DISCUSSION: Chapter One Hundred Twenty to Epilogue

From Matt Bai, author and New York Times Magazine correspondent

Hart's "Hell no."

Now and then, it's true, you can get a glimpse of real character in the way a candidate handles defeat in the moment. The most striking example, of course, is probably Richard Nixon's defeat in California in 1962, with the whole "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" riff. (Lesson: never elect a guy who refers to himself in the third person. It hints at psychoses.) In 1988, specifically, I think of Gary Hart's defiant withdrawal speech, which is largely forgotten now but which presaged everything that was to come in American politics. Even in defeat, Hart was clear-eyed and visionary and willful.

I can vividly remember sitting alone with Bill Bradley after his withdrawal in 2000, as he prepared to leave his campaign office for the last time and as the Secret Service detail packed up the car for the last escorted ride home. Bradley seemed almost relieved to me as we talked that day, the burden of public scrutiny and brutal itineraries lifted at last, and I think that probably said a lot about the way he ran for president and why he didn't succeed in beating Al Gore.

The Joy of Pepsi

That said, I'd say you learn a lot more about candidates in the months and years that follow defeat. Think of how John Kerry, whatever his flaws as a candidate, went back to the Senate and worked even harder on leaving some kind of legacy, to the point where he is now on an inside track for the State Department. That took real determination. Contrast it with John McCain, who four years later returned to the Senate feeling embittered and victimized, and who squandered a chance to become a genuine elder statesman and force for cooperation. It makes you wonder what kind of president he might have been, internalizing every slight and holding onto every grudge.

Of the 1988 crowd, Bob Dole is probably the most universally admired (even though he lost the general election in 1996), probably because he handled both defeats with grace and humor and never seemed to personalize it. By remaining constructive and engaged after losing for a second time, Jesse Jackson probably did a lot to dispel the 1960s stereotypes about reactionary black men in America, and in this way, I would credit him with making possible Barack Obama's election 20 years later.

Hart spent most of the next two decades in his Colorado cabin, waiting for someone to bestow redemption; he was entitled to it, but his refusal to seek some kind of public rehabilitation also said something about his considerable pride and obstinance. (That Hart never reentered public office was a deep loss for the country, and the legacy of that scandal is the subject of my next book.)

The Majority Leader, 1991.

Perhaps the most confounding story from 1988 involved Dick Gephardt, who served another 16 years in the House (several of them as minority leader) before running for president and losing again. Then this hero of the populist left started his own lobbying firm and took on clients like the pharmaceutical industry and the Chinese telecom company. He bought a giant house in California's wine country and stopped giving interviews.

What this tells you, perhaps, is that losing politicians often feel they're owed something for their years of service. And who knows, maybe they are.

Discussion

It's actually his fault.

It is the end. The Bobster's "The Other Thing" is gone. Dick Gephardt is weeping in Jesse Jackson's arms like Matt Damon to Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. Hart is drifting, waiting. Joey Biden is working on his house again. Michael Dukakis is on the right and just path. And Poppy Bush does what it takes.

In the last paragraph of a book with many, many paragraphs, Bush says he will do whatever it takes to win reelection. "People wondered . . . why would he say a thing like that?" That's what the previous one thousand forty-six pages were meant to explain.

Bob Dole's "People of Earth" speech is just one of many disasters in the making in this book, only the disasters at the end have a sense of finality -- the latest chapter, closing. Dole's Klingons spent all his money, running the New Hampshire 'Footprints-in-the-Snow' ad in Florida, where they never saw snow. Elizabeth insists Bob's half-hour on WGN broadcast live from the Lincoln Room in Galesburg, and Mike Murphy and Alex Castellanos are scrambling and ready to boost a satellite truck if they have to. The lights go out, the signal is lost, Bob is forced to ad-lib his way through the end. It was wretched, yet they had to do it again, clean, for rebroadcast. That's just how it goes in the campaign. You get your head kicked in, then you get up and say, 'OK, how about we try that again?'

Like how Dick was getting pummeled and his campaign team had given up on him, but he threw it all into the Michigan primary anyway. You get so far into these things, it becomes impossible to stop.

