Inside The War Rooms
By John F. Dickerson; Karen Tumulty
KERRY
Operation Gutsball
Everyone looked perfectly serene in the private cabin of the Boeing 757 ferrying the Democratic nominee and his newly named running mate to their first campaign rally together on July 7. The Veep hunt had proceeded just the way Kerry wanted it: smoothly, surefootedly and secretly, right up to the moment when John Edwards' selection was announced. A beaming Kerry was popping in and out of the cabin. Edwards was catching a nap, his ever present Diet Coke on the tray of the armrest next to him; his wife Elizabeth was reading. But across the aisle, campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill was explaining her biggest worry to TIME. "August." Cahill said simply. "We haven't figured out how we get through August."
Five treacherous weeks stretched out ahead, weeks that many in the Kerry camp believed could sink the candidate before the fall campaign got under way. Vertigo was a sensation those around Kerry had come to regard as normal. More than once he had been written off for dead in this race. He had marched through the primaries, but only after a year of bad starts, restarts, setbacks, comebacks. Kerry had fired one campaign manager and mortgaged a house to raise money. And he had yet to convince voters that he really stood for anything.
The new danger ahead in August sprang from the combined vagaries of the calendar and the campaign-finance laws. Once Kerry accepted his party's nomination at the Democratic Convention on July 29, he would be bound by a strict spending limit of $75 million in public money--a straitjacket that President George W. Bush would not have to put on until his own convention finished Sept. 2. By early June, some of Kerry's media advisers wanted to change the game.
Inside Kerryland, it was called Operation Gutsball, chiefly because it would take a gritty determination to pull it off. Gutsball was a secret plan to supercharge the way Kerry would fight and finance his fall campaign. He would pass on the public dough altogether, not exactly a precedent that the avowed campaign-finance reformer would want to be the one to set. But the idea was tempting.
And terrifying. A top Kerry fund raiser condensed the pros and cons of Gutsball in a memo and sent it round to the inner circle. Gutsball meant Kerry would try to raise $150 million in the final three months of the race. It meant diverting Kerry and Edwards at least 40 times to blue-state cities like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, where money was plentiful but swing votes were not. And playing Gutsball ensured that Bush would opt out of funding too. On the other hand, the memo noted, if Kerry didn't opt out, Bush still might. And if he did, no one doubted Bush could raise $100 million without breaking a sweat.
To settle the matter, Kerry convened a virtual Cabinet meeting of top advisers one afternoon at the campaign's soulless McPherson Square headquarters in downtown Washington. He went round the big conference table and asked everyone in his inner circle what to do. And each time he got an answer--Do It or Don't--Kerry argued with it. The staff realized what was going on. Kerry was working through it. He argued passionately with both sides, telling the Do It crowd why it was nuts and then reminding the more reluctant side that it might work. It went on that way for 90 minutes. And when it was over, he said, "I'll let you know."
A week later the word went out: Kerry had decided against Gutsball. It would take him away from the battleground states when he could least afford it. But that meant August was still going to be a crapshoot, a five-week run through a gauntlet where Bush--or someone acting in his interest--would surely attack Kerry with a well-financed ad campaign. Kerry, meanwhile, would need to sit tight, take the hit and conserve his $75 million for the ad fight after Labor Day. "Opting in was an enormous calculated risk," said an aide. "It meant crossing our fingers. But we had to take that risk."
BUSH
The White House Springs a Trap
By early August, Bush was fighting to get back on offense, and in the conference room on Air Force One, he thought he had finally found a way. Nine days earlier, at his convention, Kerry had said he would never mislead the country into war, and so Bush would now force him to explain his vote authorizing it. "I'm going to keep after him," Bush told aides, "until he answers it."
