How Bush Did It
Enviado: 5/11/2004 18:18How Bush Did It
Exclusive: A team of NEWSWEEK reporters unveils the untold fears, secret battles and private emotions behind a historic election
Newsweek
This story is based on reporting by Eleanor Clift, Kevin Peraino, Jonathan Darman, Peter Goldman, Holly Bailey, Tamara Lipper and Suzanne Smalley. It was written by Evan Thomas.
Nov. 15 issue - In the winter of 2003-04, Jenna Bush, one of president Bush's 22-year-old twin daughters, dreamed that her father lost the election. Jenna had never before shown any interest in politics or much desire to get involved in her father's campaigns. But now she, along with her sister, Barbara, volunteered to help their father get re-elected. The president was overjoyed to have the girls on the campaign bus, recalled his wife, Laura. His mood lightened, to the relief of his handlers, who had been anxiously discussing their candidate's surliness and impatience.
Politics has been a family business, and a family war, since long before the Capulets and Montagues began plotting against each other. Alexandra Kerry, the Democratic nominee's 31-year-old daughter, disliked politics, but she campaigned hard for her father anyway, until one day hecklers called her a "baby killer." Weeping in her father's arms, she confessed her fear that the Republicans would steal the election. Kerry comforted her, telling her that he would not let that happen (just in case, his campaign recruited 10,000 lawyers).
For all the billions spent and the efforts to make elections a semi-science (Karl Rove, Bush's chief adviser, was always studying "metric mileposts" in his get-out-the-vote operation), politics is intensely personal. Presidential candidates are in some ways objects, screens upon which we project hopes and dreams, fears and hatreds. But they are also human—they are husbands and fathers, they have insecurities and doubts, moments of loneliness and fatigue. They are motivated to run for office by visions of a better country but also by old resentments and angers. This was especially true in the 2004 presidential election.
It is not clear when George W. Bush and John Kerry first met. Kerry once recalled Bush, none too fondly, to writer Julia Reed of Vogue magazine: "He was two years behind me at Yale, and I knew him, and he's still the same guy." Bush says he has no recollection of meeting Kerry at Yale. Both presidential candidates were members of the same college secret society, Skull and Bones, but brothers they were not. The two men had disliked each other before they knew each other.
Bush did not remember Kerry but he knew the type: sanctimonious suck-ups who looked down on fun-loving fellows like George W. Bush. In the world according to Bush, guys like Kerry were not out just to ruin Yale. They wanted to take over the whole country, to impose the smug, know-it-all liberal ideology on regular, God-fearing, hardworking Americans. Kerry's regard for Bush was just as dismissive. Kerry may or may not have met Bush at Yale but he had met his kind before. At Kerry's prep school, boys like Bush were known as "regs," regular guys, the cool, sarcastic in-crowd that made awkward, too-eager-to-please boys like John F. Kerry feel low and left out. The regs were insular, stuck up, too sure of themselves to reach out to, or even see, the wider world.
It is impossible to understand the 2004 presidential campaign without appreciating the nature of the animus between the two men. It wasn't entirely personal; the candidates were capable of saying gracious things about each other's family. But their differences went beyond party or ideology or styles of leadership. Each saw the other as a symbol of the wrong side of the great post-1960s divide. Bush eyed Kerry and saw the worst of Blue State America—a pseudo-intellectual, a Frenchified phony, a dithering weakling. Rove built a whole campaign around this point of view, casting Kerry as a "flip-flopper," "out of the mainstream," clinging to the effete "left bank" of society. Kerry looked down on Bush and saw the worst of Red State America, a know-nothing who blustered and swaggered, even though his head was stuck in the sand. The two candidates could debate lofty issues in a time of war, but their mutual disdain showed through.
Thanks to modern technology and the influence of money, Bush and Kerry could summon enormous resources to bash each other. The 2004 presidential campaign was the first $1 billion-plus campaign (up from roughly $600 million in 2000). About the only good thing that can be said about the cascade of money, much of it from special interests, flowing into the campaign was that it was probably a wash—a zero-sum game, a case of massive overkill on both sides. Both Kerry and Bush were able to call on some very clever political minds. Indeed, Kerry could not stop calling on them—he used his cell phone so much that his handlers twice took it away. Kerry's tendency to endlessly revisit decisions muddled his message. Often, he seemed so tangled up in dependent clauses that he lost sight of the larger issues facing the country.
