Review by Booklist Review
Competence? Ideology? Foursquare moral rectitude? No, it takes an epiphany, as Cramer has discovered in this zany, inventive remolding of the usually stultifying campaign epic. When candidates Dole, Bush, Dukakis, Gephardt, Biden, and Hart jumped from thinking, "I ought to be president," and realized, "I could be president," the big dogs started running--the big dogs being the media mutts and their lapdog pundit-gurus. Wickedly, fluently satirical, Cramer is practically a U.S. Mint of verbal coinage: Mike Dukakis, master mechanic of government, with his chorus of "diddybops" (the pro-Duke Boston press); "muckety-mucks," an all-purpose tag for smart, esoteric advisers (e.g., arms-control geeks); and "triple-E big foots," the national reporters stomping around with their lunch buddies. Without a good, empathetic, sympathetic, biographical answer to his question--"Who are these candidates?"--the author's project would have ended up just as more windy, short-shelf-life palaver from a wise guy. But it's the opposite; mordantly funny, it honestly conveys the pre-campaign lives and personalities of the various 1988 presidential candidates, leading up to the compressed period of time, 1987 and early 1988, when they all put their long-nursed dreams to the circus test. Innovative, this is a benchmark equal to Theodore White's Making of the President series of studies. (Reviewed May 1, 1992)0394562607Gilbert Taylor
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
``Who are these guys? What are they like?'' Cramer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Esquire contributing editor, answers these questions at length in this compulsively readable look at six presidential contenders in 1988: two Republicans (Dole, Bush) and four Democrats (Hart, Biden, Gephardt, Dukakis). He follows each candidate as he makes his way through the primaries, fine-tuning his stand on issues, struggling to retain his individuality while being hounded by rapacious journalists, worked over by his handlers and browbeaten by his image wizards. Cramer's use of interior monologue is brilliant, especially his portrait of Dukakis as a humorless know-it-all and Bush as a compulsive nice guy. Based on more than a thousand interviews and remarkable cooperation from the candidates, the narrative is rich in its accounts of each candidate's family background, marriage, political career and personal ordeals. Delicious quotes and anecdotes abound, such as Bush's ``I deny that I have ever given my opinion to anybody about anything.'' First serial to Esquire; BOMC featured selection. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Defying political logic, Cramer has written a non sequitur that succeeds. In the midst of the 1992 campaign, why write such an exhaustive scorecard of the presidential candidates of 1988? By delving into the lives of these men--George Bush, Robert Dole, Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt, Joseph Biden, and Michael Dukakis--Cramer allows the reader to experience palpably what it feels like to run for president in 1992. The extended biographical sketches are among the finest of the current genre, surpassing his choppier but still satisfying transitional sections on the campaign itself. Dole's recovery from having his arm nearly blown off in World War II is a triumph as powerfully retold as Ron Kovic's story in Born on the Fourth of July (McGraw, 1976). This extended metaphor of surviving and prospering on the mean streets of American politics is recommended for public libraries and emphatically so for large collections. BOMC featured selection; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/92, and ``On the Campaign Book Trail,'' LJ 3/15/92, p. 110-112.-- Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, Pa. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Irreverent, highly knowledgeable look at the 1988 presidential primaries by Pulitzer-winning journalist Cramer. The author's candidates are tough and clever, driven to a life so complicated by power that ordinary behavior is impossible--as when George Bush, ever eager to please (his intelligence ``a silken windsock...so responsive to the currents''), tries to throw a baseball while wearing a bulletproof vest even as his son, bumped from the presidential box by an aide, throws a tantrum. Cramer's images are indelible: Shy, thoughtful Gary Hart, who soon will be destroyed by the press, noticing things that others do not (``The Soviet Union is rotting from within,'' he's quoted as saying; ``...the Cold War rules do not have to apply''). Joe Biden, stutterer, the toughest kid in school somehow now a US senator, climbing into an abandoned DuPont mansion, claiming it for his own, and pouring money into it until friends think he is mad. Down-home Michael Dukakis chasing his cousin around the house with a fish- head, thinking that running the nation can be like running Massachusetts, and never grasping that the limos and other perks of power are essential evidence of major-league behavior. Or the usually well-balanced Richard Gephardt exploding at an overbearing reporter: ``Fuck him to death!'' But the great achievement of this powerful piece of Americana is its majestic sweep and range, brought into focus by Cramer's ability to fuse telling details into a fierce crescendo of a barbaric marketing process that, he contends, hucksters like Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes use to hoodwink the press (for which the author has little respect: ``David Frost, the celebrated English brown-nose''). Cramer penetrates media smoke screens as only a media-man can, marching into the psyches of his candidates as boldly as Albert Goldman investigating pop heroes. Exhaustively researched and written in a hot, jarring, unsentimental prose: the perfect antidote to election-year mythologizing.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