What so tantalized the President was the chance to reanimate his most powerful charge: that Kerry didn't know his own mind. The Bush campaign had been pushing the story line since the Democratic primaries, but it was given neon prominence when Kerry's own remarks ratified the Bush message. In March, Kerry uttered what Bush adviser Karl Rove had called the most deadly phrase in politics: "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it," said Kerry about his vote against supplemental funding for the war. The trap looked foolproof: If Kerry defended his vote, that would seem to be at odds with his four-day convention attack on the war. If he changed his position, he would undermine his convention's theme of strength. If he wiggled, the G.O.P. would use his running mate Edwards' devastating line during the Democratic primaries: "Senator, that's the longest answer I've ever heard to a yes-or-no question."
Bush was overdue for a score. Throughout the summer, every time his aides rustled up a notion about how to regain control of the race, their idea would be overtaken by events. May, June and July had been filled with spikes of violence in Iraq and new disclosures about abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. "We'd try [to change the subject], but even if the President said Iraq once, that's all people would talk about," recalled Rove. Though Kerry had seen no real bump in the polls, voters were viewing him as a more plausible Commander in Chief than they had before, and they were listening more closely to him than before the convention. "We couldn't believe it," says a top campaign official. "We were on defense on Iraq when Kerry had held 10 different positions."
Bush uncorked his dare during an event in New Hampshire. "There are some questions that a Commander in Chief needs to answer with a clear yes or no. My opponent hasn't answered the question of whether, knowing what we know now, he would have supported going into Iraq." The next day at the Bush team's weekly session held in Rove's dining room, advisers planned to put the question in each of Bush's speeches. Some privately feared that Kerry might not take the bait. The Democrat was looking stronger. His vice-presidential selection and convention had been managed smoothly. "We weren't sure he would do it," says Bush adviser Mary Matalin. "We thought we might be seeing the strong closer everyone had talked about." Then Kerry bit. Standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon three days after the President's challenge, Kerry told a reporter who had repeated the President's question that even though inspectors had found no stockpiles of unconventional weapons in Iraq, he believed even now that it was right to authorize the use of force. Kerry's answer would dishearten some of his strongly antiwar supporters and make it seem as if he still could not find a consistent thread in his case against Bush. "We couldn't believe that he went for it," says White House communications director Dan Bartlett. Onboard Air Force One the President sat with Rove, Karen Hughes and Bartlett, his advisers almost giddy as they worked on new language for the President's remarks. Bartlett answered an email on his BlackBerry that asked if Kerry had given the campaign a gift. The communications director messaged back, "Yes, and my boss is about to open it." They crafted a speech that would lampoon Kerry's "new nuance" as the President ticked off the Senator's various positions for and against the war, concluding with the mocking compliment "I want to thank Senator Kerry for clearing that up."
KERRY
Waiting Too Long To Return Fire
For all the campaign's worry about how it would survive Bush's August blitz without money of its own to fight back, the strategists had failed to see the sniper that was waiting in the weeds. Just a week after a Democratic Convention that had been a four-day-long infomercial about Kerry's Vietnam record, a group styling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was suddenly dominating the cable airwaves with accusations that Kerry had faked his injuries and lied about his heroism in Vietnam to collect a chestful of medals that he didn't deserve. Kerry's initial strategy was to do ... nothing.
His handlers, led by pollster Mark Mellman and consultant Bob Shrum, had convinced themselves it was unwise to respond to the Swifties' ads, which were running in only three states and were funded by a longtime Bush donor, because a rebuttal would serve to amplify the phony charges. And the advisers were determined to stay upbeat, in keeping with the holy writ of the focus groups that kept saying how distasteful they found negative campaigning. So when a jolt finally forced Kerry to face reality, it didn't come from any of his high-priced consultants and pollsters. The truth was delivered by men Kerry didn't even know, folks who have better training than any political operative in spotting and surviving an ambush. It came from the vets.
A life member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Kerry reminded the crowd at its national convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Aug. 18 that he was "a combat veteran who has walked in your shoes." Kerry's reception was no better than lukewarm--a sharp contrast to the enthusiasm that had greeted Bush there only two days before. During the 35 minutes Kerry spoke of keeping faith with all the experiences and values that combat veterans shared--mentioning his military service no fewer than two dozen times--two members of the graying Massachusetts delegation stood at attention, with their backs to him. Somewhere in the room, someone shouted, "Liar!" And it was hard not to notice that there were plenty of empty seats up front.