Kerry (like Bush) is a far more complex man than the caricature he helped create. He could be decent, thoughtful, sensitive, especially with his well-loved daughters, Alexandra and Vanessa. He had proved his toughness and resilience in war and politics; he was a searching and careful thinker. And yet at times he seemed like a shallow opportunist with a finger in the air. Politicians, of course, need both vision and practicality to get anything accomplished, and Kerry, while often cautious, could also be bold. Both to heal the bitter partisan divide and because he would do anything to win, Kerry offered to make GOP Sen. John McCain a kind of grand national-security czar—serving as both secretary of Defense and vice president in a Kerry administration. McCain declined and supported Bush.
In an interview with two NEWSWEEK reporters aboard Air Force One in August, Bush was funny and relaxed, self-confident enough to be self-effacing. He is blessed with a patient and caring wife who can tell him when he has gone too far. Yet the peevishness that he showed in the first presidential debate was never too far from the surface. Bush may believe in himself too much. Or, more precisely, perhaps, he has banished his self-doubt to the point where he mistakes his own ego for the national purpose.
For more than a year, NEWSWEEK followed the presidential campaigns of both men from the inside. Beginning in mid-2003, a team of NEWSWEEK reporters detached from the weekly magazine to devote themselves to observing, recording and shaping the narrative that follows. The reporters were granted unusual access to the staffs and families of both candidates on the understanding that the information they learned would not be made public until this Election Issue—after the votes were cast on Nov. 2.
Viewed close in, the Kerry campaign was even more unwieldy and clumsy than it appeared in plain view. An underreported story of the campaign was the distracting presence of the candidate's willful wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who demanded everyone's attention, including her husband's. Kerry was delighted by Teresa, and not just by her fortune; she was smart, sexy and independent. But at times she could be a trial. Kerry himself was a loner, willing to be criticized but oddly impervious to criticism. The candidate was almost impossible to "manage," at least until the fall of 2004, when John Sasso arrived on the campaign plane to impose some discipline. It was a good thing Sasso came aboard with less than 60 days to go, observed Jim Jordan, Kerry's first campaign manager (fired after nine months in 2003); any longer and Kerry would have tired of him, too.
President Bush, by contrast to senator Kerry, was a zealot for order. The hard-drinking frat boy had long since found the cleansing joy of discipline. He demanded a tightly wound, top-down, on-time-to-the-minute operation. His advisers, some of them martinets, gave him what he wanted. At Bush-Cheney 2004 headquarters in Arlington, Va., the dress code was corporate and the atmosphere vaguely martial. Staffers were supposed to be upbeat at all times. The press was at best a nuisance to be tolerated. (Periodically, NEWSWEEK would be banished from campaign headquarters, the last time because the magazine reported that a couple of campaign staffers had been seen twirling their cigars at an "off the record" party before the first debate.)
Better organized than the Kerry campaign, more clever and quicker to respond, the Bush campaign became too confident, openly condescending toward the sometimes hapless Kerryites. It was almost too successful in creating, in the public mind, a caricature of Kerry as a loser. When, at the first debate, Kerry appeared more presidential than the president, the Bush campaign was stricken with near panic. It rallied by becoming even harsher in its treatment of Kerry. And Kerry slammed right back, as if to show he could mislead as shamelessly as his opponent. There were undoubtedly great issues of war and peace at stake in the election, but the attacks were highly personal, right up to the day the votes were cast.
Bush had the advantage of being a better natural campaigner than Kerry, who never did learn how to deliver a speech. Campaigning ground Kerry down; he seemed to labor under the weight of expectation. But Bush was worn by war and burdened by the terrible weight of the terrorist threat—and that was before he began stumping for re-election. Both men had deep reserves of grit and ambition. The ugly race did not necessarily reflect the character of the candidates. Both have a sense of honor, even if their better sides were sometimes hidden. In the end it was Kerry who had to find the moral fortitude to accept reality—and abandon a dream he had begun nurturing in high school.
Campaigning for the presidency is grueling beyond all imagining. It takes an extraordinary person to withstand the grind, the abuse or the pressure. Kerry and Bush, for all their human flaws and foibles, are not ordinary men. They are driven—by patriotism, duty, vanity, vision and, in this election, a lifelong disdain for each other. Each man saw in the other a world view he utterly rejected. Their personal differences, writ large, became the choice on Election Day, 2004.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6407226/site/newsweek/
Exclusive: A team of NEWSWEEK reporters unveils the untold fears, secret battles and private emotions behind a historic election
Newsweek
This story is based on reporting by Eleanor Clift, Kevin Peraino, Jonathan Darman, Peter Goldman, Holly Bailey, Tamara Lipper and Suzanne Smalley. It was written by Evan Thomas.
