On a flight to Portland, Ore., on Sept. 25, Bush stood up and put his face only inches from a reporter’s face as he described how lucky he was to have Laura back by his side on the campaign trail, freed from her home-maker chores. “She got a little bit bridled there,” Bush said, as if he were referring to a prize horse. Laura thought her furlough had given her a fresh perspective on the race. “I was off the road, helping the girls move to school,” she said. “You get a totally different view than you get on the [campaign] plane. I was seeing what everybody else was seeing.”
As Laura told the story, she began to have worries as she helped her daughter Barbara unpack at Yale in late August. Barbara didn’t have a TV set in her dorm room, but Laura was getting regular reports from George’s cousin Debbie Stapleton and her husband, Craig, about the newly critical press coverage, particularly in The New York Times. Laura was staying with the Stapletons in Greenwich, Conn. “I’m worried about the campaign,” Laura told her hosts. She wasn’t just bothered by Gore’s rising poll numbers–she had expected a bounce for the veep after the Democratic convention–but by the “look” of the Bush campaign in the media. “It didn’t look good,” recalled Laura. “The pictures weren’t good, the stories weren’t good, the pictures on TV weren’t good.”
Her anxieties jelled when she returned to the campaign. As George was out for his afternoon jog, Laura sat in the hotel room flipping channels. She came across CNN’s daily afternoon show “Inside Politics.” Every story, it seemed to Laura, served only to magnify her husband’s problems: the bungled debate-over-the-debates, the “major league” open-mike gaffe, the inconsistency between Bush’s promise to improve the “tone” of politics and the RNC’s sneering ads about Gore. She was struck with a feeling of helplessness. When George returned to the room, she unloaded.
“This is terrible,” she said, gesturing at the TV. “Every single story was negative.”
“Well, don’t fuss at me about it,” said her husband, sweaty from his three-mile run. Sounding more frustrated than irritated, he reminded her he rarely watched TV.
“I’m not fussing at you. I’m fussing at CNN,” she replied. Taking her husband at his word, she decided to fuss at someone who could do something. She picked up the phone and called campaign manager Karl Rove. The candidate’s wife described what she had just seen on CNN. “This needs to be changed,” she told Rove. “Everybody needs to reassess. We need to reassess what we’re planning. The campaign has gotten a little bit into the safe. Every event is the same. George has stopped doing those one-on-ones.” Just as he had after he lost the New Hampshire primary, she argued, her husband needed to step out from be-hind the podium and start taking questions again directly from the voters.
Rove offered no argument or defense. “You’re right,” he said.
Laura also pointed out to Rove that her husband wasn’t doing any “free media”–appearing on talk shows. She believed that chatting with Oprah or Larry King and their ilk would show off the candidate to his best advantage. “You need to start going on those shows,” she told her husband.
Bush bucked at first. “No, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to go on those shows.” Laura knew that his reluctance was reflexive. She had seen it before. “You’re good on those,” she persisted. “You ought to go on ’em and give the people the opportunity to see you–and not just see you the way some network covers you. They’re seeing how you really are.”
The campaign embraced Laura’s advice. Two weeks later the candidate was on Oprah, kissing the talk-show host on the cheek. He went on Regis dressed as Regis, in his host’s trademark monochromatic tie and shirt, an idea cooked up by Brad (Fargo) Freeman, an old Bush pal who helped run the California campaign. He exchanged jokes with Jay Leno and chatted seriously with Brian Williams on MSNBC. At the same time, he stopped going into the back of the plane and fencing with the traveling press corps.
Bush quickly warmed to his new role as talk-show talent. Burned by his former friends in the fourth estate, he was only too happy to cut off the cynics in the back of the plane and reach out instead to the chatty hosts and their vast audiences of female swing voters. He was glad to be out of what he called “the barrel,” his term for the place where unlucky candidates get stuck when the media want to shoot at them. Reflecting on his postconventions plunge, Bush suggested that the drumbeat of bad press had undermined the campaign’s confidence and diverted it onto the low road. “Campaigns can develop a… I don’t know if psychosis is the right word,” he said, “but a frame of mind. If you ever doubt whether your candidate can win, the frame of mind shifts toward ‘Well, we better tear the other guy down.’ We got kind of a mixed message going then,” he said, referring to the caustic RNC ads that went up during the first weeks of his September swoon.
