What it takes is a book specifically focusing on the 1988 presidential election and six candidates in it: Bob Dole and George Bush for the Republicans, and Dick Gephardt, Joe Biden, Michael Dukakis, and Gary Hart for the Democrats. It is kind of a weird book to read because the 1988 presidential election seems so insignificant in hindsight. The biggest criticism I have of the book, which Cramer acknowledges early on, is that Cramer doesn't cover Jesse Jackson! That's the guy who got second place to Dukakis! He was the most successful black candidate for president to that point! It's a huge gap in the book. The book is written in a really informal way, almost like a novel, which makes it an easy read. But it would have been much improved if it had more interesting subjects. I found the best chapters to be the ones about Dole, Bush, and Biden. I would criticize the book for its organization, which jumps forwards and backwards through times and switches candidates mid-chapter without telling you. That made it a little difficult to read at parts. That said, this surely has to be the best and most complete book written about the election of '88.
The best early portion of this book focuses on Bob Dole, a man I knew nothing about until I started this book. He is honestly fascinating and all the notes I took early in the book are about him. Bob Dole is today known for being Republican Speaker of the House before Newt Gingrich and having unsuccessfully been the GOP nominee for President in 1996. However, he also ran in 1988 and lost in the primary, so he is included in the book. What I learned about him though was amazing. Dole was a high school athlete when he went to fight in World War Two. He served in the infantry in Italy, and in April 1945, the very end of the war, Dole was seriously injured in action. Doctors put him in a cast from his chin down to his legs, and even crated him for shipment. Doctors thought he was a dead man, and that infection or pneumonia would get him. In addition to the wounds he received in combat, Dole had a kidney full of stones and a 108.7-degree fever. Bob Dole shrank to 122 pounds after having been the biggest, strongest kid from Russell, Kansas. Eventually, the community raised funds to send Bob to Chicago for an operation (and then more operations in the future) that saved his life. But if not for his sheer tenacity and will to live, Dole would have never made it that far. That said, I'll never understand how a man who owes his entire life to people putting bills in a cigar box on a drugstore counter and friends going door-to-door for collections can become a politician who tears down the safety net that Americans depend on for situations exactly like his. I don't get how a man who firsthand experienced a situation where the high cost of healthcare could have cost him his life would pull up the ladder behind him and deny the same opportunities he had to others who need the government to provide for them.
Dole was a very smart guy. People explained it by saying that he had to keep all his notes in his head because he couldn't write. But the bigger explanation was that he had a system where he always had three, four, or seven or more people giving him information at any one time. Knowledge is power, and Dole knew that by having different notetakers at different meetings he would never be dependent on one person and that he could rely on phone calls and conversations with different people so that none of them would see the full picture, but he could. And then he could control the movement of information. He managed his staff, they didn't manage him.
A big focus for Bush in '88 was meeting governors in the years beforehand. Cramer points out that Senators only run every six years, and knew people who would help in campaigns. Governors, on the other hand, had an advantage in their states over the senators because they actually had to work with people in the state day in and day out, while Senators spend a lot of time in DC. This reminded me of how Caro writes in The Years of Lyndon Johnson about the difficulties of running for President as a Senator.
The difference that 34 years makes is really obvious in this book. Our politics feel so different now and the problems of 1988 seem so much smaller than those today. There's all this talk about balanced budgets and welfare reforms that just feel really small in an era where democracy itself is at risk and our global adversaries are gaining power.
I had never heard of Gary Hart before this book, so I was surprised that the Colorado Senator was actually the early favorite in the Democratic primary. However, he wasn't a great campaigner. Despite his two terms in the Senate, he couldn't get many Senators to endorse him. Despite being highly intelligent, most observers saw him as weird instead. He had trouble asking for votes, and was stiff when dealing with reporters in interviews. But that also meant that he was practicing a cleaner form of politics. People didn't vote for him and endorse him because they owed him for some favor, they supported him based on who he was as a person. But his character became the thing that tore him down, when he was spotted bringing a young woman who was not his wife into his house late one weekend night.
Another big theme in the book, especially in the chapters about Hart's downfall, is how important the press pack is. The opinion of the reporters who follow a candidate around can make or break him. In Hart's case, they broke him. He tried denials, but the harassment of his family was just insane, and he ended up dropping out of the race. It didn't look good for him. His big problem was that he didn't deal with the accusations by clearly saying "that's none of your business" and saying no more. Instead, he tried to weasel his way out of it by coloring the truth, but he looked like he was squirming and weak.