But then, at the end, something unexpected happened. Dozens of vets made their way to the rope line to shake Kerry's hand and deliver a message. "What are you waiting for? You gotta fight back!" Again and again they told him the same thing. He had to say something, take the fight to Bush, stop coasting. You are losing this thing, they said.
By the time he reached his Boston town house at 10 that night, Kerry was livid. He gathered Cahill, communications director Stephanie Cutter, press secretary David Wade and traveling chief of staff David Morehouse in the messy fourth-floor office where he keeps his most precious Vietnam mementos, including a picture of his friend Dick Pershing, from whom he had been inseparable in prep school and college and who had been killed in a rice paddy by a Vietcong grenade. "Every time they attack what I did on those rivers, they attack people who are not alive to defend themselves," Kerry thundered. "This is an outrage. I'm not going to sit and take this anymore." When the rest of the team in Washington joined the conversation by speakerphone, Kerry learned that it wasn't just a principle at issue: the campaign's polling numbers were showing an alarming slide.
The campaign quickly changed gears. Kerry and his aides set to work furiously, turning what was supposed to be a speech the next day on homeland security into a good old-fashioned counterpunch. "Thirty years ago, official Navy reports ... documented my service in Vietnam and awarded me the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Thirty years ago, this was the plain truth. It still is, and I still carry the shrapnel in my leg," he would declare. "I'm not going to let anyone question my commitment to defending America--then, now or ever." After drafting the speech and sending Kerry off to bed shortly before midnight, Cutter, Morehouse and Wade reconvened at Figs, an Italian place on Beacon Hill, to soak their remorse in beer and put the other pieces in place: the logistics for the speech site, the final tweaks to the speech, an alert to the press that there would be big news the next day. Kerry was fighting back. The question was whether he had already lost too much blood to survive.
BUSH
McCain: Who's Zooming Who?
The President was off mountain biking, leaving a political odd couple sharing a cup of coffee on the cool limestone porch of the Texas ranch. One was overnight guest John McCain, and the other was Bush's political adviser Karl Rove, the man who helped destroy McCain four years earlier in the South Carolina primary. Lately the Senator had been openly referring to Rove as "staff scum," a term of endearment he often uses for his own aides. Now the two discussed the political map and the previous day's events in Florida. Flying with Bush to Pensacola, McCain had told tales of his fighter days in that town. And once they landed, McCain was beside himself with excitement about the size of the crowds. "He kept turning to me and hitting me in the arm and saying, 'I've never seen anything like it,'" said Rove. "I thought I was going to have a bruise."
The summer romance between Bush and McCain was confounding to the Arizona Senator's friends and fans. Was this a true reconciliation based on shared principles in a time of crisis? Or was St. John, the famously pure, blunt, fearless crusader selling out in order to build up equity with his party for another run in 2008? "I genuinely enjoy his company," McCain has explained in a pleading tone to skeptical friends. Aides say that after Bush spends time with McCain, the President's arguments for the war are sharper.
Those close to McCain say that at bottom he doesn't believe Kerry has the strength to face the tough business of war. McCain's views about Bush have been formed up close. After both visited families of dead and wounded soldiers at Fort Lewis in Washington State, they flew in silence on Marine One. The grief had been deep, and some of the relatives had had an edge in their voice as they talked to the President about the conflict that had taken their loved ones. As the helicopter climbed, McCain could see that the encounter had battered Bush. "I'm proud of you," he said, putting his arm on the President. He then promised Bush his full support, no matter what happened.