In the press accounts of Bush’s new look, there was no mention of Laura’s critical role, and that was fine with her. “Well, I mean, I don’t provide that much advice,” the former librarian said in her calm, unaffected voice. “And I certainly don’t provide any policy advice”– Hillary she isn’t. But, she allowed, she could speak freely to both her husband and his staff in ways that others could not. “I’m talking about saying to George, ‘You just look terrible. You just look terrible on TV’,” she recounted. Her first inclination had been to blame the press for being unfair. But then, she said, “I thought about it: we weren’t managing the press like we should–or how the other guy was.” Gore, she said, was “having more success with a lot less access” by the traveling press corps.
There were moments during the “black month,” as some staffers called the four grim weeks from mid-August to mid-September, when Laura’s hopes began to flag. But she was saved by a willingness to laugh and friends who were willing to joke with her. “Do you think it’s over?” she plaintively asked one friend during a particularly low moment. “What! Over?” the friend replied. The friend began to imitate John Belushi’s rallying-cry speech from “Animal House” when the administration threatens to shut down the frat house: “Did you say over? Nothing is over until we decide it is. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell, no!” (Belushi’s character, Bluto, is an old favorite of George W’s.) Both women dissolved into laughter.
Bush’s charm offensive on the talk shows worked: his dive in the polls ended. His peck on Oprah’s cheek was immediately dubbed “The Kiss II.” Pundits, always looking for a way to keep the story fresh by reversing momentum in the campaign, sensed yet another turnaround. Bush’s numbers recovered slightly, and the campaign appeared to settle into a virtual dead heat going into the final six weeks.
Small gestures–a kiss, an unguarded remark–appeared to be tipping the balance back and forth. Swing voters were swayed by mere body language, then swayed back again by some other ephemeral gaffe or stumble. Issues mattered less to these voters than some small sign that was revealing of character, or deemed to be. Fortunately for Bush, just as he began once again to show his sunny side, Gore reverted to his bad habit of embellishing the truth.
In one of his routine attacks on the drug companies for overcharging seniors, Gore claimed that the arthritis medication used by his mother-in-law, a drug called Lodine, had cost three times as much as the same medication used to treat Gore’s dog, Shiloh. Sniffing a story that was too good to be true, Walter Robinson, a veteran reporter for The Boston Globe, called a Bush operative named Dan Bartlett. Bartlett was spokesman for the rapid-response unit in Austin known as the Candygram Committee. (The name was taken from an old “Saturday Night Live” sketch in which a man-eating “land shark” knocks on the door, squeaking, “Candygram!” An early sobriquet, the Stink Bomb Committee, was dropped.) Not quite as nimble as Gore’s Kitchen, the Candygram Committee had been on the defensive for much of September, but now it pounced.
Robinson had found a congressional study that cited exactly the same prices for human and animal prescriptions of Lodine as those cited by Gore. As it turned out, Gore’s mother-in-law really was paying substantially more for her own arthritis medication than to treat the Gores’ dog, Shiloh, but not three times as much. Still, Gore had been caught exaggerating, and for a time Shiloh became a hot story, thanks in part to the energetic fanning of the Candygram Committee. Bartlett sent out faxes and e-mails to reporters and got the RNC to hire a college student, put him in a dog outfit and hang a sign around his neck reading lodine the canine. For the next several weeks, “Lodine the Canine” showed up at most Gore events. Two weeks later Bartlett was still helping the Globe’s Robinson comb through Gore’s “bio spots,” his paid ads extolling his family background. Robinson had a hunch that Shiloh had been digitally removed from the ads that were still running on TV. “They rubbed out the dog,” Bartlett drawled with a mild giggle. “See if we can’t revive the story one more time.” The dog, in fact, had not been deleted. But Bartlett needn’t have worried. Gore would soon provide fresh material at the first of the presidential debates.