Michael and Estrich

Michael -- famous for his campaign's policy of 'Don't Tell Michael' . . . well, it turned out, he couldn't be told anything. He showed Massachusetts how wrong they were for kicking him out, that by 1982, he was a message machine. He thought he knew all there was to hardball and bridge-building. So when he started to slide in '88, you couldn't tell Michael anything. Lord knows Susan Estrich tried. He would listen to others' advice -- after he'd been proven correct, of course. And no, he didn't need Sasso's help. "Look," Michael told him, "I'm gonna beat this guy. This may be a blowout. You start thinking about the first hundred days. I'll take care of this guy."

Bar and George

On the other side of the coin was George Bush. Reagan was aloof, the polls were slipping and Bush could feel it, the Mercury in retrograde. Atwater went into a panic, wondering if this was his end, how he could avoid embarrassment. Then the three-by-five card to the research director: get him the stuff to beat Dukakis and put it on the card. Then he sold it to Bush . . . Atwater wanted Bush to let him loose. But Bush insisted he would do it himself. And so he trotted out the "vows and threats" he would take all the way to November.

That was who Bush was, as Roger Ailes sussed out in an interview about his near-deadly bombing run in World War II. There were flames on the wing and smoke in his cockpit, but Bush stayed the course. "Why didn't you bail out?" Ailes asked.

Bush didn't pause, didn't think, didn't blink. "I hadn't completed my mission," he said.

People once wondered about George Bush. Thanks to Cramer, we don't have to wonder anymore.

The First Person

The author is present.

In the Epilogue, Richard Ben Cramer puts the readers in his shoes for the longest chapter in the book, as he pans the national locker room to show the fighters, bruised and bloody, after the bout.

Cramer begins the book telling us how the people who became president seemed like no one he ever knew. And by the end, he knows. He looks into Bush's eyes on the bus, as the Beach Boys' Mike Love is telling him about a double-girl rubdown, and Cramer can see that nobody's home. Bush was on autopilot, doing what it took to get through to the end. By election day, friend-to-all Poppy is so thoroughly drained that he's not even Poppy anymore. He's not inviting friends back to jaw; he's going home.

Presidents: they're not like us.

Biden starts taking his time

Cramer pays his respects to the dearly departed. He talks to Hart about his woes, the constant disrespect visited upon him, treated like a professional scandal assessor. Gary is wary toward all, even Cramer, telling him he's got "a Washington answer" to a question.

Dick's already thinking about what's next -- not governor or senator but president. Majority Leader simply falls into his lap, so, he sees something to do, something to get him back to where he needs to be to do it again. Bob Dole, well, he always thought about the future. He gets himself set for the vice presidency (just in case) and keeps moving forward. Joe Biden's got his house, and he's not thinking about '92 or any other time soon. He hadn't lost his motor, it was just running at a slower speed.

And Michael. He's too busy beating up on himself for blowing it. The chapter in which he says he had the campaign in his pocket is the shortest of the book. The epilogue, its longest section, explains all the ways Michael did not have it, nor would he find it again once he got home. The Massachusetts Miracle wasn't so miraculous once the paperwork was sorted. Back on Perry Street, Kitty had lost herself to the campaign and, sadly, drink.

It took Bush some time before he became President, a real president who had busted skulls and gotten his man. Meanwhile, the boys who built his bubble left in bubbles of their own, and the reader can sense that it's all about to pop, even though the book was completed long before the '92 election.

Because the end exudes the folly in it all. Yes, there is the great power that Bush possesses. It's the getting there that matters, the powerlessness over so much in it that reminds us what they had, what they gave and what it took.

Share more quotes and scenes in the comments.

DISCUSSION: Chapters One Hundred Six to One Hundred Twenty

Discussion

Dole and Bush with Nancy Kassebaum

It has come to this. Dole has seen another presidential race lost to disorganization and disarray. Still, Bob thought he could do it. He saw Bush as a bleacher-seater in the sport of politics -- too much of a tennis-talkin' friend-to-all to earn respect. On the other hand, Bush didn't think Bob could keep it together. He thought Dole lacked "family" and "values." And tasteless, too, with no sensibilities about how a man should act with another man. (Gonna need a lil' decency, a lil' respect.)

What Dole failed to realize -- perhaps deluded himself from realizing -- is that Bush didn't need to earn respect the same way he did: he had the money, the organization and the trappings of the vice presidency. While Elizabeth and Al Haig were nearly killed when a coil blew in their plane, Bush was still "flyin' around" on Air Force Two, with a crisp backup jet waiting on the runway . . . just in case. No one would be kicking open a cockpit full of smoke on his campaign team.