Before the campaign was over, Bush would travel more with McCain than with any other politician he was not kin to. Just after McCain squelched the rampant rumors that he might be John Kerry's running mate, the Bush team put him on the road with the President, making the Senator's mere presence a powerful political endorsement for the incumbent. McCain helped draw crucial moderate G.O.P. voters and independents to events where they could be registered and courted by the campaign. He let direct mail go out under his name to swing states. He recorded radio spots in New Hampshire, where he pasted Bush in the primaries in 2000, and agreed at the last minute to stump there the weekend before the election. At times, McCain's television appearances were scary duck-and-cover drills for the Bush message team, as McCain was perfectly capable of breaking ranks with the President on issues ranging from Iraq reconstruction to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. On the eve of the first debate, campaign communications director Nicolle Devenish drew the line: McCain was forbidden to go into the postdebate spin sessions and give praise to both sides. That would be a loss for Bush. "People see you as the referee," she said. "We need you to be for us." McCain grumbled about getting instruction. But he knew what he needed to do. By the third debate, Bush asked McCain to sit in the audience in his line of sight for moral support. But it was as much to be seen by the audience as to be seen by Bush.
After the debates, McCain amended his early public promise not to criticize his friend and fellow Vietnam veteran Kerry, noting the candidate's inconsistencies and what McCain considers an unrealistic view of the powers of diplomacy. At the campaign's request, he even made a second visit to the press cabin of Air Force One to cry foul at Kerry's mention of the Vice President's gay daughter. "He was there whenever we needed him," said a Bush staff member days before the election, grateful that the alliance had held, "and thankfully, nobody lost any limbs."
KERRY
Return of the Clinton Team
You could count on Bill Clinton to run late, even when he was awaiting heart surgery. Hours after word spread that Clinton was being rushed to the hospital for emergency bypass surgery, Kerry telephoned him to wish him luck, and Clinton, alarmed at the drift of Kerry's campaign, suggested they make some time over the weekend to have a serious talk. The two made the connection around 10 p.m. the next day, a Saturday, an hour behind schedule. By the time they finished--Clinton mostly talking and Kerry mostly listening--it was nearly midnight. One message stuck. "If you're the issue in this campaign, you lose," Clinton told Kerry. "If he's the issue in this campaign, you win. Stay in his face."
Predictably, news of the call was all over the papers by Monday. And just as predictably, Kerry was furious. Four years before, Clinton had been shunned by his own Vice President, and more than a few Democrats believe that hurt Gore. But even so, there were dangers in flying too close to the Sun King now, not the least of which was how a gray presence like Kerry could disappear in the glare. There were those who believed that Clinton's real interest was less in helping Kerry win in 2004 than in clearing the way for Hillary to run in 2008.
But Kerry was smart enough to know something else. "You're the only Democrat who's been elected twice since F.D.R.," he told the ex-President. No one had been so tested as Clinton's team when it came to digging themselves out of a crater, and Kerry had already recruited some of the most combat-hardened of them out of retirement--former White House press secretaries Joe Lockhart and Mike McCurry, ex-Clinton aides Joel Johnson and Doug Sosnik, and Hillary's old chief of staff Howard Wolfson. Almost from the moment they arrived, Kerry's operation showed a new edge and agility. Less than an hour after the last chant of "flip-flop" echoed across Madison Square Garden, Lockhart engineered a midnight rally in Springfield, Ohio, where Kerry told a crowd of 15,000, "I will not have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and who misled America into Iraq."
The rally barely made a dent in the news cycle--or in the bounce that Bush got in the polls after his convention. But it sent a shock through Kerry's dispirited troops. "They had gotten to the point where they had lost their ability to be aggressive," an adviser recalls. "But all that had changed, and the campaign finally was getting the message: You don't have to roll over. It was more a message to our own people that if they hit us, we'll stay up all night to hit them back."
There were other changes as well. Respected longtime adviser John Sasso moved from the Democratic National Committee to the campaign plane, where he cut through the clutter that had so often surrounded decisions that had to be made on the spot and offered the mature sounding board that Kerry had been missing. Kerry's traveling staff took to calling Sasso "the Wolf," after Harvey Keitel's fixer character in Pulp Fiction. The old hands like Cahill, Cutter and Shrum remained in place, leaving everyone to wonder how well the campaign would function with two camps vying to guide it through the final, most difficult phase of the race. But one thing was clear: it would be different from here on.
