Thoughts on Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes, and the Lonesome Death of Political Journalism

Just over two years ago, I wrote about What it Takes: The Way to the White House and what it meant to political writing, especially campaign books. I was of the opinion then that it was the high water mark of such books and with its commercial failure, it marked the death of proper political journalism.

If anything, I feel even more strongly than I did on New Year's Day of 2011. Moreover, I think the consequences of it are infinitely worse than I did then. For a democracy to be worthwhile, it has to be informed. Otherwise we're a land of the blind, where the one-eyed man is king.

That's more or less where we already are. Imagine just about any modern politician running fifty years ago, armed with little more than their silly platitudes and absurd talking points. Do you seriously think that any of them would last more than five minutes before they were shamed into committing suicide?

We have access to more information more affordably than at any other time in human history. Virtually anything you want to know is at your fingertips. Yet people manage to know even less than they did just a generation ago. It's remarkable when you think about it. Our grandparents knew more about the basic functioning of their democracy from reading a daily newspaper than we do with literal encyclopedias on our telephones. As literacy rates skyrocket, actual knowledge is declining.

Politics used to be about persuasion; convincing people that disagree with you that your platform is best for society. That hasn't been true in some time. politicians now pander to our predetermined beliefs, which are often breathtakingly ignorant. Political consultants and lobbyists (who are, with shocking regularity, the same people with different titles depending on whether it's an even or odd numbered year) will tell you that this is democracy in its purest form, which is a lie.

Modern communications and microtargeting don't persuade anybody of anything as much as they tend to reinforce existing positions and drive turnout. It's all very scientific, to be sure, but it exists only to play to stupidity. It doesn't educate or elucidate and it isn't supposed to.

The same is increasingly true of journalism, which is now thoroughly targeted to existing biases and only barely pretends otherwise. Why else do Fox News and MSNBC even exist?

Virtually every political campaign book in the last twenty-five years have been little more than opportunities for insiders to badmouth one another and deflect blame from themselves. Expand the tabloid format by 300 pages and that's your book.

What it Takes was very different. It was almost a series of mini-biographies of the major candidates that went into great detail about what shaped them and why. In some cases, Cramer interviewed the candidate's grade school teachers. Yes, the book was a thousand pages long, but you learned more than that consultants are human garbage, which everybody already knew.

I believe that the commercial failure of What It Takes sent a powerful message just as the information revolution was beginning. Detail and depth are the surest way to the remainder bin. Nobody wants to read something that they don't already know or doesn't confirm to what they already believe. Nothing succeeds quite like intellectual laziness and underestimating the intelligence of the audience. Nobody wants to be challenged about anything, especially their system of government.

What It Takes is considered by political journalists to be the most influential book ever written, but that doesn't change the market and it sure as hell doesn't change the attitudes of editors and publishers. And in the end, it doesn't change us.

Prior to 1992, people were complaining that no one was writing books like What It Takes. But Richard Ben Cramer did, and no one bought it. As I noted two years ago, Cramer still owed his publisher $200,000 back from his initial advance and he never wrote about American politics again.

Cramer died Monday evening of complications of lung cancer. He was 62 years old. Of course, every political writer in America has published tributes to his ability and the majesty of What It Takes. But none of them are doing what would be the most fitting tribute to Richard Ben Cramer of all: Doing their jobs the way he did his.

If you want to know how much poorer we are for his loss, you should buy a copy of What It Takes, read it, and imagine how much different things might be if more people wrote and read books like it.

Hitch 62: 1949-2011

Christopher Hitchens died Thursday night and we're all a little worse off for his loss. He was 62 years old.

When I started writing regularly nearly a decade ago, I knew that the exercise would be an exploration of my own outrage and contempt toward virtually everything. That being the case, I chose as models the two writers who best expressed those feelings, Hunter Thompson and Christopher Hitchens, both of whom were very much alive in the spring of 2003.

