An UNMUTED Book Club - What It Takes

An UNMUTED Book Club: What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer
We read the big ones twice a quarter. First up: Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes, a 1,000-page beast about the 1988 presidential race that political junkies treat as scripture.
Cramer spent six years following six candidates (Bush, Dole, Biden, Dukakis, Gephardt, and Hart) and the book is less about who won than about the question underneath every campaign: how do presumably ordinary people get that mix of ambition, stamina, and pure shamelessness it takes to run for president? It's deeply reported, frequently funny, and occasionally horrifying about what the whole circus does to the people in it and the families behind them. NPR called it possibly the best book ever written about an American election, and it's the thing every modern campaign writer steals from.
Show up even if you only got through a chunk. We'll talk about the candidates, the press machine, and what holds up about 1988 in a very different 2026.
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