KERRY
The Midnight Conversion
When Lockhart reported for duty at Kerry headquarters, the first thing he did was pick a fight--the one the campaign had been avoiding for months. Kerry's shifting answers on Iraq had become more than a damage-control problem. When the candidate had fallen into Bush's August trap, the truth he had been trying to outrun since he slipped past Howard Dean in the primaries finally caught up with him: his position on Iraq was incomprehensible to anybody who wasn't a regular lunch guest at the Council on Foreign Relations, and it was getting more so every time Kerry tried to explain it.
Advisers like Shrum believed that Kerry's best course would be to turn to domestic issues, which polls suggested would ultimately decide the race. Kerry tried that approach for a bit, maintaining that the war's $200 billion cost would be better spent at home, but the commentariat found that laughable: Was Kerry, who had supported the war, now saying he wasn't willing to spend what it would take to win it? So Lockhart kept hammering: no one was going to listen to Kerry on anything else until he found his voice on Iraq.
It would take people who had longer histories with Kerry to bring the candidate around. On what happened to be the third anniversary of Sept. 11, three of the people Kerry trusted most--Cahill, Sasso and longtime adviser Michael Whouley--laid out the choice in its starkest terms at a meeting at Kerry's Georgetown mansion. He had to quit twisting himself in knots trying to defend the Senate votes that had put him on all sides of Iraq, and focus instead on making the case against what Bush had done there. He could no longer keep saying that he wouldn't have gone to war the way that Bush had. He was going to have to answer the biggest, most dangerous hypothetical question of all: If John Kerry had been President, would he have gone to war at all?
Kerry was torn. He had once fought in a war, and knew what it was like to be bleeding in the field when people at home were calling what he was doing a mistake. What kind of message would he be sending to the troops who were in precisely the same position 35 years later? And if he said he would never have invaded Iraq, wasn't he admitting the point that Bush was making every day on the stump, that if John Kerry had been President, Saddam Hussein would still be in power?
Time was running out. If Kerry was to make that pivot, he would have to do it before the first debate, or the headline coming out of that contest would inevitably be KERRY TAKES YET ANOTHER POSITION ON IRAQ. But as late as 1:30 a.m. on Sept. 20, just hours before Kerry was to give the speech at New York University in which he would lay it all out, aides were still arguing all sides of the question around the dining table of his suite at the Sheraton in New York City. Some maintained he had said all he needed to say on the question of whether he would have gone to war. What would he get for answering yet another hypothetical--except more attacks from Bush? Finally, Kerry couldn't take it anymore. "This is a f______ war, and kids are dying over there. You'd have to be out of your mind to have gone to war knowing there were no weapons of mass destruction or ties to al-Qaeda," he told them. "The answer is no. Anything else is a bunch of crap." Said Cahill: "Then that's what you have to say."
Kerry's message that day was clear and sharp. "Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell," he said. "But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war. The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: we have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure." As one of his top strategists later put it, "You could physically tell the difference between John Kerry before and after that speech. He was liberated to go run a presidential campaign."
BUSH
CBS: A Gift That Kept On Giving
The President didn't know what to make of the National Guard documents his communications director Bartlett showed him that morning in early September in the Oval Office. They looked like fresh evidence that Bush had received preferential treatment and ignored a direct order to attend a flight physical. Bush had never seen the documents before and had never heard of them. He couldn't remember having a conversation with anyone about the flight physical (which he had admitted skipping), as the documents contended. What Bush did notice was that his address on the documents was not the one he used while he was in the service. But there was the whiff of truth in the documents. They could be real. Bush and his staff weren't sure, but they had to come up with a reaction quickly. 60 Minutes had just sent the documents over that morning, and the camera crews were arriving in three hours.
