is a phenomenal piece of research if nothing else.I found the book particularly interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it's been nearly 25 years since the events described, so it's like a Wayback Machine for those interested in politics. But it wasn't like reading old newspaper columns or editorials. It's an entertaining, though long, word picture of the process for each of the six candidates.Second, and more important to me, it was very descriptive of the press' role, behavior, and motives during the primary campaign. My view is that if anyone comes off poorly in this book (and few are spared), it's the reporters and editors. In fact, one reasonable take on this tale might be that it's a Reporter-in-the-Trenches' complaint about how media competition and ambition manages to screw up candidacies and therefore elections.The penchant of reporters to try to "bring down" a candidate is discussed at length in the parts about Gary Hart and Donna Rice. To smaller extents, this penchant affected all of the six candidates. They all had to deal with the press' perceptions of them - seemingly as often as they had to deal with the issues of the day. While I'm all about First Amendment freedoms and I don't like *any* attempt to regulate speech (McCain-Feingold, for one example), I had to agree that the feeding-piranhas result the author describes in the press may not always serve the public very well.Aside from those, one of the things that struck me about this book was the author's slang. Maybe these terms are (or were) current among political reporters but they were news to me. The book is rife with "smart guys" (Issue or Message experts), "wise guys" (reporters who ask smart-ass questions, I think), "diddybops" (TV/radio reporters), "TVs" (television/video crews), "white men" (well-connected political consultants) and "big feet" (well-known print reporters). The most amusing aspect of this usage is that by the end of the book "big feet" had morphed into "triple-E pundits".

Some elements are dated: Gary Hart seems less admirable, the absence of Jesse Jackson is less defendable or explicable (no Jackson, no Obama?), the evils of the media seem less unique and outrageous.But this remains a phenomenal piece of writing about top flight politicians, their lives and their motives. Very long, but very rewarding and rich in detail. Like Hunter S Thompson's classic account but without the clearly made up bits. And with real background research.

A perfect present for my wife who is a "West Wing enthusiast". Thank You, Rob Lowe who was quoted in the Radio Times.

Superb drawing of major political figures. Grips like a thrilller. Beautiful spare prose. Loved it. Recommend to all fans of US poliitics

This was/is an important book in American political science but beware that seven presidential cycles on it is very old news. Not just in terms of who won, but in terms of "what it takes".This book harkens back to a time when CNN was the only news channel going, the public had no access to the Internet (even if Gore claims to have already invented it) and a political landscape with memories of neither Monica Lewinsky nor 9/11. While retail politicking is still alive today in Iowa and New Hampshire, "What it Takes" to win the White House now is a lot more sophisticated than it was in 1988. Try going back in time and explaining the mini-brouhaha in December 2015 about how the Sanders campaign accessed the Clinton campaign's voter files on NGP VAN. You might be able to draw a metaphor about how one side broke into the other side's filing cabinet, but how do you explain that both filing cabinets are, of course kept in the same office? "What do you mean, Nixon and McGovern's people shared the same suite at the Watergate Hotel?"It's a good read, and a seminal read for US political historians, but for the casual observer, retroactively, the title should now be "What it Took".

El contenido del libro podría ser muy interesante, pero la edición con letra tan minúscula hace difícil e incomoda su lectura. No lo recomiendo si tienes mas de 50 años