ON POLITICAL BOOKS: The Right Fluff
Dowd, Maureen
ON POLITICAL BOOKS The Right Fluff by Maureen Dowd When this book first came in the mail, I thought, Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Eee Eee Eeeeeee! Augghh! Gaghhh! It’s bigger than a dictionary! It’s...
...Smooth Howard Fineman from Newsweek, with the soft hands and bottom-line eye of an up-and-coming junk bond salesman, just meant to hit with a thump-wherever, however...
...They bend lives everywhere they go...
...Cramer writes that Paul Taylor of The Washington Post was cool, handsome, and detached, was by his own lights a man who “saw nuance” and “took a fair-minded approach...
...So the Bidens stood in announcement clothes, while Pat, as the majordomo, flicked on the stereo and cranked it up to TEN, till it felt like the speakers were slapping them in the face...
...All of these men were their mothers’ darlings...
...Random House also claims that Cramer reveals that Bush was under tremendous strain in the period after the United States invaded Panama but before Manuel Noriega was caught...
...Like so many Times-men, he was an expert-a Ph.D...
...It’s not possible to really know what’s in anyone’s head, no matter how close you are to him, how much he tells you, or how much research you do...
...Wouldn’t you say a loss in MichiDICK!WHY’DYATHINK YA LOST...
...Harrmmph...
...These are not small-cheese types...
...Cheese heads Perhaps it’s just that I have always secretly hoped that these guys’ inner monologues are at a higher level than their extemporaneous speech...
...Hart quoted, from his friend Warren Beatty, ‘When forced to show all, people become all show.’ ” (Maybe Cramer should have called his epic War and Beatty...
...Certainly, it could be argued that the press has debased the nation’s political dialogue...
...Yut dut dut dunggghhhh...
...Asked about it, a Random House publicist replies that Cramer reveals that GARY HART DID NOT SLEEP WITH DONNA RICE...
...Nooooooooo indexxxxxx...
...In addition, Cramer runs wild mau-mauing he flacks, gurus, and reporters as he flips in md out of the heads of the candidates, their vives, their mothers, and their aides with Sybiesque fervor...
...Unlike Molly Ivins and P. J. O’Rourke, who are raking in a lot of money making fun of politicians, Cramer has stacked the deck in the direction of the paeanic...
...This was important . . . the finale to Les Miserables . . . and this was HOW THE CAMPAIGN HAD TO BE...
...The same things are sad that were sad five years ago: Dole’s mind-bending years trying to get back his motor skills after his arm and chest were ripped up in World War 11...
...Pandom House, $28...
...E. J. Dionne, from the Times, was short, quick., and awfully busy, harried like a border collie with a bad herd...
...As he writes in his epilogue, “Hart thought the sickness [of the character question] stemmed from a dangerous fallacy-Americans think they can know (have a right to know) everything about their leaders...
...It’s never “character cops” when it can be “Karacter Kops...
...But the writer does not offer a serious discourse on the larger issues of press responsibility and presidential character...
...Many were quasi-dorks who blossomed in high school or college...
...Now, while I’m still trying to igure out who Ross Perot and Bill Clinton are, Lichard Ben Cramer wants me to go back on a antastic voyage into the hearts and minds of kichard Gephardt and Michael Dukakis...
...He merely takes a snide tone toward the reporters who, now that the parties are no longer winnowing the candidates, are struggling with the task of examining the backgrounds of guys who come out of nowhere and want to run the country...
...Attempting to recreate the streams of consciousness of Bush and Dole when they thought they might die in World War I1 is a bit of a stretch...
...But reading his book gave me the same impulse that Jimmy Stewart had with the tarty Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again, when he told her something like: “You know, if you took off all that makeup, I bet there’s a lovely . face under there...
...But if he wants to write a Tom Wolfe version of Gail Sheehy, then he should curb his sneering tone toward reporters who tried to do it in real time with what he calls “Grape-Nuts’’ of information...
...Wouldn’alossbe CONGRESSMAN...
...I fantasize that Bush talks to himself not like Bertie Wooster but like Philip Marlowe, and that Michael Dukakis speaks, not like a computer scroll of an urban planning paper, but with the mean-streets growl of a David Mamet character...