But the trappings of the vice presidency also became a trap. Bush had to get out of "the bubble" -- and give the people some of the see-me-feel-me-touch-me. So he ran around, tooling on forklifts, helping guys get their cars out of snowbanks . . .  and Bob Dole watched in despair. These were things he could not do. If only he had been "whole." The loss that kept him devastated and hidden in Bina and Dorian's living room for so much time.

Hunter, Beau, Ashley, Jill and Joe

This book is constantly going into what pursuing the White House takes from these men. In one special instance, it reveals what it gives. Joe Biden miraculously cheated death thanks to the decisive action of his brother Jimmy. Even with nothing to do, Joe Biden was hesitant about making a big deal over a headache and going to the hospital. And if he were on the campaign trail, there would have been no way to get him to go. Had he stayed in the race, Biden would have been in New Hampshire that week. He wouldn't have been close to a good hospital. He would have dropped dead on the trail, an Also-Ran who would have never gotten to run again.

And in a few short sentences, we see what Joe Biden learned from it all, as he says what he fears are his last goodbyes with his kids, his wife, his friends and family. He tells them something he had learned fifteen years earlier, when he lost so much more than a presidential race. He tells them: you'll go on.

Lee and Gary in New Hampshire

Gary Hart finds no way forward for his new ideas, for his "reform" candidacy to which there was no other alternative in the race. In Dukakis' march to the nomination, Hart saw "the same stupid inevitability" of Mondale '84. Dukakis never got more than 35, 40 percent anywhere -- "he had a ceiling, he couldn't win -- why didn't anybody write that?" Simply put, nobody liked Dukakis. As Jesse Jackson whispered to Hart in one of the debates, "I don't like that guy . . . he's mean."

Gephardt's killers warned their candidate that if he put even the daintiest hit on Michael's correctness, Dukakis would never forget or forgive. In Dick's flailing campaign, it would mean forgoing the vice presidency and heading back to the House to raise the money for the debt his campaign had amassed -- $100,000 on Dick and Jane's credit card alone. (What It Takes? American Express.) Gephardt openly laments that if they had told him he would have to raise $10 million to run for president, he wouldn't have done it.

Gary against The World

As for Gary, Hart could speak but he could not be heard. When he tried to rouse a room of South Carolina Democrats, there was a moment when it seemed the crowd had caught on. Yet they were only paying respects to former Governor Terry Sanford, who was there to champion the constantly reinvented Al Gore. When Sanford moved to the head table to raise Gore's right arm with his, Hart sought to join in the celebration, and raised Gore's left arm, but Gore pulled jerked his hand down and away. Gary was not wanted.

Gore was not the only one. The press was shoulder-to-shoulder against Gary Hart's return to politics and policy ideas, succinctly put by the Los Angeles Times: "Sit down, Gary. You have nothing to say. You have no place in public life in this country."

What may be the most telling paragraph in the book, Hart concedes:

I'm in a struggle to the death over who I am. And I feel my opponent is the press, who cannot allow me to define myself--they have a stake in this. They're all on record, and they can't bear to see me reemerge as a serious person in this country, because they went so far out and said such terrible things. They can't allow me to succeed.

He drops out of the race days later.

1988 Like It's 2012

Doesn't apologize

There are always similarities between presidential races. It is an event unto itself in American life. And there are more than most in Chapter One Hundred Sixteen.

George Bush's campaign was geared toward the people he had been working on since his earliest days in Texas. They were all Democrats in the 1940s, when the schools, hospitals and electric lines came. But years of wealth and development in the '50s, and then the social changes in the '60s had turned them Republicans. These were "the got mines" that Joe Biden talked about. As Cramer writes, they now wanted the government to do . . . well, not much . . . save to stand tall for America, God bless her." And that's where Bush's Super Tuesday rhetoric came in: "I'll never apologize for her." Ahem.

Meanwhile Bush was doing six-minute events with six months of advance. While he was starving the political press corps to death, his handlers would find time for local TV "interviews" -- very necessarily in quotes. "It was just the VP and a single blow-dry in matching armchairs -- very intimate -- they could really get to know one another . . . you know, for four minutes and thirty seconds." Ahem.

Week Twelve: "WON'T HE DIE?"

Now reading: Chapters One Hundred Six to One Hundred Twenty (pages 872 to 953).

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

Week Ten: "THE WIMP COVER"

"I smell VICTORYYYY! . . ."