At another time, Bush and Bartlett might have challenged the authenticity of the documents. But stiff-arming the press had failed during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and after the tempest over WMD claims in the State of the Union address, so the last thing Bush wanted was a credibility fight. "We couldn't challenge their veracity because then people would challenge ours," says Bartlett. A softer defense was hatched: Bartlett would hint that the alleged new evidence was being pushed by the President's political enemies but would stick to the talking points: Bush had been honorably discharged.
The strategy worked better than the Bush campaign could ever have imagined. After the 60 Minutes piece aired, bloggers took up the campaign's cause. Suddenly the story was about superscripts and typewriters and Dan Rather's history of trouble with Republicans. Had the Bush campaign made the same charges, they would probably have fallen flat. But though the bloggers were in some cases even more rabidly pro-Bush than his own staff members, they nevertheless seemed like gumshoes going after the truth. Bartlett eventually stopped spinning and just let the bloggers take over. Questions about the President's service dwindled, and CBS was forced to endure the kind of treatment White House aides received every week. "This is the gift that keeps on giving," said Bartlett at the time. "It's fun being on the other side of it for a change and watching them do all the things we get criticized for: denial, spin and stonewalling." Eventually, Rather had to acknowledge on-air that the documents might be forgeries and apologize for vouching for them. CBS appointed a two-person panel--Richard Thornburgh, Attorney General under the first President Bush, and Louis Boccardi, former president of the Associated Press--to investigate what had gone wrong and report back after the election.
KERRY
"He Says Saddam? You Say Osama"
The sniggering started when the Washington politocracy got a look at those 32 pages of debate rules. The candidates were going to have their time limits policed by lights and buzzers, like a couple of Jeopardy! contestants. What a trap the Bushies had laid for a windbag like Kerry. At 30 seconds left, a green light would come on; at 15, a yellow one; and with five seconds left, a red one. If a candidate repeatedly went over his allotted time, the moderator could start using the buzzer--and everyone knew which of the two was more likely to make that happen.
As for Kerry, he was none too keen when his handlers took him off the road for four precious days so that he could go to "debate camp" in Wisconsin. Hadn't he been training off and on all summer? Hadn't he memorized all those briefing books they kept sending to the plane? Hadn't he spent two whole days in Nantucket, Mass., in August, practicing, practicing, practicing, especially the foreign policy answers?
When Kerry got to the House on the Rock resort outside Madison, he found his advance staff had transformed an old machine shed into a near perfect replica of the first debate site, figuring in everything from the lectern specs to the camera angles, even the color of the carpet and the walls.
The first day was a disaster, with Kerry struggling to keep his answers within the time limits. "He was awful," says one of the few advisers allowed into the shed. Aides Shrum and Ron Klain, who were running the practices, imposed what they called "zero tolerance," and by the time Kerry had drilled a few days, he had figured out how to make those lights his friends. The green one, for instance, would be his cue to pivot from attacking Bush to talking about his own proposals, so that every answer would end on an upbeat note.
But Kerry had to do more than avoid tripping a buzzer if those debates were to put him back in the race. The first debate--the one on foreign policy--would be the crucial one. Kerry was going to have to make two big, risky points: The war in Iraq was not the war on terrorism, and Saddam Hussein was not Osama bin Laden. Again and again, Klain coached Kerry: "He says Saddam? You say Osama."
By the time Kerry boarded his plane for Miami, he had gone through four full 90-minute dress rehearsals and more hours than anyone could count refining the back-and-forth on every conceivable question. But before they left that shed for the last time, Kerry took Klain aside. "You know, when we came here, I wasn't sure what I'd get out of it," Kerry told him. "But this has been really, really useful."