...But that certainty of knowledge is not available...
...In many cases, they got into the presidential race without knowing exactly why they wanted to be president or what they wanted to say, and then ended up getting molded in unattractive ways by the image wizards...
...It’s an odd conceit, to take some of the least ntrospective men in the history of American iolitics and write from inside their heads-and 3 take some of the most ordinary and flawed ioliticians in recent memory and turn them nto heroic figures...
...Besides, most people thought of the Donna Rice caper not as a morals breach but as an IQ test...
...Cramer can hit home about the faults of reporters: He’s right that “Dukakis’ ‘terrific comeback’ was . . . wish-fulfillment for the wise guys and a press corps that needed a story...
...Beneath his hyperventilating prose, Cramer is a mordant observer and exhaustive reporter...
...He even hums with a lot of consonants: “Hnnghhhh gnngh hnnnnnnnggh...
...Although Cramer set out to explain the soil that best nurtures presidential ambition, it is still not clear what ingredients besides the obvious ones do the trick...
...But after reading every nuance, every shading, every interior monologue in this monster book, I can’t say I’ve learned anything fundamentally new about any of the candidates...
...Cramer has lovingly laid on brush stroke after brush stroke-the gathering storm of the perfect Gephardt, the high school exploits of the brash Biden...
...Ross Perot is building an entire candidacy on the strength of public distaste for conventional media outlets...
...Still, Cramer’s cruelest cut to the gurus and reporters is not in his irreverent-and sometimes amusingpoint of view...
...In many cases, they had fathers who did not succeed as they would have liked...
...People can’t be tied down, reduced to facts...
...Suffice it to say that some readers may continue to doubt-even though Hart’s friends did always say he was a guy whose idea of a wild time was talking about Thomas Jefferson...
...Hart said he didn’t sip, but lost the election anyway...
...In his epilogue, Cramer writes, “George Bush was wound so tight that his back seized up-he was hunched, walking like a hundred-and-eight-year-old man...
...It is the music of a people Who are climbing to the light...
...But Cramer wants it both ways...
...hen a 33-page epilogue arrived and I really ot depressed...
...In Cramer’s view, the press just did not understand Hart...
...But one thing we know, looking back at JFK, LBJ, and Ronald Reagan, is that these are fallible men capable of huge mistakes of judgment and lapses of intelligence...
...They’re big, extraordinary men,” he told Mirabella magazine...
...And here is the press as Gary Hart gets back in the race : “GARY G ARY LEE w h ad d y aM R S . - HART...
...Bob Dole rarely starts a sentence without an “Aghh” or “Gggaahh...
...gear-VRO-0-0-OM...
...Caddell forced the Bidens to listen to Les Miserables on their way out to mnounce Joe’s candidacy...
...Whoooooaaaaaa...
...Richard Ben Cramer...
...It is the fact that his book will not have an index, according to the publishers, so the Washington cognoscenti cannot engage in their favorite activity of skipping straight to their citations...
...Whut It Takes: The Way to the White House...
...If he wants to mock reporters trying to illuminate Karacter with “psycho-investigations,” then he should write a 1,200-page book examining all the ideas and issues he believes were ignored in 1988...
...ON POLITICAL BOOKS The Right Fluff by Maureen Dowd When this book first came in the mail, I thought, Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...
...Hart was running for student council president at his strict religious college when he and some buddies were spotted passing a beer around the table at Ned’s Pizza in Oklahoma City...
...And the same things are funny here that were funny five years ago: Pat Caddell desperately seelung a musical them(: that would appeal to the Big Chill generation, while his boss, Joe Biden, as Cramer writes, “was still a bit hazy on the Beatles...
...That’s sca-a-a-aryyy...
...More dangerous still, politicians try to toe the line...
...He never smells victory when he can smell “VICTORYYYY !” After the election, Dukakis looks not just tired, but “weary, punch-rumpled, hard-cheesebeatup...
...And it’s hard to imagine that the ultrastraight Gephardt really thought his suit’s sliding shoulder pads made him feel like “he was growing tits...
...I didn’t...
...Unphh, unphh...
...As he noted in a recent interview, reporters think if they could only peel off enough layers, they’d find all the flaws, whereas “if they would actually peel the layers, they’d find a hell of a man...
...With a prose style more irritating than enteraining, the author takes Wolfe’s faded New lournalism technique and sends it into fifth Waureen Dowd is a political reporter for The New York Times...
...But, according to the jacket durb, Cramer wanted to write an epic that vould “do for politicians what Tom Wolfe did or astronauts in The Right Stuff...
...Cramer offers a withering view of the consultants who grafted new personalities onto his heroes or threw verbal darts at them...
...It’s bigger than le Congressional Staff Directory...
...That is serious...
...He follows wo Republicans, George Bush and Robert >ole, and four Democrats, Gary Hart, Joseph 3iden, Gephardt, and Dukakis, from the cradle o the end of the 1988 primary, with an epiogue on the quenched dreams of Dole and the 8till-simmering political aspirations of the oth:rs...
...LISTEN TO THIS NOW . . .” Pat yelled through the music...
...After Gephardt places third in Michigan, his press conference is portrayed as a cacophony of the heartless hyenas of the press: “Areyagonnaquit...
...While I’ve occasionally used the gimmick of getting inside George Bush’s head for a humor piece, the notion of using it for an entire book is disquieting...
...Yeah, that’s great, Pat...
...I had to wait until page 519 to find out that I was “observant” but obvious, and until page 639 to learn that I am regarded as “the prima donna of the politics beat...
...And when Ben Bradlee gets involved in the HartDonna Rice imbroglio, Crarrier calls him the Big Hound coming out of the kennel, trying to put the coon up the tree...
...The author reveals that it was a young Gary Hartpence who first employed the “didn’t inhale” defense...
...The Random House publicist explained that the book did not need an index because “everyone who’s in there already knows they’re in there...
...For a long time, the 1,011-page book* sat in iy house, making an indentation in a chaise mnge as I threw reproachful looks its way...
...This revelation seems to be based on Hart’s continuing claim that he did not, and that the young lady left after midnight by the back door not being watched by Miami Herald reporters...
...VRO-0-0-OM!dousing each page with italics, ellipses, exclamation points, sound effects, dashes, hyphens, capital letters, and cute spellings...
...Where was that sonofabitch Noriega...
...Virgin Gary Although Random House promises “news-breaking revelations,” it’s hard to discern them...
...It’s bigger ian George Bush’s Rolodex...
...Cramer only confirms what was already known: that Dukakis had an overwhelming need to be correct, that Biden had an overwhelming need to connect, that Kitty Dukakis had an overwhelming need to dramatize her life, that George Bush cared more about being president than he cared about ideas, that Hart cared more about ideas than he did about some silly standards of political conduct (like not opening the door of your hotel room in a short bathrobe when a female reporter is coming to interview you late at night, as Hart did with Patricia O’Brien of KnightRidder...
...Howard, it should be noted, was the first of his generation to earn a panelist’s chair on the Hour of the Living Dead, “Washington Week in Review...
...thinkaDONNARIy ’ gonna WIN think ya WINPOSTgonna print a LEE storygotta RICE Gary MONEYLEEEEHEYY...
...He refers to consultant William Schneider as “the well-known TV-guest-intheknow on well-known knowledge,” and “the ubiquitous pilgarlic, who worked for anybody, wrote a column, and showed up on TV whenever anyone spent a dime to call him,” and the “pilgarlicpol 1 s t er- pundi t -colu mni s t -TV- guest -part-timeBiden-guru-who-gave-Joe-the:-Kinnock-tape-in-thefirstplace.’’ But the author reserves hi...
...And, unlike the ’88 crop, those men were big cheeses...
...Dut dug duunnnnnnghh dghndughnnnnnnn...
...Do you hear the people sing Lost in the valley of the night...
...It got so bad with Bush’s back that he couldn’t even play sports with his sons...
...highest contempt for the obtuse and superficial reporters who yap and nip at such titans as Biden and H,art...
...historian from Oxford, no less-and he’d learned his politics at the knee of guru-columnist William Schneider, so he could seek from the latest polls the undertow of the great sea of voters...
...WHYD’YATHINKYOULOST...
...Certainly, Cramer has accumulated some wonderful tidbits in his five years of reporting...
Vol. 24 • July 1992 • No. 7
