What it takes (1992)

The 1988 field, both parties The book aides and journalists cite most often, and the one to choose if you read only one here. Cramer spent six years on it and wrote more than a thousand pages about six men who wanted the job: George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole on the Republican side, Joe Biden, Michael Dukakis, Dick Gephardt and Gary Hart for the Democrats. It is less about strategy than about character: what kind of person puts themselves through a campaign, and what it costs them. The length is the price of entry, and readers coming to it now find extra interest in the Biden chapters, written more than thirty years before he won.