BUSH
"We Were Watching Our Lead Disappear"
This could be a problem," said Hughes, watching the first debate from a black-curtained boiler room backstage. It was hardly the knockout punch the Bush team had hoped for. Instead, as the debate unfolded, Bush looked more and more ... well, undone. With each smirk and scowl and shake of his head, the President ratified every charge John Kerry had made about his stubbornness and inability to admit mistakes. He not only looked cranky but he sounded it, shearing off his answers, forgetting the more expansive and compelling explanations he routinely gave on the stump. As the squalls continued, Hughes stood huddled in the corner with communications director Bartlett to discuss the setback in the making. Chief strategist Matthew Dowd held both hands to his mouth as if in prayer. "We were watching our lead disappear," says a Bush official.
That was the last thing the Bush team had expected. Instead of employing his legendary charm to put the White House out of Kerry's reach, the opposite occurred. Bush was alienating a huge proportion of the audience with his manner. Spinning reporters afterward, Rove insisted that the President had been "thoughtful" and "pensive"--the epitome of revisionism. Hughes went about her work too, feeding a wreath of microphones and tape recorders with argument after argument that Bush had done well. Later Hughes spoke to the President via cell phone about the early story line. "I was not irritated," he said, irritated. "Sir," said Hughes, "you were."
Over the next 24 hours, the damage seemed to have no end. The crucial block of undecided women voters later told pollsters that Bush reminded them of their husbands who wouldn't stop and ask for directions. Americans who may have been willing to stand behind Bush again if he showed a little bend or a little learning heard no evidence of either. Just as important for the Bush campaign, which had so carefully courted its conservative base, the President's performance set off gnashing and moans among the faithful.
The next morning even Bush was angry--with himself and his staff. "You're losing the spin war," he told his aides. Now he wanted the debate preparation streamlined. Too many people had pelted him with too much advice for him to keep it all straight, he said. So Rove told aides to leave the President alone. "Don't take that to him now," Rove was heard to say, "he's got campaigning to do."
For days the question lingered, Why had Bush bombed? The President had prepared carefully, listening to audiotapes of Kerry's most pointed attacks on the Administration. Everyone--Rove, Hughes, even Laura Bush--had a pet theory. Was Bush tired from visiting hurricane victims? Had he been so blinded by Kerry's claims that he'd forgotten the warnings that his facial reactions as Kerry spoke would be seen by tens of millions? "I still don't know where that person went who showed up to those last practice sessions," said an aide, looking back. The best guess was also the simplest: Bush is incapable of hiding what's on his face when he's angry. And it had been a very long time since anyone had gone into the Oval Office and criticized him so directly and relentlessly.
During the practice for the second debate, Bush aides showed the President tapes of his performance to punctuate the power of his peevishness. They also worked on parrying Kerry's thrusts. "You can't respond to each attack or you'd look defensive, so we worked on picking one, refuting it and then quickly turning to offense," said Hughes. A coming speech on medical liability was shoved aside so that Bush could explain the choices in the race on the economy and terrorism in a way he hadn't in the debate. He would also try to account for his own behavior, hoping a little self-deprecation would even the score. "If you hear all that," he said in the speech, alluding to his opponent's litany of charges during the debate, "you can understand why somebody would make a face."
KERRY
Last Round? Stay on Attack
When it came to his closing argument, John Kerry wasn't about to trust anyone's instincts but his own. Ten days before the election, Lockhart and pollster Stan Greenberg started circulating a battle plan among Kerry's top advisers that called for an abrupt pivot in tone and message for the final stretch. He should talk more about domestic issues, the memo said, adopt a "positive and hopeful tone" and offer optimism instead of fear. "We want to elevate the choice by elevating the moment and the consequences--of four more years of Bush, with all the partiality and bleakness, or a fresh start for America with Kerry, with sense [of] the possibility and hope," wrote Lockhart and Greenberg.
All of which sounded nice--except that Kerry didn't buy any of it. When he saw the gauzy stump speech his staff had produced from the memo, Kerry told the advisers aboard his plane--Shrum, Sasso, Cutter and McCurry--that the last thing he could afford now was to start sounding like Oprah. Not while Americans were hearing of hostage beheadings and car bombs every night on the news; not while Bush and Cheney were stoking the voters' fears with ads about wolves in the forest and hints of a postelection nuclear holocaust. A warm and fuzzy message now, Kerry said, would be a bigger mistake than it was in August, and then it had almost killed him.
