Word: cramers
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...even more surprising when you consider who goes to All-Star Games, especially in conservative San Diego, political birthplace of California's republican governor, Pete Wilson. Tickets to such games are expensive (40 bucks for the cheapest seats this year) and usually obtained by what Richard Ben Cramer, in his new book What It Takes: The Way to the White House, calls the "corporate perks crowd"--white and GOP-friendly...
AUTHOR: RICHARD BEN CRAMER...
...with Richard Ben Cramer's artful reworking of the too-dispiriting- for- words 1988 presidential campaign. He achieves the near impossible by making us care -- and vicariously relive -- the failed and half-forgotten presidential quests of Bob Dole, Dick Gephardt, Joe Biden and Gary Hart. He even mines a few fresh nuggets of insight about the oft-ridiculed campaign styles of George Bush and Michael Dukakis...
...Cramer, once a Pulitzer-Prizewinning foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer, had the chutzpah to attempt the ultimate look-Ma-no- hands high-wire act as he searched for a fresh vantage point from which to look down on presidential politics. Though there are backstage meetings and tense strategic debates, What It Takes is not Theodore White's Making of the President series revisited. For one thing, Cramer views the overpaid and overpraised parade of pollsters and media advisers as a comic chorus to be irreverently dismissed as "wise guys," "Big Guys," "killers" and (his sobriquet for the Bush team...
Both the anger and the human sympathy that animate What It Takes are rooted in this perception. Cramer believes with some justice that the rituals of presidential politics (the sound-bite speeches, the handlers, the mind-numbing travel and the press claque with its self-aggrandizing agenda) end up blinding us to who the candidates actually are and what their life histories represent. "I wanted to know not about the campaign, but about the campaigners," Cramer explains in his introduction. For what fascinates him is "how people like us -- with dreams and doubts, great talents and ordinary frailties...