Now reading: Chapters Seventy Nine to Ninety (pages 715 to 789)

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

DISCUSSION: Chapters Sixty Four to Seventy Eight

From Josh Benson, co-editor of Capital

 

Joe Biden needs context. All politicians do, but as the ongoing "chains" controversy indicates, the need in Biden's case is particularly acute.

He talks a lot, and with a supreme confidence in his ability to do so extemporaneously. And contrary to the crazy-uncle caricature of him as vice president, that confidence is usually justified. He's an ambitious speaker, and good on his feet, and he can give a speech, in plain English.

Out of context, it's Biden's moments of rhetorical excess—the ones so outrageously at odds with approved campaign language that they go viral the moment the words are out of his mouth;that define him as a public figure. He becomes the sum of his gaffes.

The re-elect

Never has Biden been as sympathetically, and brilliantly, contextualized as he was in What It Takes. The end of Biden's campaign in 1988, after his most famous blunder ever, is the culmination one of the book's two great tragic narratives (the other being the end of Gary Hart's campaign).

The Biden portions of What It Takes say much about him, and about how presidential campaigns work, that is perfectly relevant today, as the Obama campaign once again finds itself answering viewership-boosting questions about whether they might not swap him out for Hillary Clinton. Biden will never be a boring speaker, or a disciplined one; the first draft of history will always be less kind to him than the ones that are written later, when the author has had time to determine what's important and what isn't.

Discussion

It's the end of the line for Joe Biden, chased out of the race -- "blackmailed" in the press, some would feel -- by accusations of plagiarism in a mysterious "attack tape" and similar misconduct in law school. They were doing what Biden abhorred, labeling him "a cheat." Initially, Joe decides to make a stand, hold a press conference to talk this problem down. And he holds forth, as we see a page-and-a-half of Biden verbatim, totally in his element, explaining who and what he was and is.

And . . . it all gets digested into a three-word headline: "BIDEN ADMITS PLAGIARISM." In hindsight, these were things that could have been manageable were Biden not chairing the hearings to defeat President Reagan's Supreme Court nominee, Robert Bork. That was more important than anything to him -- "twenty years." So Joe had to do the right thing and quell the spectacle around him. Perhaps they were just not that "ruthless," as Jill Biden would put it. Joe seemed to agree: they were not as ruthless as Michael and Kitty Dukakis.

But Joe is surprisingly calm and collected about the whole thing. And because he had gone down so nobly, the press feels bad. All of a sudden, they were full of indignation: who could have done this to Joe Biden? (Never mind that they were sniffing around Jimmy Biden's bankruptcy, and Joe couldn't tell his anxious congressional backers how many other shoes would drop -- it all depended on what the press considered a 'shoe.')

Gephardt finds out what losing feels like

The press settles on Gephardt as the culprit, and they go at him hard. CBS News makes the link -- Gephardt was dirty! Lesley Stahl! Dan Rather! At Dick's throat! Gephardt got in the race thinking he couldn't lose. Even if he didn't win, he was still young and would come away with national exposure. Yet here he was, losing. His campaign an embarrassment, completely stuck in the mud. And now he was being pegged as the guy who did Biden dirty?

"This just shows . . . you can do nothin' wrong . . . and they'll STILL . . . FUCK . . . YOU . . . TO DEATH!" he told a stunned senior staff meeting. Dick's becoming one of the killers, and he likes it. Too bad he has to throw over guys who'd been with him for eighteen years for killer-approved hacks.

Speaking of replacing people, Dukakis is dismayed at having to -- simply having to -- fire John Sasso for making the "attack tape." Everything was going so well for Michael. He was raising money, building stature, talking to world leaders, coming off like a real president. And he was doing it the right way, meeting his lifelong need to be more righteous than humanly possible, to be, as Cramer repeats over and over, "correct."

Sasso, always slightly offstage, where Michael needed him

What Sasso had done was not "correct," and Sasso felt no need to explain why. This was how it was with them -- the "Don't tell Michael" ethos. Out of sight, like Billy Bulger traipsing the balcony of the statehouse past Michael into John's office all those years! What did Michael think he was up to? And now it was a question of loyalty. Well, that wasn't why they were in politics. Michael had been telling friends about the "common weal" thing ever since they got into power. He wouldn't even do the smallest of favors for people. No jobs. No low-number license plates that cost nothing. Michael would have a dinner for them, a small group. But no caterer. That'd be too rich. The governor himself would make turkey tetrazzini for twenty five. So John had to go.

"... this was hate."