Bill Clinton was existing on four or five hours of sleep a night. Routinely using scheduled “office time” to take 20-minute naps during the day, he remained heedless of the sleeping habits of others. At the Los Angeles convention, consultant Bob Shrum was awakened at 6 a.m. by the president, wanting to know if Gore’s speech had too much of a populist tilt. It didn’t, Shrum groggily tried to assure the president. In New York City in mid-September for a gathering of world leaders, Clinton returned exhausted to his suite after a day of speechifying at the United Nations and engaged his aides in a few hands of Oh Hell, his new favorite card game. While he played, he scribbled notes for a speech that the First Lady would be giving in the morning. The aides stumbled to bed at 1:30 a.m., but Clinton awakened one of them at 3 a.m. to transmit his notes to Hillary, so she could see them first thing in the morning. Nothing unusual there, said the aide. Clinton was an addict. “This is the first Labor Day in 26 years that I have not been in a parade,” he moaned to a friend. Clinton couldn’t get enough of Hillary’s campaign.
As his wife neared the biggest hurdle of her candidacy–the first debate with Rep. Rick Lazio on Sept. 13–Clinton was determined to be by her side. The First Lady was not so sure that was a good idea. True, it would look odd to have no family present at the debate. Lazio’s wife, Pat, would be front and center. Hillary had hoped their daughter, Chelsea, could be in the audience, but she had just left for the Olympics in Australia. As for the president, she was uneasy about having such a large distraction sitting in the front row. Afraid of provoking a scene or witnessing his disappointment, she couldn’t bring herself to tell her husband to his face. “Could somebody please call him?” she pleaded. Pollster Mark Penn agreed to be the bearer of bad news.
Bill Clinton was a happy warrior. Hillary, by contrast, was becoming cranky and querulous, lashing out at her aides over small mistakes. The First Lady had been in “savage moods,” remarked one of them, bruised and worn. “The campaign has taken a real toll on her,” said this aide. “There are phone conversations, and you just want to drop the phone.” Gone was the confident Saint Hillary of the first term, determined to remake national health care. Now she seemed off balance, unwilling to trust her own political judgment. She was constantly second-guessing herself and everyone else, running a campaign so cautious that no one dared budge her from her daily message.
Debate preparation was fraught. Knowing that the moderator, NBC’s Tim Russert, would not be shy about probing her personal life, her aides felt compelled to ask her the hard questions. “We pulled no punches in that regard,” said a participant. In rehearsal, asked why she stayed with her husband after Monica, Hillary bristled. “You could almost hear her thinking, ‘That’s none of your goddam business’,” said this aide. But when Russert actually did confront her with a tape of her defending her husband in Monicagate before the truth came out, Hillary seemed genuinely humble. She lowered her eyes and gave a halting but human response. Instead of playing the gentleman, Lazio piled on, and later strode across the stage to thrust a piece of paper in her face (an agreement to forgo “soft money”), while wagging his finger and demanding that she sign the pledge. His aggressiveness hurt him. Afterward, polls showed Hillary winning among women by two to one, easing a gender gap that had bedeviled her for months.
Clinton watched his wife perform on a television set in the White House solarium. He was not entirely congratulatory when he called after the debate. He felt she had left too many of Lazio’s claims and charges unrebutted and told her so. Despite Lazio’s bumptiousness, Hillary’s advisers were also lukewarm about her showing. They felt that the First Lady had revealed too much of her frostiness and controlling nature. “Hillary, you know the issues, and everybody thinks you know the issues even when you don’t,” a top adviser told her. “It’s your attitude, your demeanor.” “I know, I know,” she replied. Intellectually, she did. But changing her manner, which tended to be starchy and cold when she was threatened, was hard to do.