Kerry sent the speech back to be overhauled. He wanted a guided missile, not a softball. On Oct. 25, Lockhart and Greenberg described the final march in a memo titled "THE FINAL PHASE Take Three." Kerry would keep making the campaign about Bush's failings --how he had made "catastrophic misjudgments" in Iraq, how he was letting down the middle class on everything from jobs to college costs to health care. And how, as long as Bush kept saying everything was fine, "the country dare not hope for something better."
Reality, Kerry decided, would be his final weapon. He would keep riding the headlines, right up until Election Day. And as it happened, the lead story of that day's New York Times offered a promising start: HUGE CACHE OF EXPLOSIVES VANISHED FROM SITE IN IRAQ. While the following days' headlines would offer a variety of theories and evidence about when and how the explosives were removed, the issue brought the spotlight back to the Bush Administration's competence in running a war.
BUSH AND KERRY
How Do We Play The Videotape?
Four days before the election, on his way to a campaign stop in Manchester, N.H., Bush learned in his regular sunrise briefing that Osama bin Laden had delivered another video to al-Jazeera. It looked like the opportunity to ride the storyline the White House loved best--right through the final days. Whenever voters were reminded of terrorism, they had never failed to turn to the President. Kerry had been using the ghost of bin Laden for months, arguing that Bush had let him go. But now that the real thing was back on their TV screens, voters would focus less on what had happened in the past and more on which man could take care of the threat now. It would "bring the security moms back home," said a Bush adviser, describing the campaign's view of the political benefit.
Still, the President would have to tread carefully. Word went out from Air Force One that no one in the campaign or at G.O.P. headquarters was to make a political calculation within earshot of a reporter. While Bush spoke in Toledo in the late afternoon, his political aides discussed setting a trap for Kerry. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice briefed Bush throughout the day on the details of the tape, and Chase Untermeyer, the U.S. ambassador to Qatar, tried to persuade al-Jazeera not to run it. Once aides were sure the video was being aired, however, Bush wrote down some remarks that included Senator Kerry. "We knew that Kerry couldn't resist responding more than he should on these issues," said a senior White House aide at the time. "He has to show that he knows better." So the President lured Kerry in a brief statement on the tarmac in Ohio: "Americans will not be intimidated or influenced by an enemy of our country. I'm sure Senator Kerry agrees with this."
Translation of the tape came to Kerry's campaign during the afternoon by way of BlackBerry while the Senator was giving interviews by satellite in West Palm Beach, Fla. Shrum, who cannot type, dictated a brief statement to Josh Gottheimer, one of the campaign's young speechwriters, which they showed to the candidate in the limo on the way to the airport. Kerry deleted only one sentence, the first one, which referred to how bin Laden had castigated both him and the President.
"In response to this tape from Osama bin Laden, let me make it clear, crystal clear," Kerry said when he delivered the statement at the airport. "As Americans, we are absolutely united in our determination to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. They are barbarians."
But would Kerry keep to the high ground? The Bush campaign was betting that he wouldn't, and it didn't take long to find what they needed to put their indignation on speed dial. The Bush campaign's rapid-response team discovered remarks Kerry had made to a local Wisconsin TV station during those interviews by satellite, reiterating the criticism he had been making for months that Bush had let bin Laden slip away at Tora Bora. The Bushies cried foul and had Bush do so in his last speech of the day. "It's the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking," said Bush. "It is especially shameful in the light of a new tape from America's enemy." But did Americans agree, or was the tape a reminder of Bush's failure to catch the murderer he had once vowed to bring in dead or alive? Some polls showed a mild boost for the President when voters were asked if the video had pushed them toward a candidate, and who knows? Perhaps bin Laden did help give the President another four years. --With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr. and James Carney/ Washington
With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr.; James Carney/ Washington