And the would-be first ladies shone a lot of light in this section. Jane Gephardt tells Dick that he doesn't know what his killers are up to, that he no longer has control. Kitty Dukakis struggles to console Michael as the "attack tape" is pinned on him. And Jill Biden truly shines here. We see her enter the world of Joe, Beau, Hunter, Val, Jimmy and Mom-Mom. (Two dates, and Joe is ready to settle down!) Jill learns how the Bidens are, and shares in the plans, shares in Joe's dream. And so when it crashes down, she feels it worse than Joe does. As Cramer writes:

"She stared straight ahead at a wall of cameras, the pack . . .  but she met no one's eyes. She hated them. First time in her life . . . but it was true: this was hate. They were destroying what Joe worked for, twenty years. It was just another story for them."

What It Bakes: Turkey tetrazzini for twenty-five

Chef Michael Du-cook-is

In case you are one day elected Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and need to thank your closest supporters while on a budget and suffering from sanctimonious self-delusion, you're going to need to know how to make turkey tetrazzini for twenty five like the Duke.

Ingredients

• 3 (16 ounce) packages uncooked spaghetti
• 1-1/2 cups and 1 tablespoon butter 
• 1-1/2 cups and 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour 
• 9-1/3 cups chicken broth
• 6-1/4 cups milk
• 5-1/4 cups grated Parmesan cheese
• 12-1/2 cups chopped cooked turkey

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease a very, very big baking dish.
2. Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Add spaghetti, and cook for 8 to 10 minutes or until al dente. Drain, and place in the prepared baking dish.
3. Melt butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Stir in flour. Mix in chicken broth and milk. Cook and stir until the mixture comes to a boil. Stir in about 5 1/4 cups Parmesan cheese, and remove from heat.
4. Mix chicken broth mixture and turkey with spaghetti. Top with remaining cheese. Bake for 1 hour 15 minutes in the preheated oven, until surface is lightly browned.

Week Nine: "IT'S HARD TO SMILE"

"What does John think?"

Now reading: Chapters Sixty Four to Seventy Eight  (pages 642 to 714)

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

DISCUSSION: Chapters Fifty to Sixty Three

From James Hohmann, reporter and editor of Politico's "Morning Score"

Lawrence E. Spivak and RNC Chairman Dole, 1972

Strong backstory helps make What It Takes a masterpiece. In chapters fifty to sixty, Richard Ben Cramer shows how Bob Dole came to loathe and resent George H.W. Bush in the two decades before they clashed in the 1988 campaign. This helps us understand why he behaved the way he did that fall.

The product of Russell felt like he earned his position on the national stage. A series of experiences deepened his sense that Bush got it handed to him: Dole had been in the House for the better part of a decade when Bush showed up in the late 1960s and nabs a coveted seat on the Ways and Means Committee because the freshman had family connections. Dole is bothered by Bush’s continued rise even after he lost his 1970 Texas Senate race. (Bob had won his in Kansas against the odds, after all.)

Then Dole gets pushed out as chairman of the Republican National Committee after the 1972 election, and goes to gauge Bush’s interest in the job at Nixon behest. Bush doesn’t reveal during their meeting that he’s already talked with the president. Richard tells us that Dole kept “an unfading memory of Bush’s blank, friendly smile.”

Chuck Grassley at Ames, 1987

The author so ably links these experiences to Dole’s sense that he understood the voters in a way that Bush did not. As Chuck Grassley said at the Ames straw poll, Dole was “one of us.”

“In the Bush-mind,” meanwhile, “Dole was a Beltway Bandito, an inside player, the kind you watch out for…Bush had known Bob Dole for 20 years – and never known him.”  Richard also ties all this to Dole’s continuing insecurity, an important theme which drives the senator to bring Bill Brock on board and replace some of his longtime loyalists.

It’s all part of an ever-present sense of grievance that drives Dole. It’s the little details that make readers understand. He liked his bean-counter at headquarters, an old Kansas friend named Kirk Clinkenbeard, because he had a vision disability, for example.

Four fun pieces of color

• Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills nicknamed Bush “Rubbers” because he introduced a birth control bill soon after winning his House seat
• Dole fell in love with Nixon because he was the only one in Washington who stuck out his left hand to shake.
• Dole gave Washington the CREEP nickname for Nixon’s Committee to Reelect the President.
• Bush allowed Roger Ailes, now the Fox News chief then Bush's image consultant, once chastised Bush after a speech in which he took off his suit coat to reveal his tie and a short-sleeve dress shirt. “Don’t ever wear that shirt again,” he told him after. “You looked  like a fucking CLERK!”

