Whistlestop: My Favorite Stories from Presidential Campaign History
Twelve, 2016
I’m going to be honest, I want to be one of those guys who likes the book better than the movie. And I often do go book over movie, but, even more often I think that the real winner is which ever medium that I first experienced the thing, even if that’s not the original.
(Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, for example, is a great book which I only picked up because I saw the movie. But I think because I watched the movie first, I’m much more likely to rewatch the movie than re-read the book. This is in part because I still have a couple of Chabon’s novels that I need to read for the first time. Not a slight to him, it’s just that there’s only so much time and I’ve got books I bought at the dollar store to read and review.)
Which is a lot of words to explain this fact about John Dickerson to you: I am a huge fan of the WhistleStop podcast where these stories first appeared and the book is a fine translation of the podcast, but the podcast is better than the book.
But just like Wonder Boys, you should still read this book.
But having pronounced my opinion about the formats of the project that Dickerson is enagaged in, I should provide some context. Dickerson is a political reporter who now works at 60 Minutes, but when this book was written, was the host of CBS’s Face the Nation. Point is, he’s a smart political reporter and thinker.
And around the time Donald Trump started making waves in the Republican primaries, this smart, political guy started telling stories pulled from past Presidential campaigns. They run through America’s history from Thomas Jefferson’s personal “Attack Dog” who did TJ’s dirty press work for him to Howard Dean’s scream which end up destroying the good doctor’s chances.
The stories are sourced from newspaper accounts and the cascade of political memoirs that come out whenever the presidency turns over or when a long time Senator retires. Dickerson tells you what happened in a particular incident with historical parallels, then talks about how the press/society reacted to it in it’s historical moment, and then discusses what that meant for today (Or really for four years ago-ish.)
You can get a good idea of the type stories presented, Dickerson has broken his book up into following parts: Inflections Points, Comebacks, Collapses, Gambits and Gambles, Too Close to Call, Tar and Feather, and Crashing the Party. My favorite chapter title is probably “Vote for Muskie or He’ll Cry” (which Dickerson borrowed from bumper stickers from the 1972 campaign).
I’m going to leave Muskie alone for the rest of this review and instead, I’ll give you an overview of the chapter “1988–Dukakis Tanks”. Essentially, in 1987, George Bush’s team pulled a lot of dirt on Dukakis and “Like all successful image-based attacks, the salvos created such a fever in their target that Dukakis blundered into inhabiting the caricature Republications painted of him.”
Suring the 1988 campaign, Vice President Bush was trying to get out of President Reagan’s shadow by hitting up every conservative group he could. It wasn’t going well, as George Will wrote at the time: “That unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is the thin tiny ‘arf.’ The sound of a lap dog.”
Newsweek ran a picture of Bush on it’s cover with he headline FIGHTING THE WIMP FACTOR. Dickerson suggests that the picture “looked like an ad for a local fish restaurant know for its scrod.”
Dickerson takes us through the twists and turns of the race, as Bush becomes okay with going negative in the primary and then lets his campaign do it again against Dukakis, blaming him for the case of Willie Horton, a prisoner furloughed from a Massachusetts prison who attacked a couple in Maryland (stabbing the man and raping the woman). They also promoted rumors that Dukakis had–gasp!–seen a psychiatrist. The Bush campaign banged on against Dukakis until it had managed to convince his campaign that they had a wimp issue.
The solution they came up with went down in campaign history as the wrong move: They put the Duke in tank to show he was commander-in-chief material. The pictures of him in a tank, wearing a helmet that made him look a bit like a weenie. Dickerson provides this assessment: “It looked desperate and grasping, like what a person who had no idea what being commander in chief would think was required of a commander in chief.”
In the end, Dickerson then unpacks how the whole thing went down: pointing out not only that the lesson of the Tank incident was to not allow your opponent define you, but that Dukakis’ real problem was that Dukakis was devoted to both running a positive campaign and to making that campaign about real issues. Bush won because he was pretty okay with negative campaigning and he understood that ducking the real issues by accusing his opponent of being more of a wimp than Bush himself was perceived as.
Dickerson’s book is filled with stories and analysis like this. It’s a fun, informative read, especially if your education was anything like mine and your American history course was comprehensive up to World War I and then rushed through the rest, not giving you the details like Truman giving a speech wearing his bathrobe while campaigning for re-election by train.
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