Pulitzer prize-winner discusses political reporting

In his lecture, Cramer said that he admonished traditional styles of reporting for failing to investigate the true personalities and motivations of political candidates and for failing to establish contacts among candidates’ friends and family.

Cramer said that he happened into political journalism while working for The Baltimore Sun. “We covered the political machines,” he said of his time at the paper. “The politics that I learned in Baltimore City Hall ... and in the statehouse in Annapolis is the same as politics [everywhere].”

He noted that political reporting is closely tied to the motivating factors of elections themselves. “People want to feel like they are electing someone decent like them, someone who shares their values,” he said, noting that voters typically desire the answers to questions such as “ ‘Who are these guys? What are they really like? What are they like to deal with?’ ”

However, Cramer argued, most political journalism fails to address these questions, instead preferring to pluck quotes from contacts such as members of the Washington, D.C., press corps or congressmen who know the candidate only impersonally.

He also argued that such coverage causes the nation to feel apathetic about candidates because they fail to report on their true lives, instead focusing too often only on the negative to make them look like “small, dweeby, crooked” people.

“I liked the 2008 election because it reminded me of the country I grew up in,” he said.

Cramer recalled that, when he was covering the election of Congressman Richard Andrew “Dick” Gephardt, he interviewed Gephardt’s brother and was surprised to learn that the press had barely contacted him.

“It’s his brother. All he is going to say is something nice about the candidate,” Cramer said. While journalists don’t want to be accused of being too soft on a subject by interviewing people who would speak positively about them, Cramer explained, “the only people who are ever going to really know these candidates” are those who are close to them.

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Cramer addressed this issue in his 1993 best-selling book “What It Takes: The Way to the White House,” which chronicles the 1988 presidential election through a series of detailed personal biographies. The book is held as a model of intimate and effective political reporting.

“What I set out to do when I wrote my book was figure out when a normal guy suddenly decides, ‘I should be president,’ ” Cramer said. “And then, once he gets that crazy idea, what happens to him.”

Cramer said that, although he tried to talk to campaign managers and finance directors when writing his book, they could not provide any telling details of candidates’ lives.

However, “if I went to the candidates’ hometown, and talked to his mom, and looked at his photo album, and find a boy who once told his teacher that all his class should go to Washington, D.C.,” he explained, he could arrive at a much better idea of the potential each candidate has for the position.

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Anthony Paranzino ’14, chair of the Cliosophic party, said he enjoyed the talk.

“His whole thesis is about how political reporting is about people at its center,” he explained. “He does a great job of proving this, how their character comes out not just on the camera, but in front of people. He embodies his thesis that politicians should be portrayed, first and foremost, as people.”

It’s not just about covering the details, Paranzino noted. “It’s about getting to know a person.”

Jay Parikh ’12, Whig-Clio president, said the group had selected Cramer to speak after it found “that he had actually been one of the most important political reporters in the past 50 years.”

“I thought that his presentation was phenomenal,” Parikh said. “Finding stories and personal backgrounds is the only way you can truly report. I thought that we had a great turnout; his humor and personality appeal to a wide variety of people.”