Nov. 15 issue - In the winter of 2003-04, Jenna Bush, one of president Bush's 22-year-old twin daughters, dreamed that her father lost the election. Jenna had never before shown any interest in politics or much desire to get involved in her father's campaigns. But now she, along with her sister, Barbara, volunteered to help their father get re-elected. The president was overjoyed to have the girls on the campaign bus, recalled his wife, Laura. His mood lightened, to the relief of his handlers, who had been anxiously discussing their candidate's surliness and impatience.
Politics has been a family business, and a family war, since long before the Capulets and Montagues began plotting against each other. Alexandra Kerry, the Democratic nominee's 31-year-old daughter, disliked politics, but she campaigned hard for her father anyway, until one day hecklers called her a "baby killer." Weeping in her father's arms, she confessed her fear that the Republicans would steal the election. Kerry comforted her, telling her that he would not let that happen (just in case, his campaign recruited 10,000 lawyers).
For all the billions spent and the efforts to make elections a semi-science (Karl Rove, Bush's chief adviser, was always studying "metric mileposts" in his get-out-the-vote operation), politics is intensely personal. Presidential candidates are in some ways objects, screens upon which we project hopes and dreams, fears and hatreds. But they are also human—they are husbands and fathers, they have insecurities and doubts, moments of loneliness and fatigue. They are motivated to run for office by visions of a better country but also by old resentments and angers. This was especially true in the 2004 presidential election.
It is not clear when George W. Bush and John Kerry first met. Kerry once recalled Bush, none too fondly, to writer Julia Reed of Vogue magazine: "He was two years behind me at Yale, and I knew him, and he's still the same guy." Bush says he has no recollection of meeting Kerry at Yale. Both presidential candidates were members of the same college secret society, Skull and Bones, but brothers they were not. The two men had disliked each other before they knew each other.
Bush did not remember Kerry but he knew the type: sanctimonious suck-ups who looked down on fun-loving fellows like George W. Bush. In the world according to Bush, guys like Kerry were not out just to ruin Yale. They wanted to take over the whole country, to impose the smug, know-it-all liberal ideology on regular, God-fearing, hardworking Americans. Kerry's regard for Bush was just as dismissive. Kerry may or may not have met Bush at Yale but he had met his kind before. At Kerry's prep school, boys like Bush were known as "regs," regular guys, the cool, sarcastic in-crowd that made awkward, too-eager-to-please boys like John F. Kerry feel low and left out. The regs were insular, stuck up, too sure of themselves to reach out to, or even see, the wider world.
It is impossible to understand the 2004 presidential campaign without appreciating the nature of the animus between the two men. It wasn't entirely personal; the candidates were capable of saying gracious things about each other's family. But their differences went beyond party or ideology or styles of leadership. Each saw the other as a symbol of the wrong side of the great post-1960s divide. Bush eyed Kerry and saw the worst of Blue State America—a pseudo-intellectual, a Frenchified phony, a dithering weakling. Rove built a whole campaign around this point of view, casting Kerry as a "flip-flopper," "out of the mainstream," clinging to the effete "left bank" of society. Kerry looked down on Bush and saw the worst of Red State America, a know-nothing who blustered and swaggered, even though his head was stuck in the sand. The two candidates could debate lofty issues in a time of war, but their mutual disdain showed through.
Thanks to modern technology and the influence of money, Bush and Kerry could summon enormous resources to bash each other. The 2004 presidential campaign was the first $1 billion-plus campaign (up from roughly $600 million in 2000). About the only good thing that can be said about the cascade of money, much of it from special interests, flowing into the campaign was that it was probably a wash—a zero-sum game, a case of massive overkill on both sides. Both Kerry and Bush were able to call on some very clever political minds. Indeed, Kerry could not stop calling on them—he used his cell phone so much that his handlers twice took it away. Kerry's tendency to endlessly revisit decisions muddled his message. Often, he seemed so tangled up in dependent clauses that he lost sight of the larger issues facing the country.