Of the two, Hitchens was a better writer for longer. Though legendary, Thompson was only truly incandescent between 1970 and 1979. Afterward, he became a truly erratic writer. The genius would pop up from time to time - the best example of which is his 1994 eulogy of Richard Nixon -  but, more often than not, he wrote like a Hunter Thompson impersonator. You could see him trying to top his own past and failing. It was almost tragic to watch, and most likely the reason he ultimately killed himself. Not only was football season over, as his suicide note said, it had been for a good long time.

Hitch was consistently brilliant for decades. If anything, he got better as he got older in ways that Hunter never could. While he never produced anything as immediately classic as "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved", Christopher Hitchens was a better writer than almost anyone else for thirty years.

Where Thompson's written expressions of indignation were rhetorically violent, Hitchens' were outstandingly elegant without being foppish, a curse of most British writers. Thompson's outrage was energizing while Hitchens' was almost narcotic. His turn of phrase was so beautiful that you almost didn't notice the anger that drove it. And that, my friends, is art. Like Hunter Thompson, Christopher Hitchens turned something as terribly pedestrian and dreary as journalism into something literary and beautiful to read for it's own sake. The only other political journalist I can think of that turns cynicism into something akin to poetry the way Hitchens did is George Will.



I've made the proud ignorance of the Republican Party something of a religious text here for nearly four years. I've referenced it over and over again in this space, without knowing that Hitchens said it first on Hardball with Chris Matthews 11 years ago before yesterday. As Rick Perry would say, "Oops."

Here's the full quote;

“[George W. Bush] is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”

As was true of Bobby Kennedy, when Christopher Hitchens hated you, you stayed hated. His best books, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, and The Trial of Henry Kissinger were all moral condemnations of their subjects and all far more eloquent by several degrees than anything else written on the subjects of his scorn.

Even God His own Self wasn't spared the wrath of Hitchen's typewriter. His 2007 book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything posited that most of mankind's evil is sanctioned in our holy books, in one way or another. And the truth of that is almost inescapable. You can argue whether the good religion produces outweighs the evil it condones, but you cannot reasonably argue that said evil isn't textually sanctioned and, in some cases, actually demanded.

I was raised Catholic, so there are few things that I love more than precious (mostly, but not always, liberal) Catholics who feel that feel that the One True Church is "misguided" in believing that things like divorce, homosexuality and abortion are abominations and mortal sins, while maintaining that they are "good Catholics."

If you're one of those folks, you're a hypocritical asshole and should probably suffer any number of biblical fates for several deadly sins, not the least of which being pride.

The Church isn't a grassroots organization like ACORN, for Christsakes. Moreover, it never pretended to be a "bottom-up" democracy. Foundational beliefs like papal infallibility tend to undercut silly notions like that quite nicely.

The Church is their club, not yours, and their rules are law. To suggest that you can "reform" what even you believe is the Word of God - and is actually written in the text of the book - is more than a little presumptuous and definitive proof that you're simply bad at your religion. It is the height of arrogance to suggest that your religion disagrees with you, rather than you with it.

When I was twelve years old, I determined that the beliefs of the Church were dangerous and silly, so I refused confirmation and stopped considering myself a Catholic. As a matter of theological fact, liberal Catholics aren't Catholics, either, I'm just honest enough to say so. The Church was there long before I was born and will continue long after I'm dead. I merely choose not to prticipate in it's extraordinary silliness.

Under no circumstances would I associate myself with anyone running around Africa and telling the locals that AIDS was bad, but condoms were worse, so I quit. But I would never presume to say that Church's position wasn't biblically sanctioned because it is. I just happen to believe that the sanction is moronic and demonstrably lethal to the most vulnerable people on earth. If you believe that "God hates fags", you sure as shit better not have a tattoo while doing so because that just happens to be the next verse in Leviticus.

Essentially, that's what God is Not Great is about. If you wrap yourself in some supernatural, superstitious ceremony, you should also be called to account for the true - and sometimes breathtakingly so  - evil that's done in it's name. If the world was populated with rational adults, rather than overly tall children, that book would not have been as controversial as it was.

The facts are the facts. And the facts are that the Catholic Church didn't renounce the biblical interpretation that the Jews were responsible for the murder of Christ - the basis of 1,000 years of Christian-propagated pogroms - until Vatican II, seventeen years after the Holocaust ended. And, to my way of thinking, that's more than enough reason to renounce Christianity.

Of course, Hitchens wasn't without his own messianic impulses. He was fervent supporter of the idea of regime change, particularly in Iraq. While I was - mistakenly - at the time, as well, Hitchens and I differed on the entire  point of the war. He strongly advocated Bush's disastrously wrong "democracy agenda", which argued that you can maintain Iraq as a cohesive country while enhancing regional stability under the will of the people. It should be pretty clear by now that you can't.

His position was eminently justifiable as an ethical matter. He morally identified with the plight of the Kurds., who are the world's largest minority without their own country. For Hitchens, it was a matter of loyalty to leftist comrades against what he rightly called "a pornographic regime." But he never, to my knowledge, shared their aspirations for a national homeland.

And that's where his case falls apart. There is no reason to believe that the Kurds will ever abandon their desire for a state, but any declaration of independence will result in a catastrophic war with Arab Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey, some of whose territory would be a part of such a state. And unlike Kosovo, there is no international guarantor that can protect such a fledgling nation from immediate destruction.

Having said that, you can't help but admire the passion that Hitchens brought to the issue, particularly when you consider the personal and professional friendships his stance cost him on the political left. He was unwavering in what he believed was right, and that couldn't have been easy.

On the other hand, he did popularize the term "Islamofascism", which I've had a number of things to say about. It is the one instance I can think of where Hitchens carelessly throws words together, contrary to their diametrically opposing meanings. Like "progressive conservative" or "revolutionary conservative", "Islamofascism" is an oxymoron and well beneath the linguistic standards of a titan of the language that Christopher Hitchens was.  Being an Islamofascist is not unlike being a "pro-abortion Catholic", a ridiculous contruct on it's face and not something to be taken seriously.

One can't truly appreciate Christopher Hitchens without exploring the way he conducted the last 18 months of his life. Instead of engaging on a maudlin celebration of his own mortality, Hitchens instead used his esophageal cancer as a point of intellectual exploration, especially in his Vanity Fair column. If you read anything today, it should be "Topic of Cancer" and  his most recent essay "Trial of the Will."

It was on the topic of his own mortal illness that he truly broke through a journalist, and produced some of his most beautiful writing.  There was no sentimentality or self-pity in those columns, particularly "Trial of the Will", published just a week before his death. It was an intellectual and philosophical exploration on what it is to die, written by someone who was in the process of doing just that. "Tuesdays With Morrie" it wasn't.

Christopher Hitchens explored his own death with the same courage and valour that he lived his life. It didn't matter if you agreed with him or not because he was smarter than you are and would argue circles around you. Even when he was wrong, he could make a persuasive case that he right. That isn't normally the job of a journalist, but it is the raison d'etre of a writer.

Hitchens on Bill Clinton



Hitchens on Mother Teresa



Hitchens on the Tea Party



Hitchens on Jesus and the Exodus



Hitchens on 60 Minutes

Hephzibah Anderson's Big Book of Lies

As a general rule, I'm against book burning. For example, I was strongly against that guy with the cool moustache in Florida burning the Koran last weekend. It turns out that Muslims get super-upset when you do that, so I try to avoid it whenever I can. I'll bet that you had no idea that I was so sensitive, did you?
That's not to say that I'm categorically against all book burning, however. Books represent ideas, and all ideas are not equal. In fact, there are some books and ideas that are so idiotic and repulsive that they deserve nothing less than the hottest flames available.

I'm not speaking of Hitler's Mein Kampf or Benito Mussolini's My Rise And Fall, both of which I own. They're ridiculous and unreadable books, but they're also important historical documentations of the evil that men do, and therefore they should be preserved.