The same could be said for Al Gore. As he prepared for his first debate with George W. Bush, the vice president was urged to warm up by a group of 13 so-called real people brought in to act as a kind of private focus group. The “real people” were voters who had been collected along the campaign trail and invited to Florida to watch the practice sessions and offer advice. “You should relax, and you should smile more,” one woman ventured. Gore replied with deadpan dryness: “You know, all this high-priced talent over here”–he gestured at his team of consultants and aides–“they never told me that.”
Everyone had a good laugh, but there was an uncomfortable reality behind the joshing exchange. Gore’s friends and expensive media advisers had, in fact, been telling the candidate to loosen up for years–for the previous two decades–without much success. To get him ready for the biggest debates of his life, Gore’s team had assembled an elaborate and costly training camp at an aquatic center in Florida. A stage was built to resemble the debate site. In the auditorium of the aquatic center a large plastic shark hung on the wall. Some aides had draped the shark with a mule harness taken from a Carthage, Tenn., barn where Gore had always practiced for debates. The metaphor seemed about right: Gore was at once a mule and a shark in debate, stubbornly determined and biting. The cost of this setup, plus transportation and lodging for the veep’s large entourage, including the “real people,” was $400,000. Some aides grumbled that the money could have been better spent winning a state. But no one denied the critical nature of the debates, especially the first one, in a deadlocked race.
At first Gore seemed more weary than engaged. At an early practice session, some aides could swear that he had actually fallen asleep for a moment at the podium. The candidate seemed oddly passive discussing tax cuts. It wasn’t enough to attack Bush’s proposed $1.3 trillion plan as a giveaway to the rich, his handlers warned. The vice president needed to sell his own plan. Focus groups had discovered that the tuition tax deduction was popular. Talk that up, urged the advisers. Other focus groups cautioned him not to get too tangled up in the specific numbers. All those trillions and billions could be confusing.
Every so often Gore would say, “Let’s discuss this answer.” He would retreat from the podium and sit down. An aide watching began to wonder if he wasn’t more interested in sitting down than discussing. Gore’s back had been bothering him. His ramrod-straight posture was in part a way of coping with nagging back problems. The vice president was starting to show the wear and tear of campaigning. His nails were bitten to the quick, a habit that defied his iron will. “He’s one of those bloody-cuticle types,” said an aide. Gore was known among his handlers for rigid self-discipline about diet and exercise. “But then he’ll eat a plate of cookies,” said one.
Playing the role of George W. Bush at debate prep was Paul Begala, a Texan who had been a close adviser to Bill Clinton in the ‘92 campaign and later came back as a second-term White House aide. Begala had replaced former congressman Tom Downey, a close friend of Gore’s who had served as a sparring partner for the veep in past debates. Downey disqualified himself in early September when he received an anonymously mailed package containing a videotape of George W’s debate prep, as well as a briefing book and some Bush-campaign memos marked confidential. Wisely, Downey had turned the package over to the FBI. Searching for the mole in Bush headquarters, the gumshoes had interrogated staffers right up to Karl Rove. Suspicion focused on a low-level receptionist at the office of Bush’s media consultants, Maverick Media. The receptionist had been filmed by a post-office security camera sending out a package on the same day and at about the same time the mystery tape was mailed to Downey. The investigation–with its implication of some kind of effort to frame the Gore campaign with “stolen” campaign documents–had unsettled Bush headquarters. Defensively, the Bushies tried to steer reporters to look into a Democratic plot, noting that the fire door between Maverick and a studio where local Democrats produced ads had been kept unlocked.
In a roundabout way, the flap over the purloined video benefited the Bush camp, said Stuart Stevens, Bush’s media consultant. He thought that Begala was a poor substitute for Downey in the role of George Bush. The former Clinton aide loathed his fellow Texan, said Stevens, and didn’t understand him. At Gore’s training camp, Begala took delight in imitating Bush’s crude frat-brother jokiness. When the subject of gays in the military came up in a prep session, Begala launched into a riff about the Clinton administration’s “Gayto” alliance (a joking reference to NATO and the policy on gays in the military). Everyone chuckled except Gore, who stayed in character, grimly earnest. Even the practice handshakes became a silly pantomime. Gore crushed Begala’s hand and drove him backward. Begala recovered and thrust himself in Gore’s face. Once Gore accidentally stepped on his foot but then pushed again. “It was like sumo wrestling,” said Begala.
