Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 29, 1993 TAG: 9308290290
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by PRESTON BRYANT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Someone once said that to run for president one must be willing to go out into his town's busiest intersection at high noon, take off all his clothes and take a bath.
And anyone who has run for president in the modern political age, or even paid attention to a political campaign in the modern age, knows that to be the truth. It takes guts to run for president.
In "What It Takes," Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer reveals in compelling prose six salient political psycho-dramas from the 1988 presidential race, starring Republicans George Bush and Bob Dole, and Democrats Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt, Joe Biden and Michael Dukakis.
Cramer isn't big on charts, graphs or statistics, and he doesn't offer rehashed accounts of strategy meetings or mere excerpts from speeches. He strips the emperors of their clothes and exposes them for what they are _ human beings who have calculated the risks of public life and, despite them, gone on to endure as many agonies and defeats as thrills and victories.
Cramer doesn't confine these times to campaign months. His coverage and analysis is much broader than that. He juxtaposes, for example, vignettes of a younger, angrier Dole fighting to overcome crippling war injuries to an older, still angry Dole trying to rehabilitate a faltering campaign. He shows in another snippet how Biden's presidential bid is thrown off track by accusations of law school plagiarism and in yet another, how the senate judiciary committee chairman is derailing a supreme court nominee.
And to show how politicians who don't learn from history are destined to repeat it, Cramer spotlights Hart, the stellar young philosophy student who many knew would be something other than an academic. When Hart was accused of drinking during his `56 campaign for student body president at his small mid- western Nazarene college, it was difficult to defend himself and he lost. And when he was accused of something else in the `88 nomination battle, it was even tougher to defend himself and he bowed out.
The paradox that rings truest throughout "What It Takes" is that politicians, while undoubtedly unique among the governed, are really no different than the governed. Gephardt's weeping on Jesse Jackson's
shoulder after the Wisconsin primary proved the congressman's bid unreachable reduces him to a near touchable level. The same happens when the ever-present public chill of Dukakis privately warms in the face of his wife's admitted alcoholism. And as for Bush, the eventual taker-of-all in the national battle royal, over the next four years he would put Willie Horton behind him and become the golfer-grandad everyone would want to have next door.
In "What It Takes," Cramer removes the robes and crowns Americans tend to put on presidential contenders and redresses them in everyday clothes. He presents them as ordinary people who take on superhuman challenges and who discover along the way that there is more to politics than just politics.
\ Preston Bryant is an aide to De. Vance Wilkins, R-Amherst.
by CNB