No, I'm here to tell you about a truly evil and horrible book. This is a book that can cause you nothing but misery if you read it and live your life according to its awful precepts.

I'm here to tell you about Hephzibah Anderson's Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year Without Sex.

Despicable things have always been committed to paper before and there has never been a shortage of amoral publishers willing to market them. That those ideas would ruin and pollute everything that humanity is supposed to isn't their problem, or so they would have us believe. However, there are some books that are so beyond the pale of pointless bitterness thath they actually become crimes against humanity in and of themselves.

From what I've heard - and my sensibilities are far too delicate to bear reading it myself - Chastened is such a tome. We're at war and I believe that this book is a crime, so where is the U.N when I need them?

Chastened is the grotesque memoir of a woman for whom sex without love wasn't enough. Oh no, she needed to try love without sex. Sure, she might jerk off a motherfucker, or find herself wonderfully fingerbanged, but that was as far as her intellectually empty idea of love went for twelve whole months. Didn't George Orwell write a book full of ideas like this

Oh Lord, is there is a worse fate than that? Is there anything more powerfully ugly or solely designed to question Your Heavenly Existence? Of course there isn't. Chastened is the Crown of Thorns brought upon all of our heads. Until I first heard of this malevolent tome, I didn't believe in the idea of Hell. I do now.

I'm so sickend by the idea that a book like Chastened even exists that I can't show the cover or even a picture of the author, who actually isn't unattractive. Instead, I'll just show pictures of Rosario Dawson. She's what I turn to when I find myself overwhelmed by the hopelessness of the world, mostly because she's everything that any man could ever hope for in a woman. Moreover, nobody with a body like that could ever deprive herself of sex for a year because of some silly sophmore thesis that it would make a man love her more.

Rosario could never betray me mankind like that. But Hephzibah Anderson did. And no one who believes in love should think of her as nothing less than a criminal for her efforts.

I guess that I can't really explain my hatred of Ms. Anderson, her book and everything that both explain without telling my story. It's painful, but it's a confession that I have to make.

You see, I spent the better part of a decade being in love without sex. And I'm here to tell you that there was nothing "enlightening" about it. It was a disgustining and terrifying way to live, and not something that I would wish on any of you.

I was in love with two women during that time. However, I was painfully unable to have sex with either of them. I can tell you all that it would have been the most beautiful and pleasurable experience of either of their lives, but neither of them wanted to have a goddamned thing to do with me. Something about them already having boyfriends comes to mind.

Don't get me wrong, I fucked other women during that period. Just not the ones that I was in love with. Not having sex with the women I loved was painful, but that pain was mitigated by having sex with women who's names I don't remember today. I think it had something to do with the release of endorphins. Oh, and the massive waves of alcohol didn't exactly hurt, either.

After that long, extended and horribly wrong period, love and sex managed to line up nicely. After all, how could it not? I have a blog! And I was sleeping with them within an hour of meeting them for the first time. Sadly, none of them lf them were Rosario Dawson, but some of them were probably better. However, nearly a third of them were married at the time. It was a great decade, indeed!

Then something devious and wrong happened. I met my current girlfriend and had to wait an entire four dates before plowing her like a farmer's field. Worse still, there was nary a blowjob or a surruptious handjob to be had. And I even took her to a movie where a guy shot up a whole bunch of women at an engineering school! And that was one of my most popular posts ever !

How could I have not been the man of her dreams? I was worried because I really liked this girl. A lot! But there was just no fucking to be had for nearly a month. This is something that I hadn't tolerated in nearly a decade, and I was beginning to worry. Was I becoming less of a man. Was I beginning to look like Paul McCartney's mother, just like Paul McCartney?

Thankfuly, I wasn't. We had a holly, jolly Christmas, and we remain together to this day. But I was almost afraid that she was going to turn out to e one of those Hephzibah Anderson bitches that haunted me all the way through my twenties.

I might get anal yet. Stranger things have happened, right?