A really interesting aspect of the Biden chapters is that his run for president overlapped almost completely with the Bork nomination process, which Biden led as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Biden really saw himself as an underdog, educated at Syracuse Law, fighting against a man from what Joe referred to as the "River of Power," as Bork was an Ivy-Leaguer through and through. So a big question of mine as I finish the book is how did Biden's run affect the Bork nomination? It is hard to think that it wouldn't; Biden was able to use the Bork nomination to get serious news coverage as he managed the entire process and thwarted Ronald Reagan, which Democrats would love. What's crazy to me is that Biden's campaign was ended by a scandal in which he plagiarized a speech from a British politician- but that he had cited that guy in every speech he gave but one. It just happened that the one time he didn't, Biden was being filmed by a Dukakis man who released the tape. It worked well because Biden already had run into plagiarism trouble as a law student (although he was officially exonerated), so it was more believable. I was just amazed by how easy he went down after dealing with something that wouldn't even really register as a scandal today.
I am amazed that Dukakis was the eventual Democratic nominee, as he comes off as a man without a personality. Cramer writes that, "Michael didn't screw around (but liked his wife), never took drugs (but blamed himself for not watching his wife), never got drunk (but would taste wine), never lost himself in fancy for a movie, a book, an idea of any kind ... never overate, overslept, overworked, overpaid, overspent, overreached, overspoke ... never lost control, in any way they could see." Just totally boring. Dukakis would have been a good ascetic. He was just totally morally uncompromising, which is usually pretty good, but Dukakis brought that to a fault I think. Maybe that was the only thing he overdid. He refused to give jobs to anyone on his own campaign! He refused to issue low-number license plates to those who helped him, which was a sort of free status symbol in Massachusetts in those days (this was probably a good thing). And when his wife insisted that they host a dinner to thank his top supporters in the gubernatorial campaign, he cooked dinner himself for twenty-five people and then he cleaned it up! Sort of over-the-top if you ask me. The last thing I'll say about him is that while I appreciate his clear sense of clean politics and morality, he was also an idiot and barely even a Democrat. The man was obsessed with balancing the budget and needlessly promised that he wouldn't raise taxes. So he refused to give cost-of-living raises to state workers, as well as the cost-of-living raise for welfare. He also froze the accounts that purchased services for the mentally and physically disabled as well as the state's poorest residents. He held up thousands of welfare checks and his welfare cuts absolutely attacked the poorest people. So was that moral? To not grant even the smallest favors to his supporters and then to cut the support for the poorest people? At a certain point, you're not a crusader, you're just an asshole. Then, when he inevitably failed to balance the budget using only accounting tricks, he was forced to raise taxes. Even better, when legislators begged him to do it all in one go, Dukakis insisted that they raise taxes twice in one year (great for your PR, right?) because he saw it as two separate issues that needed tax hikes. What a schmuck.
A lot of this book is about the candidates asking themselves what's the point? The book is called What It Takes because it takes complete commitment and willingness to debase oneself to reach the White House. And so many of these guys couldn't put themselves through it because they just didn't have a good reason to be President. Basically every candidate came across as uninterested in the issues except for maybe Dukakis, who was deeply into the issues, but it was unclear why. He was just a pure technocrat who wanted to run government well, but not in any particular direction. Each candidate mainly just believed in himself. There's a whole part where Bush's advisors are encouraging him to give people a clearer idea of what he wanted to do, and Cramer writes, "The fact was, he wanted to be President. He didn't want to be President to do this or that. He'd do ... what was sound." Maybe that's what it takes to be President and keep your sanity when you can't actually get anything done. You just have to like being a big important politician. Cramer goes on, "One time, a reporter kept asking. Bush said: 'Well you know ... doesn't everybody grow up wanting to be President?' Maybe where he grew up."
Cramer focuses in on Bush in the epilogue, specifically on his succumbing to brainless movement in the system and willingness to do whatever it took to become President. Cramer writes that, "In the end, we have only one nonnegotiable demand for a President, the man we hire to watch the world at our backs: that is totality. We may differ on our seven-point plans for child care, the six-hundred-ship Navy, one-man-one-vote for Namibia. But every adult in the country knows instinctively: that job in the White House is brutal, and the bastard who gets it works for us... Gary Hart admitted adultery and asked us to forgive his sin. But unforgivable was his assumption that he was supposed to have any life 'outside.' Whatever he did with that lovely girl, he put his enjoyment ahead of our good opinion, and he was erased from consideration. He would not concede that his life was our chattel."
Miscellaneous Facts:
- There was so much dust in Russell Kansas during the dustbowl that during basketball games they had to sweep the court every ten minutes. People walked along the streets with streetlights on in the middle of the day.
- Dole always held his nearly paralyzed right arm hiked up in front of him, holding a rolled-up paper or a pen in his fist to keep its shape
- This is random but former congressman Jason Chaffetz's dad was married to Kitty Dukakis and Chaffetz's brother was adopted by the Dukakis family.
- It's kind of stunning to read about George Bush's first failed Senate campaign. He was so right-wing that he is unrecognizable. Bush opposed the Civil Rights Act, wanted America out of the UN, and thought we should be open to using nuclear weapons in Vietnam.
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