![]() Cramer, after a low period, turned to writing about baseball. “What It Takes” received mediocre reviews and sales fizzled. ![]() ![]() Who, four years after he lost, wanted to read 100 pages on Dick Gephardt’s childhood? It was viewed as eccentric, affected, too long for its boring subject. When it came out in the heat of the 1992 campaign, the tome dropped with a heavy thud. But the judgments of Washington’s elite come late to Maryland’s remote Eastern Shore, and the book’s place in political writing has dawned only very late on its author. “What It Takes” is now widely considered the greatest modern presidential campaign book. ![]() “So that’s how people see me?” he marveled to Cramer and others after he read the book. “Joe sees no limits in houses.”Ĭramer hasn’t made any of the improvements Biden suggested, but if that glimpse of Biden’s obsession with real estate sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because this is the Biden whose life - and rundown Wilmington mansion - Cramer introduced to the nation in his 1,049-page chronicle of the 1988 presidential campaign, “What It Takes: The Way to the White House.” The book was the point of departure for every profile of the vice presidential nominee 20 years later. The Biden brothers approved, and Joe Biden “had a fabulous way for me to get it all repaired and fixed up and everything,” Cramer recalled. ![]()
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