The Gore camp methodically “focus-grouped” jokes and comebacks. If Bush criticized Gore’s judgment, the veep was supposed to riposte with a crack at Bush’s ownership of the Texas Rangers: “At least I never traded Sammy Sosa,” Gore was coached to say. If Bush went after Clinton, Gore was instructed to counter, “George Herbert Walker Bush isn’t on the ticket and neither is William Jefferson Clinton. This is about you and me.” The Gore team tried to find statistics that would make Bush look like a tool of the rich. Ron Klain of the Kitchen came up with the most damning: the claim that Bush allocates more of the budget surplus to provide a tax cut for the wealthiest 1 percent of the population than he does for all his other spending–on education, health care, defense–combined. Leaving nothing to chance, campaign aides studied old videotapes of the debate moderator, PBS’s Jim Lehrer. They predicted the obvious, that the amiable and determined-to-be-neutral Lehrer would not come on as strong as Tim Russert.
All this preparation, however, could not alter Gore’s basic character trait, his must-win combativeness. The late Bob Squier, who spent many years coaching Gore for debates, finally gave up trying to program Gore. He would advise newcomers to Gore Land: never bother with strategy memos. Just give him killer lines, killer facts, killer statistics.
In retrospect, aides would wish that they had tried a little harder to soften Gore’s hard edges. But the campaign was hungry for a knockout in the first debate. Gore’s slim lead in the polls was starting to slip. At a meeting in Nashville, Stanley Greenberg presented the shaky numbers. Gore’s lead had been cut in half. Rarely more than 4 points, it was now an anemic 2. More worrisome, his lead in the battleground states was also dwindling. “It’s a result of looking too political again,” said Greenberg. Gore’s little embellishments–the latest one was a joking claim to have heard his mother sing as a lullaby a labor anthem that wasn’t written until he was 27 years old–were taking a small but perceptible toll. “You know, we all missed this,” said campaign manger Billy Daley, trying to head off the finger-pointing before it got started. But everyone knew Gore needed a clear win in Boston.
At Bush’s training camp–his beloved Texas ranch–true anxiety settled in the weekend before the first debate. In many ways, Bush’s debate manual was the July 2000 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, whose cover featured Al Gore with a curled upper lip revealing a vampirelike fang. “An Acquired Taste: How Al Gore Learned to Love the Jugular,” a 16-page analysis of Gore’s debating style by James Fallows, was read over and over by everyone, including the candidate. “It just scared the hell out of us,” said media man Mark McKinnon. “It really got our attention.”
The Bush team gathered for a mock debate at a small church near Bush’s ranch on Friday night, Sept. 29. The evening couldn’t have gone worse. “It was a disaster,” said McKinnon. Karl Rove arrived late; he had taken a wrong turn driving up from Austin. Bush, who hated tardiness, was annoyed and impatient. The mood didn’t improve once Bush faced off against his sparring partner, Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who took the role of Gore. Bush was unfocused and uninspired, and he knew it. The confidence was gone. “I feel like we’re lambs being led to the slaughter,” McKinnon told Stuart Stevens in the parking lot.
Stevens wasn’t so worried. He thought Bush would rally, as indeed he did the next day. “Just forget last night,” said the candidate. “Let’s get after it today. I’m ready.” Still, Stevens was concerned that Bush had not rehearsed enough. True, Bush had been preparing on and off for five months. The first sessions had begun in secret back in late May. (Gregg had slouched down in the passenger seat of a car and held up a newspaper when he arrived for the first run-through at the Bush family compound in Maine.) But, distracted by his campaign’s woes, Bush had barely practiced for a month. Bush’s relaxed approach to debate prep frustrated his consultants.