Discussion

After hundreds of pages of Gary Hart, Joe Biden and Dick Gephardt breaking their necks, getting pulled under by their campaigns, George Bush returns in this section... on vacation.

In the harried summer of 1987, George Bush spent twenty-five nights "reck-reating" with Bar and the "grands." The Bush consultants -- "the white men," as Cramer calls them -- were content with him in repose. They didn't need any unforced errors. And indeed, their strategy at that point was all about capitalizing the relationship with his "Big Friend," RR, Ronald Reagan. Bush was a loyal guy who treated Reagan with the deferential respect the presidency deserved -- the deferential respect all presidents deserved.

Bush and his Big Friend

This is a key point of the section: the perks and the pitfalls of serving the President. With his "Big Friend," it meant that Bush could be "flyin' around," as Dole put it in an early chapter, on Air Force 2 free of the usual trappings of travel. It meant Bush didn't have to sweat the way Dole did through the '86 elections. It meant he could run as a junior partner, no matter how much Dole saw himself as Reagan's true partner, the guy the White House called in the Senate when it needed things done.

And then there is the case study of Bush and Richard Nixon. Bush, chairman of the RNC, served with unfailing loyalty in the most troubled years of the Republican Party's existence. And it came at a steep price to his personal integrity. The letters he sent and signed "Very Truly Yours," the speeches he gave and meetings he had, reassuring nervous Republicans that Nixon was unfairly accused, would be exonerated, that he had the President's word.... Well, loyalty had turned George Bush from the respectable U.N. ambassador to the party shill. It was terribly difficult.

Of course, Bush and Dole, from their different stations in birth and life, have wildly varying definitions of 'difficult.' Bush's years at the RNC stole some personal integrity; Bob Dole's years took his personal life.

Brock'n'Dole (Bill Brock and Bob Dole), 1987

Dole wanted to challenge Hugh Scott for Leader in the Senate, and had to build the profile to do it. So his friends in the Nixon administration barely -- just barely -- give him the chairman's job. So Bob takes on the job in full, sleeps in the basement four hours every night before he's back in the car again, misses out on raising his daughter, and eventually sacrifices his marriage to move up in the party. And Nixon barely appreciates it, tossing him out for George Bush after the '72 elections before Dole even got a chance to plead his case.

So Bob needed a Big Guy to match Bush's Big Friend, and found one in former Senator Bill Brock. Brock was surrounded by a bunch of smart guys, so naturally Dole turns over the campaign to them. As the 'Klingons' slowly mow down Dole's Kansas friends-turned-staff, Bob does his best to stomach it, to play in the big leagues. But he has to put his foot down somewhere: when the Klingons can one too many of Bob's farmboys. One might call them the 'little friends.'

Bush edits on the spot, Ames, 1987

And then Bush, fighting the 'wimp' factor, trying to be more like his Big Friend, has a speech at the Iowa Republican straw poll. The idea is "tough Boy Scout." He'd open with substance, saying he served alongside a great president, "And I'm damned proud of it." Well, he looked out at a crowd, couldn't find his people (the white men hadn't organized so well) and all he could see were a bunch of Pat Robertson t-shirt-wearing, no cussing Christians sitting in front of him. And all of a sudden "damned proud" became "very very proud." He finished third that day.

Inside the Chapter: "White Men"

There's a lot about Bush's "white men" in this section, Cramer's term for Bush's consultants. Barbara Bush took great offense to this, as Cramer later said in the C-SPAN "Booknotes" interview:

The February 1992 issue

After I had sent her the pages, she wrote me a note that she had to stop reading it because she found it hurtful. I subsequently heard that what really bothered her was when I started talking about all of Bush's advisers as "the white men in suits." She thought I was trying to make Bush look like some kind of racist when, in fact, it had nothing to do with race. I was talking about class or, better yet, American substitute for class, which is power and money. So I think her unhappiness was based on a misreading, but there you have it. 

The whiff of racism was heightened, no doubt, by the attention the Willie Horton ad gained -- one of the most enduring images of the 1988 election. It may have had something to do with the title of the 1992 excerpt published in Esquire magazine: "George Bush's White Men." But that was simply the name Cramer had for Bush's boys, as Biden had his "gurus," Gephardt his "killers," Dole his Bill Brock-bred "Klingons," and, most importantly, Gary Hart's "white boys." It was an affectation at best, an uncomfortable statement of fact at worst, but not an indictment of Bush and his court as racist.

