something about "What It Takes: The Way to the White House," by Richard Ben Cramer

What It Takes is a fascinating look into an American presidential campaign season.

Author Richard Ben Cramer was a journalist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. But What It Takes: The Way to the White House, the document of the 1988 presidential election, is his nadir. Here, we learn how George Bush collects contacts; how Dukakis masters state politics but flies too close to the sun; how Bob Dole tirelessly meets and greets everyone; how Joe Biden morphs into a salesman; how Gary Hart studies, and how his studiousness lifts his political career. Cramer also covers the decline of these political animals--most dramatically, the psychology and the mind-spinning that leads to Biden's plagiarism and Hart's infidelity.
 
Cramer delivers breathless, compelling coverage as he follows the action and tries to get inside the head of each candidate.

My favorite part comes early, when Cramer peers a little deeper into the Bush family operation. When Barbara Bush learns Oliver North, stained by the Iran-Contra scandal, will attend the Christmas party, she cringes. But, to George Bush's mind,

Ollie was a guy he knew, he'd worked with...The point was, that was all politics. Bush couldn't let it change the way he was. They were friends. Shouldn't be shunned...

The funny thing was, everybody heard Bush use that word, "friend," a hundred times a day, but they never could see what it meant to him.

By what extravagance of need and will did a man try to make thirty thousand friends?

By what steely discipline did he strive to keep them--with notes, cards, letters, gifts, invitations, visits, calls, and silent kindnesses, hundreds every week, every one demanding some measure of his energy and attention?

And by what catholicity (or absence) of taste could he think well of every one of them?

He could not.

But they would never know that.

The funny thing was, the friendship depended not on what Bush thought of them, but what they thought of him, or what he wanted them to think. If they thought well of him, then, they were friends.

So what does it take? Whatever it takes.


Note:

• I could only read a bite at a time, and since the book exceeds 1,000 pages, this read took a while.

 

A working class hero is something to be

The Onion has a lot of fun portraying Joe Biden as a free spirit whose working class roots and uncensored attitude clash comically with peoples' concept of groomed, self-preserving politicians. The political right casts him as an idiot, and mainstream media coverage comments on his penchant for "gaffes", but The Onion writers heroize Biden through their satire.

The Onion writers (and, by extension, members of their audience) who love Biden value in him a rebellious streak, his individuality, and his "authenticity" or sincerity, all of which is located in his being uncensored (Biden says what Biden thinks when Biden wants). The justification behind this reverence, however, lies in his being powerful and famous. Ordinarily, The Onion would mock disdainfully a blue collar, working class white who might wash his Trans Am shirtless in the driveway or resort to hitchhiking for transportation. Such a character would be portrayed as too dumb to know which party to vote for or what music to listen to or shows to watch on TV. His wife might even enter their white trash daughter in a child beauty pageant.

Notes:

• Biden, of course, is more competent and astute than one might think after reading about him, and The Onion writers and their audience knows this, which is why the satire works in two ways: it taps into (1) our concept of politicians and (2) our experience with press coverage of Biden.