Kerry (like Bush) is a far more complex man than the caricature he helped create. He could be decent, thoughtful, sensitive, especially with his well-loved daughters, Alexandra and Vanessa. He had proved his toughness and resilience in war and politics; he was a searching and careful thinker. And yet at times he seemed like a shallow opportunist with a finger in the air. Politicians, of course, need both vision and practicality to get anything accomplished, and Kerry, while often cautious, could also be bold. Both to heal the bitter partisan divide and because he would do anything to win, Kerry offered to make GOP Sen. John McCain a kind of grand national-security czar—serving as both secretary of Defense and vice president in a Kerry administration. McCain declined and supported Bush.
In an interview with two NEWSWEEK reporters aboard Air Force One in August, Bush was funny and relaxed, self-confident enough to be self-effacing. He is blessed with a patient and caring wife who can tell him when he has gone too far. Yet the peevishness that he showed in the first presidential debate was never too far from the surface. Bush may believe in himself too much. Or, more precisely, perhaps, he has banished his self-doubt to the point where he mistakes his own ego for the national purpose.
For more than a year, NEWSWEEK followed the presidential campaigns of both men from the inside. Beginning in mid-2003, a team of NEWSWEEK reporters detached from the weekly magazine to devote themselves to observing, recording and shaping the narrative that follows. The reporters were granted unusual access to the staffs and families of both candidates on the understanding that the information they learned would not be made public until this Election Issue—after the votes were cast on Nov. 2.
Viewed close in, the Kerry campaign was even more unwieldy and clumsy than it appeared in plain view. An underreported story of the campaign was the distracting presence of the candidate's willful wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who demanded everyone's attention, including her husband's. Kerry was delighted by Teresa, and not just by her fortune; she was smart, sexy and independent. But at times she could be a trial. Kerry himself was a loner, willing to be criticized but oddly impervious to criticism. The candidate was almost impossible to "manage," at least until the fall of 2004, when John Sasso arrived on the campaign plane to impose some discipline. It was a good thing Sasso came aboard with less than 60 days to go, observed Jim Jordan, Kerry's first campaign manager (fired after nine months in 2003); any longer and Kerry would have tired of him, too.
President Bush, by contrast to senator Kerry, was a zealot for order. The hard-drinking frat boy had long since found the cleansing joy of discipline. He demanded a tightly wound, top-down, on-time-to-the-minute operation. His advisers, some of them martinets, gave him what he wanted. At Bush-Cheney 2004 headquarters in Arlington, Va., the dress code was corporate and the atmosphere vaguely martial. Staffers were supposed to be upbeat at all times. The press was at best a nuisance to be tolerated. (Periodically, NEWSWEEK would be banished from campaign headquarters, the last time because the magazine reported that a couple of campaign staffers had been seen twirling their cigars at an "off the record" party before the first debate.)
Better organized than the Kerry campaign, more clever and quicker to respond, the Bush campaign became too confident, openly condescending toward the sometimes hapless Kerryites. It was almost too successful in creating, in the public mind, a caricature of Kerry as a loser. When, at the first debate, Kerry appeared more presidential than the president, the Bush campaign was stricken with near panic. It rallied by becoming even harsher in its treatment of Kerry. And Kerry slammed right back, as if to show he could mislead as shamelessly as his opponent. There were undoubtedly great issues of war and peace at stake in the election, but the attacks were highly personal, right up to the day the votes were cast.
Bush had the advantage of being a better natural campaigner than Kerry, who never did learn how to deliver a speech. Campaigning ground Kerry down; he seemed to labor under the weight of expectation. But Bush was worn by war and burdened by the terrible weight of the terrorist threat—and that was before he began stumping for re-election. Both men had deep reserves of grit and ambition. The ugly race did not necessarily reflect the character of the candidates. Both have a sense of honor, even if their better sides were sometimes hidden. In the end it was Kerry who had to find the moral fortitude to accept reality—and abandon a dream he had begun nurturing in high school.
Campaigning for the presidency is grueling beyond all imagining. It takes an extraordinary person to withstand the grind, the abuse or the pressure. Kerry and Bush, for all their human flaws and foibles, are not ordinary men. They are driven—by patriotism, duty, vanity, vision and, in this election, a lifelong disdain for each other. Each man saw in the other a world view he utterly rejected. Their personal differences, writ large, became the choice on Election Day, 2004.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6407226/site/newsweek/