And as for the whitest of the white boys, Lee Atwater, Cramer portrays him here as a lovable, mumblin' rascal. In the "Booknotes" interview, after Atwater's untimely death, Cramer said he felt he was "a man quite a bit misunderstood" by those who covered him.

Share more quotes and scenes in the comments. 

Week Six: "YOU WANT A MONK FOR PRESIDENT"

Now reading: Chapters Twenty-seven to Thirty-seven (pages 394 to 475)

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

DISCUSSION: Chapters Twenty One to Twenty Six

From The Gospel According To The Fix, by Chris Cillizza

This week was too hectic to solicit a guest post but I did get a chance to pick up Chris Cillizza's new book, The Gospel According To The Fix. It has a chapter on What It Takes in which Cillizza interviews the author to get at what, how and why Cramer did what he did, introducing a new verb: "I wanted to Ben Cramer Ben Cramer."

Cillizza describes how Cramer came to write the book, and the common thread he found among these six men.

The thread? Their mothers. "In every household the dad was some way recessive," he said. "The moms took every bit of ambition and their focus and their will and pumped it into this kid until that little kid was running by the time he left that house."

That singular focus was not just from the candidates' mothers though. Ben Cramer said he was struck by how "their whole world bent around them. . . they were the heavy lumps of iron." That phenomenon also produced another one: the presidential candidates almost always had, in Ben Cramer's words, "a crazy brother." Why? Because the golden child "sucks up every little bit of sunshine," leaving nothing for the siblings."

You've got to buy the book for more of the insights that Cillizza ferrets out, including Cramer's top notch reporting tips. It's great fun, with profiles, forecasting and political trivia. Cillizza can drop in a quote from the 1984 Almanac of American Politics. That's all the reason you need. Here's hoping he does another one in four years.

Discussion

Gary and Oletha Hartpence, 1958

This week we got the background on Gary and Oletha Hartpence (they don't become Gary and Lee Hart until later in the section). Gary was a nerd and she was a queen in their Nazarene world. Lee was the daughter of an important preacher and yet she took an interest in the heady Hart. Nicknamed "Bossy" as a kid, she subsequently played dumb or clueless all the time which let Gary talk and talk and be the sharpest, shiniest tool in the shed. One might find it hard to feel for Gary Hart. He comes across as so arrogant, almost reckless. But we come to like him because of his constant sense of discovery -- especially when the couple heads east to Yale. Everything back home got smaller or, in Cramer writes, "shrank."

And that word capsulizes the experience that all of these men have in running for the presidency. Think about where each them were in 1987: Gephardt, Bush, Biden, Dole, Hart and Dukakis were all in top form. They had had their trials but by that year, they were respectable and in command. Compare that with the 2012 cycle that saw several undistinguished or washed up candidates hold center stage.

Gephardt and Shrum's TelePrompTer from California

The 1988 candidates are the heroes of the book. Some operatives are good, some are bad. Bob Shrum, for one, looks like a jerk finishing Gephardt's announcement speech so late that the candidate doesn't have a chance to work on it. He just has to go. Washington Post reporter Paul Taylor explains that he was covering his ass by not writing about Biden in an admirable way. ("Suppose the ingrate embezzles the orphans' fund next Tuesday. Then who looks like a fool?") And even E.J. Dionne, reporting for The New York Times and depicted well by Cramer, leads his story from Hart's hometown suggesting a Muskie moment: "He nearly cried." Never mind that The Wall Street Journal had called his mother crazy.

This was the problem with the book's critical reception in 1988, as Cillizza's book gets at: the candidates aren't supposed to be the heroes. Most of them end up losers! And besides, they are transitory. Meanwhile the institutional players -- the press and the operatives -- remain the same. And so when What It Takes came out, making the candidates look big and the rest look crushingly petty, of course Washington hated it.

And we're left with the question Hart asks a friend of his mama's, "why would anybody want to run for President of the United States?"

The Duke Tells a Joke

Another fun anecdote from this week was when Michael Dukakis learns how to slow down, look up and land a zinger. For example, this one about Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard seceding from Massachusetts and a nuclear-happy Republican governor from New Hampshire.

Share more quotes and scenes in the comments. 

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 . . ."