RIP Richard Ben Cramer

January 8, 2013

Richard Ben Cramer is dead at just 62. He was a huge influence in my life.

It would be wrong to say he will be missed—that would only be getting at half the story. He is already missed, and has been for years now, ever since he reported out a thousand-page masterpiece and then promptly vanished from political journalism.

He vanished because his book was panned by beltway insiders and it was panned by beltway insiders because the press corps had spent an inordinate amount of the primary season obsessing over the question of whether Gary Hart had or had not had sex with another consenting adult—and Cramer called them on it. “If I was right they had been wrong for two years,” he would tell Politico years later. “They had to knock it down.” And knock it down they did. In her Washington Monthly takedown Maureen Dowd ironically suggested “if he wants to mock reporters trying to illuminate Karacter with ‘psycho-investigations,’ then he should write a 1,200-page book examining all the ideas and issues he believes were ignored in 1988” (Dowd would go on to spend the rest of the nineties diligently covering the travels of the Presidential member).

One can forgive him for wanting to get out. His “American Iliad in the guise of political reportage,” as it was billed—his answer to the shallow puerility that had so dominated the ‘88 campaign—was shot down by the very same gatekeepers he had tried to outflank. And he wasn’t one to backslap. So he didn’t bother.

He died far too young, but for his sake I’m happy he didn’t have to stick around to watch American political journalism decline any further from its already rotten state. And while I’m sorry for him that the last campaign he was alive to see featured the very first live-giffed debates, “binders full of women,” and @FiredBigBird, at least he didn’t have to see the publication of “Game Change 2: Double Down.”

Farewell.

9:46am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZpI0bybG_KGy

(Notes: 40)

Filed under: things i've written that i don't hate