An Insightful Look Behind the Political Masks   

What It Takes:
The Way to the White House
By Richard Ben Cramer
Random House

What It Takes:
The Way to the White House
By Richard Ben Cramer
Random House
1,052 pages; $28

First, reel off the obvious jokes. Like the fact that this book took longer to write (six years) than the 1988 presidential primaries it chronicles. Or the old Ambrose Bierce line that the book's front and back covers have a problem — they're too far apart.

This is a long, long, long book, the product of a reporter's nearly self-destructive compulsion, the saga of a campaign most people want to forget. But pick it up and it will rivet you to your seat.

"What It Takes" brims with telling detail, spellbinding scenes and high-ego psychodrama. Its impressionistic weaving of evidence and observation stunningly evokes the organic life-form of modern political theater.

Cramer, who won a Pulitzer Prize as a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, set out to see politics less from inside the press bus than from inside the candidates' heads.

"What I wanted, what I could not find, was an account I could understand of how people like us — with dreams and doubts, great talents and ordinary frailties — get to be people like them," he writes. "I wanted to know not about the campaign, but about the campaigners... What happened to those lives, to their wives, to their families, to the lives they shared? ..What did we do to them, on the way to the White House?"

To pursue this, Cramer ventured into "method journalism," characterized by exhaustive research, an obsessive quest to know so much about each candidate that he virtually became the person he was writing about.

The result is a three-and-a-half-pound, hyperventilated, Tom Wolfian roar, a white-water fury of nerve-rattling ellipses, italics, exclamation points and capitalizations.

Cramer interviewed more than 1,000 people. He spent 300 days on the road in 1988 alone, running up a $160,000 expense account. He haunted the candidates, their hometowns, their war buddies, ex-wives, distant cousins, gradeschool teachers.

Immersed in this tankful of material, Cramer then spins you-are-there scenes. He puts the reader on the Italian battlefield as Bob Dole's arm is ruined, in the hospital as George and Barbara Bush lose their young daughter to leukemia, in the dance hall as a dateless Michael Dukakis spends his senior prom working in the coat-check room, and in the hotel suite where Dick Gephardt and his mother Loreen hold hands watching election returns doom his campaign.

Cramer presents his scenes from the candidates' points of view, going so far as to write in their voices. This produces intensely good reading, but it raises a problem already associated with Bob Woodward's books: the unattributed, omniscient presentation of people's thoughts and words. Cramer explains himself this way: "In every case, thoughts attributed to the characters in this book have been checked with them, or with the people to whom they confided those thoughts." That's a mighty big "or."

Inexcusably, the book has no index. Another gaping hole results from Cramer's inability to gain access to Jesse Jackson's campaign. And Cramer adopts a slightly patronizing tone toward the candidates that suggests over-reliance on self-important staff members as sources.

Despite the somewhat snooty conventional wisdom that voters need more issue-oriented coverage, Cramer's work underscores the centrality of the personal. It is fascinating, even four years later, to set aside briefing papers, sound bites, and gobbledygook campaign promises and get at the human side of the story. Recording intimacies and vulnerabilities that make the candidates people, not icons, the book especially effectively conveys the pressures on family life.

Not all reporters can exhaust their time, health and money pursuing their prey as Cramer did, of course. But, to make political journalism relevant again, the press must find ways to incorporate these human intangibles — yes, the character issues — that are vital to voters' thinking.

On balance, "What It Takes" succeeds triumphantly. It penetrates the public relations armor that now envelops most politicians better than anything I have read. But the ultimate public service of "What It Takes" should be to refocus attention on shattering the press-bus mentality and getting closer to the story — who hides behind those political masks.

Dirty Politics

By Kathleen Hall Jamieson

Oxford University Press

335 pages; $25

A leading political commentator and scholar, Jamieson supplies a tough-minded look at deceptive political advertising. But she moves far beyond simply bewailing the problem.

Jamieson urges journalists to replace what she calls the "strategy storyline" with a "problem-promise-performance approach." The strategy approach, she maintains, makes politics into sport, enticing voters to merely judge who's the best campaigner.

Her method, on the other hand, "relates the performance of the candidates to their promises and sets the solutions the candidate offers against the problems the voter sees as important."

Jamieson reviews the 1988 campaign, particularly the infamous Willie Horton ad, showing through focus groups and other research how fiendishly effective this ugly device really was.

Surprisingly, she finds that many stories designed to counter such ads actually do the opposite; they make the claims stick in readers' and viewers' minds.

But Jamieson proposes remedies for that, too. She suggests the use of visual cues such as tilted off-center presentation of material from ads and on-screen language rebutting ad claims. She also proposes a tactic Bill Clinton has apparently taken to heart: "forewarning" the political audience that "manipulation is on the horizon." We'll see where that leads.

Stepp, a WJR senior editor, teaches at the University of Maryland College of Journalism.