What it Takes

The next major advancement in the style of narrative reporting on political campaigns was the work of Richard Ben Cramer as he covered a wide range of candidates during the presidential campaigns of 1988. His book,What It Takes: The Way to the White House, portrays the candidates “ … as multidimensional people, rather than ‘personalities’ or stand-ins for various ideologies or policies” (Boynton 2005, 33). Cramer writes in his author’s note: “I wanted to know not about the campaign, but about the campaigners” (Cramer 1993, xiii).

One of the weaknesses that Cramer found in other political reporting was an over- reliance on Washington insiders and unnamed sources. “I found that they didn’t really know these guys. They knew them in a kind of Washington way, but they didn’t know what was driving them onward or what was the real reason that they were climbing to the top of the pyramid,” (Boynton 2005, 33).

In gathering material for the book, Cramer abandoned the campaign trail in the early phase of the campaign season. Instead he began researching hometown connections and past histories of the candidates. “I went to the candidates’ hometowns. I talked to the people they played catch with when they were kids. I went to their high schools, their colleges, their next- door neighbors, and their first employers … by the time I got back to the campaign trail, I wasn’t just the next journalist with a notebook who wanted a ten-minute interview. I was their mama’s friend, or I was the guy their Aunty Sally had called them about. I knew all about their life. I had met the people they were genuinely close to. I had taken the time to steep myself in their world.

And that made them look at me differently” (Boynton 2005, 33).
Cramer describes in another interview what he wanted to do differently with his

characterizations. “The two questions I’m trying to answer about them are these: Number one, what kind of person can be president? How does this guy develop the will, the focus, the energy, the discipline and the faith in himself to say, ‘Yes, I ought to be president’? And number two… what happens to him? Not in the sense of how does he win and how does he lose, but in the sense of what the process does to him” (Williams 1988).

What It Takes is a large tome, with more than 1,000 pages of insightful writing about the men who campaigned be president that year. Cramer covered Vice President George H. W. Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole vying for the Republican nomination, as well as Governor Michael Dukakis, Senator Joe Biden, former Senator Gary Hart and Representative Dick Gephardt on the Democratic side. “I want my books or articles to have the same impact a novel has on a reader: Something happens to the character in the story during when an emotional truth is revealed. That is a goal nonfiction and fiction can share. Both are capable of creating a life- changing experience for the reader,” (Boynton 2005, 35).

Cramer’s in-depth interviews and immersive journalistic techniques paralleled the “hanging around access” that Talese was known for. Cramer cites hanging around with candidates for several days without asking a lot of questions “ … sooner or later, the candidate is going to get so comfortable with my being there that he will lean over to me after one of the interviews and say, ‘Damn, I fucked up that agriculture question again!’ … And at that moment I’ve moved from my side of the desk to his side of the desk” (Boynton 2005, 38).

The narrative techniques Cramer used throughout to build the characterizations, through sensory detail and conversational dialogue, wasn’t well received by critics. New York Times

Columnist Maureen Dowd criticized Cramer’s style:

With a prose style more irritating than entertaining, the author takes Wolfe’s faded New Journalism technique and sends it into fifth gear—VRO-0-0-OM! VRO-0-0- OM!— dousing each page with italics, ellipses, exclamation points, sound effects, dashes, hyphens, capital letters, and cute spellings. It’s never ‘character cops’ when it can be ‘Karacter Kops.’ Bob Dole rarely starts a sentence without an ‘Aghh’ or ‘Gggaahh.’ He even hums with a lot of consonants: ‘Hnnghhhh gnngh hnnnnnnnggh. Dut dug duunnnnnnghh dghndughnnnnnnn! Yut dut dut dunggghhhh. . . .’ He never smells victory when he can smell ‘VICTORYYYY !’(Dowd 1992)

Ronald Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times was also taken aback by the sheer size of the book. He often found Cramer’s own voice mixing with that of the characters in his reporting. Overall, however, Brownstein observed the influence of previous New Journalists in Cramer’s writing.

Cramer has produced a work that should be put under glass: It’s one of a kind, a hopped-up amalgam of Teddy White, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer – day-glo civics. Everything about this book is oversized: its ambition, its scope, its flaws, its energy. Presidential elections are the white whale of American journalism – and in Cramer they have found a manic Melville (Brownstein 1992).

Works cited in this piece: