What It Takes Now
Without resilience there's no redemption and no hero
New York-based writer Jessie Daniels recently reread Richard Ben Cramer’s classic non-fiction narrative of the 1988 presidential campaign, What It Takes. After four years of Donald Trump and a few days of Joe Biden’s presidency, she understands the title differently and more deeply.
by Jessie Daniels
Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes: The Road to the White House – a 1,000+ page tour de force about the 1988 presidential race told through the backstories of six of the Republican and Democratic candidates – experienced a bit of a renaissance in 2020 because one of those profiled, Joe Biden, is now the President. But, in the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol, another part on the eventual winner of the 1988 election, George H.W. Bush, also stands out.
Cramer takes us back to 1962. Bush is the new Chairman of the Harris County Republicans and the party is growing in Texas. But party leaders in Houston are concerned about how it's growing. As Cramer recounted, “[t]he Party meetings were bigger than ever, but those new Republicans voters – they were on the extreme, on the fringe, they were…well, they were Birchers!” Birchers being members of the John Birch Society, the conspiracy theorists of the day. They were virulently anti-communist, anti-global government, anti-big government, anti-elite. “You can imagine how upsetting it was to decent Republicans,” wrote Cramer.
Bush, though, felt there was some good in everyone, so he brought them into the fold. Others were horrified. “George, you don’t know these people,” another colleague warned. “They mean to kill you.”
Over the subsequent years, while Republicans understood the corrupt bargain they continued to make with the right-wing fringe, they also benefited from it. But they should have heeded the warnings. On January 6th, the latest iteration of that fringe – a toxic soup with large chunks of QAnon conspiracy theorists and white supremacists – took their madness to its next level, storming the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. They meant to kill democracy.
Cramer wrote What It Takes because he wanted to create “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.” When I first read the book nearly two decades ago, I interpreted this statement as wanting to know what gives candidates the drive to win something as big as the presidency. Re-reading it recently, I realized it's also about how they deal with losing along the way.
Had Cramer, who died in 2013, lived to write a book about our recent election with Donald Trump as one of his focal points, he would have had to look at what would lead a man to think he ought to stay president, even after he knows he lost. The plotline of his presidency would reveal, unsurprisingly, that he deals with loss by pretending it doesn't exist. Lose your place and status? Blame someone else. Lose hundreds of thousands of people from a pandemic? Pretend it's a hoax. Lose an election? Say it was stolen.
When I first read the book nearly two decades ago, I interpreted this statement as wanting to know what gives candidates the drive to win something as big as the presidency. Re-reading it recently, I realized it's also about how they deal with losing along the way.
The thing is, it also wouldn't be a very interesting book because in order for the protagonist to be redeemed, he needs to accept reality. Otherwise, there's no resilience. There's no hero. There's just chaos and criminal investigations at the end.
But, as we’ve seen as a country for the past four years, it has serious consequences in real life. We've had to deal with an enormous amount of losing recently: losing people, losing jobs, losing normalcy, losing decency. We've also realized that a democracy depends on losing well. Insistence on falsities and minority rule doesn't make us look exceptional. Sometimes, like on January 6th, it even makes us look like a disgrace – and unleashes another wave of anger in response.
In the aftermath of the insurrection at the Capitol, my counter-reaction mirrored many: pure, unadulterated fury. It's the fury of seeing the Capitol, a place so steeped in history and reverence, be ransacked by a mob brainwashed in American Carnage. It's the fury of watching marauders barge into areas of the building where even Congressional staffers need privileges to go. It's the fury of knowing there was an element so sinister among the insurrectionists that, had they found lawmakers, they would have killed them. It’s hard to see the good in people when, as Henry Adams said of Washington in the lead-up to the Civil War, there’s a feeling of treason in the air.
Enter into this cauldron Joe Biden, who, just two weeks later, against the backdrop of a now-tidy West Front of the Capitol protected by Fortress Washington, cautioned in his Inaugural address that “we must end this uncivil war.” During his first run for president, Cramer noted that Biden struggled to find the why for his candidacy. This time around, on his third try, the man finally met his moment, promising to “restore the Soul of America" to a people tired of discord but skeptical of unfettered unity. It proved to be a winning message.
We’ve gotten to know Biden, as both a Senator and Vice President, in the years since Cramer wrote What It Takes. We know he has lost before. We also know from that how empathetic he is, how he finds purpose in service. It's in those traits, as a friend said to me, that he offers an alternative identity to the Trump base: a chance to be part of something bigger than yourself and make the sacrifices that earn the honor you seek rather than live a life of bitterness moving closer and closer to irrelevancy.
Maybe now that we finally have someone who knows how to lose, we have the chance to win again – if only we're willing to take it. In large part, that will require us to confront the legacy of his predecessor: the Big Lie. And that means again grappling with understanding how people like us – with dreams and doubts, great talents and ordinary frailties – get to be people like them. The “them” this time, though, being those who stopped believing in reality.
Jessie Daniels is a policy professional and writer based in New York. Daniels previously worked in the U.S. Senate as a national security legislative aide to Majority Leader Harry Reid. Daniels writes frequently on foreign policy and political issues. Her writing has been published in outlets including The Guardian, The Orlando Sentinel, and The San Francisco Chronicle. This is her second piece for The Experiment. Her first contribution was last August’s “Roll Call Bracketology.”
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