Week Four: "IT'S A GREAT AMERICAN"

There will be Biden

 
Now reading: Chapters Seventeen to Twenty (pages 240 to 311)

Check back on Sunday for a running discussion. Until then, tweet thoughts and quotes with the hashtag #wit2012.

DISCUSSION: Chapters Ten to Sixteen

From Steve Kornacki, co-host of The Cycle and writer for Salon

The first time I interviewed Michael Dukakis was on the afternoon before Election Day 2000. I was a senior in college and, almost on a lark, had dialed his office number at Northeastern University in Boston, figuring I’d put in a request with his secretary and never hear back. Needless to say, I was startled by the voice that answered my call. “Dukakis here.”

Governor Michael Dukakis, 1986

The interview I proposed would be broadcast to a journalism class of about 20 students and no one else, but he readily agreed. My team and I showed up outside Meserve Hall a few minutes before the appointed hour – just in time to run into the Duke, who was finishing up the two-mile walk from Perry Street to campus. We introduced ourselves and told him what we hoped to achieve with our project (something about inspiring young people to public service, I think) and he replied with an expression straight out of What It Takes: “Terrific.”

My hope had been to get him to engage in some spontaneous personal reflecting on the experience of running for president. If you’ve read Cramer’s book, you probably know how this worked out. Dukakis had long before done his thinking about the 1988 race and had a familiar, thoroughly non-introspective answer ready for everything I asked. He’d give his stock reply, then segue to the present tense, which meant the Bush-Gore race. Occasionally, a student would pop in to ask about course selection or internships, and he’d efficiently oblige. The phone rang every few minutes, and his conversations were brisk and business-like – except one, where his mood suddenly turned affectionate and playful. Kitty, obviously.

Listening as he talked to his wife that day was (and, 12 years and six subsequent interviews with him later, still is) my one glimpse of the other Mike Dukakis – the one who we meet in Chapter 11 chasing his cousin Tiki around with a severed fish’s head. When he hung up with Kitty, he didn’t miss a beat and went right back to talking Bush, Gore and national healthcare. Like Cramer writes, with Dukakis, “there are only two types of people. There is family, and there is everyone else.”

"He lived in the state like a working man lived." Dukakis, riding the T, p. 185. #wit2012
— What It Takes 2012 (@WhatItTakes2012) July 7, 2012

Discussion

I am always intrigued by how Cramer introduces us to candidates. Bush at the Astrodome, Dole schlepping around. Here we meet Michael Dukakis, at ease, being playful and boyish, as Steve writes above. Though we do get a good picture of his stiffness, his dislike for "Sasso-grease" on the wheels of state government, and even his top aide's effort to rebrand him as "Mike" (see the campaign commercial at left) when he preferred "Michael."

Robin Bush

We also meet Gary Hart, brilliant and burning, who doesn't talk much unless he's talking about ideas -- a trick he learned with girls in high school. The reader is shown that he is "Right From The Start" yet also 'Doomed From The Start,' with the photographs of him exiting his townhouse behind an attractive young woman. Even with all his heady interactions with Mikhail "The Soviet Gary Hart" Gorbachev and Henry Kissinger, his womanizing would become the beef of his candidacy.

But the personal does matter. How the candidates coped with adversity in their lives -- and this is one of the more controversial aspects of this book -- provides insight to how they will operate their campaigns. Experiences with three family members are explored in this selection. Hart's son, angry and demurring. Dukakis' brother, the original Duke, bitter and depressed. And Bush's daughter, taken at such an early age.

Word of the Week

diddybop ('didi-bop') - noun

an overly eager member of the news media exiting a campaign plane

Share more quotes and scenes in the comments.

DISCUSSION: Chapters Four to Nine

UPDATE: Guest Post by Jonathan Martin

The first thing I think of when I consider What It Takes is the Dole voice. It's a book full of evocative imagery, but I always hear the Bobster's half-formed sentences whenever somebody mentions the Cramer opus.

And these chapters include one of the classics, best conjured in Norm Macdonald of SNL's impression "Well, agh, kinda don't . . . I mean, politics," Dole says when asked about his hobbies.

One can taste the bean soup, visualize the cloak room and picture the Leader with that crooked grin and closed right fist.

A beaut.

Discussion

So, the Great Power Outage of 2012 has waylaid our first guest post, so let me just kick off this week's conversation.

Last week's reading, the last half of Book One, is the most humanizing stuff about Bush and Dole. Bush skips college to fly in the Pacific, (the nickname: "George Herbert Walker Bush," because he was so "Not Like That"). Then he gets shot down, picked up by the Finback, and we meet Barb. Then there are his Yale, packed G.I. Bill apartment house years.

Bina Dole with her son Bob, 1976.

Some of the best stuff in the entire book, though, is Dole's experience: going to war, in the war, and after the war. The eight cigarette butts stuck in his plaster cast on the train is one of those details that let you know how far the strapping, 6"2, 195 lb. athlete had fallen. When the geezer in Dawson's asks if he wished they'd just finished him off, and he says he wouldn't be alive if he thought like that. I mean, you really get why he ran for president three times. He couldn't be kept down.

Bush and Dole's experiences are incredibly humanizing, the sacrifices they made and the challenges they faced. Yet even they had to prove they could relate to everyday people. As Jonathan writes above, even Dole had to answer for his hobbies.

Top Tweets

"The Ping-Pong table in the front hall in Greenwich...was an explicit rejection of the lives around them." #wit2012
— Michael McMillin (@michaelmcmillin) June 30, 2012

The treatise on knowledge in politics on 112-115 is brilliant and excerptable. #wit2012
— Jesse Towsen (@jtowsen) June 29, 2012

p.87 sounds like the Bush's lives being "Not Like That" was faith without practice.Looking forward to the price of milk. #wit2012
— MC RMoney (@MCRmoney) June 27, 2012

Share more thoughts, quotes and scenes in the comments.

Week Two - "HE TOLD ME WHAT TO WRITE"

Bob Dole, 1942

Now reading: Chapters Four to Nine (pages 80 to 158).

Check back on Sunday for a running discussion. Until then, tweet thoughts and quotes with the hashtag #wit2012.

What It Takes 2012: How It Works

Hello, and thanks to everyone who is participating in What It Takes 2012, kicking off tomorrow, June 18. This is how it works:

1. Start the week's reading on the designated Monday.
2. Tweet quotes, observations and other thoughts with the hashtag '#wit2012'.
3. Stop by this blog on Sunday to discuss the previous week's reading.

And that's it. Pretty simple. To quote the Bobster, "Gottagoo . . ."