The Decline, Fall and Rise of a Great Book

You might have noticed that I have a strange relationship with politics. While I've loved it since childhood, I've come to truly despise what it's become. Instead of being a contest of issues and philosophies, it is now a celebration of not just the stupid, but the awesomely stupid. Mongrel consultants and shitheel spin doctors have been elevated to a position of societal respect that they never deserved and we're all worse off for it.

If there's any theme to this dumb blog at all, it's that you're being lied to and fucked with by the political class and the news media, and have been for thirty years. The public's almost majestic ignorance is being used against us, almost judo-like, by flabby and soulless mediocrities. Things that aren't important receive marquee treatment and the things that are aren't discussed with any seriousness, if at all. I had hoped that the blogosphere would change that, if only a little, but it turned out that I was spectacularly wrong.

Writing about the decline and fall of our public discourse requires that I read a truly jaw-dropping number of political books, most of which suck beyond words. I would imagine that it's incredibly difficult to write and interesting book about political campaigns without substance, but that's hardly an excuse. Pulling facts from these books often makes me feel like Olivier in Marathon Man. One of the reasons that I loved John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's Game Change so much is that it was a perfect reflection of the 2008 campaign, superficial and annoyingly gossipy. Having said that, Game Change is at least well-written, which can't be said of most political books.

Only in our current culture could a vapid nobody like Sarah Palin rail against the "lamestream media" while signing multi-million dollar contracts with two huge media companies without anyone calling her on it. This, friends, is where we are. This is what we've become. We're all Sarah Palin now. And you know what? I'm not all that interested in changing that because it entertains me and feeds my fatalism.

For twenty years now, I've been saying that the 1988 presidential campaign is the high water mark of useless, meaningless campaigns. It was and remains the definitive Seinfeld campaign: About nothing, at least nothing that mattered. The main issues that year were the death penalty and the fucking Pledge of Allegiance, which are hardly issues at all.

No one seemed to notice that the party that calls for local control of virtually everything demanded a federal say in what schoolchildren begin their day reciting. And because the federal American code has as many death-qualifying crimes as do the Stalinist Chinese, you could be forgiven for thinking that the federal death penalty is a huge issue. Sure, you'd be overlooking the fact that the U.S has executed exactly one federal prisoner since Jack Kennedy was president, but I can at least see why you would.

Richard Ben Cramer crystallized what politics was becoming in his majestic book, What It Takes: The Way to the White House. What It Takes is easily the most magnificent campaign book that I've ever read and people should be required to read it before they even try talking about politics, and especially campaigns.

Mr. Cramer's central thesis is that presidential campaigns are little more than endurance contests. If you could survive a year on the road saying and doing incredibly empty shit without looking like an abject moron, your chances of living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are pretty good. Because politicians are mostly people, Cramer posits that they go about running that marathon in the easiest way possible, which is to say without thinking very hard or much. And they avoid at all costs provoking any kind of thinking in the voters whose asses they unashamedly kiss for a year. What It Takes isn't a book that you should read to understand modern politics, it's a necessary book to read, maybe more than any other.

But, as Politico pointed out on Thursday, I was pretty much the only person who bought it when it came out. And I only bought it in paperback. The book died a heartbreaking commercial death back then. The experience was so humiliating that Richard Ben Cramer hasn't written a word about politics since, preferring to flagellate himself by writing about fucking baseball. In fact, he still owes Random House $200,000 from his advance in the late eighties.

What It Takes was excoriated, both critically and commercially, for its size and depth. And, to be fair, at over 1,000 pages, it is daunting and exhaustive. Within the book there are biographies of minor candidates like Dick Gephardt that run dozens and dozens of pages. The swinish Washington press corps, which almost exclusively reviewed the book, destroyed it on that basis, likely because What it Takes exposed their own laziness, both physical and intellectual.

Not only were journalists jealous of the sheer energy it must've taken to write a book like this, which actually put Cramer in the hospital toward the end of the '88 primaries, it's beautifully written. If anything, What It Takes is almost novelistically written; the long biographical sections are so much like character studies that you don't really notice their length.

It's almost as if Richard Ben Cramer knew the great secret of presidential politics: That no one runs just once. Of the candidates lengthily profiled in What It Takes, several went on to become more than a little important. Bob Dole won the 1996 Republican nomination. Dick Gephardt, as House minority leader, was an early frontrunner in 2004. And Joe Biden - who learned how the public perceived him from What It Takes - was elected the 47th vice president of the United States after seeking the presidential nomination in 2008.

If nothing else, that's what makes What It Takes such an important book. Yes, Biden and Gephardt were pretty much anonymous in 1988, but they went on to become what Biden would call Big Fucking Deals. And almost everything that the public knew about them subsequently came from, in one way or another, Cramer's book.

That, in the end is why the book is so important and revered among political junkies today. There wasn't a book like What It Takes before, and there sure as hell hasn't been one since. Most people think of Theodore H. White's The Making Of The President 1960 as the gold standard of campaign books. But White's book is little more than a love letter to John Kennedy. However, you don't learn much about Kennedy at all from The Making Of The President, particularly his dark side.

What It Takes is different. It is exhaustive of the failures and agonies of the candidates, Bob Dole's war wounds and the loss of Joe Biden's wife and daughter - stories not widely known in 1988 - stand out. And that's what political books should do. They should tell you what kind of people those who presume to lead us actually are. If we knew that JFK had been on death's door for fifteen years and was hard wired on steroids and amphetamine, he might not have been elected at all, sparing us the near-Holocaust of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

What It Takes underscores the fundamental change of American democracy over the last fifty years, the triumph of process over substance. The campaign now means more than the candidate does, which means that Americans will only ever wind up with a consequential president like Abraham Lincoln or Harry Truman by accident. Neither would ever be elected in this climate because they're both too bookish and interesting. Unless you're a fucking pretend hillbilly or Erkel, you're fucked in American politics these days.

If more people read What It Takes when it came out - and actually learned something from it - America might not be where it is. Yes, it's a formidable, weighty tome, but that's what makes it so important. It's also so well-written for a political book that you quickly forget how long it is. If you want a better endorsement than mine, know that celebrated the big-titted redheaded halfwit, Maureen Dowd hated it when it came out. Game Change author Mark Haperin reveres the book, but learned all the wrong lessons for it, preferring to write a bestseller than a truly important book.

I was thrilled and pleased to learn when I was researching this post that What It Takes is still in print. But it would be so much cooler if you bought it from the link below. It might eventually get me free books, which will allow me to continue writing this long-winded nonsense for you.