Bush bridled at overhandling. In October 1999, his friend the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach suggested that he sit down for a two-hour practice session with a motivational speaker. After 10 minutes Bush said, “That’s all. It’s over.” McKinnon later recalled, “It was like a fish on a bicycle.” For the debates, the Bush organization had teams of advisers preparing one-liners. A briefing book innocuously labeled communications–the same notebook that was lifted from Maverick Media and mailed to Tom Downey –contained about 50 pages of comebacks. (Many were pretty lame. If Gore got nasty, Bush was supposed to exclaim: “Who’s your debate coach, Bobby Knight?” If Gore referred to President Bush’s “read my lips” tax blunder, Governor Bush was to retort: “It’s better than reading the president’s grand-jury transcripts.”) Bush ignored the canned jokes. He preferred his own quips, both spontaneous and rehearsed. (His crack “I may mangle a syl-la-ble” in the second debate was his own, though he practiced it beforehand and even used it once at a rally between the first and second debates.)
Bush was willing to drill with his handlers, fielding rapid-fire questions. Handlers called the exercise “pepper” after the warm-up exercise used by ballplayers before a game. But Bush would take just so much substance. When Josh Bolton, his policy adviser, started rattling off four points on Social Security, Bush cut him off. “Yeah, yeah, I got it,” he said abruptly. “That’s enough.” Some aides tried to find a virtue in Bush’s swaggering style, comparing him to a quarterback who wants the ball in the fourth quarter. Foreign-policy adviser Condi Rice was less confident. A trained concert pianist, she believed in the power of repetition. Before a recital, she would “run it,” meaning play the entire piece exactly as it was to be played. If she made a single mistake, no matter how minor, she would play the whole piece over again until there were no mistakes. To her chagrin, Bush only once practiced a full debate standing at a podium.
In the Bush family, anxiety is meant to be hidden behind kidding and jokes. On the day of the first debate, Bush entertained his sister, Doro, brother Jeb and wife, Laura, with routines and pantomimes. About half of Bush’s humor is physical. With his family as his audience in the trailer outside the Clark Athletic Center at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Bush imitated a candidate nervously pacing. Head down, grimacing, frowning, he clumped about, as the other Bushes laughed and giggled and teased each other. Should they sit in the front row and hold hands the whole time? (They didn’t.) Bush made fun of Doro, who kept getting up and folding tissue in her purse, just in case she teared up.
Walking into the cavernous, empty arena a couple of hours before showtime, Bush cracked, “Who’s got my parka?” Gore had insisted on keeping the thermostat down so that he wouldn’t sweat under the lights. Up onstage, Bush called out, “Laura, get up here. Let’s practice that kiss.” As the hour neared, Bush got serious. He hugged Laura and walked alone into a small, curtained-off area. There he stood straight up, head slightly bowed, hands crossed in front of him, like a man paying his respects at a funeral. After five minutes he marched with military purpose -onto the stage.
Gore entered from the other side. Staring into his TV in the staff room, Stevens took one look at the vice president and exclaimed, “I can’t believe they let him go out there looking like a transvestite.” Gore’s makeup was heavy and theatrical, as if he was covered with rouge and lipstick. Stevens smiled to himself. Before the debate, he had noticed that the light over Gore’s podium seemed brighter, or hotter, than the light over Bush’s podium. Stevens had asked a photographer to use a light meter; his suspicions were confirmed. But he had said nothing to the Gore people or the debate planners.
Bush struggled with the opening question, about his governing philosophy. “He booted it,” one aide whispered to another. The Bush staffers were wound up. “What are you talking about?” Communications director Karen Hughes screeched at Gore’s image. “No way!” cried Karl Rove when Gore appeared to exaggerate. “Talk about overall reform!” Hughes yelled at her own candidate when the debate turned to prescription drugs for the elderly. Everyone seemed to be shouting instructions at once.
In the Gore trailer, Bob Shrum was pacing. The tightly wound media consultant could never sit still during debates. He had been relieved, at the Dartmouth debate before the New Hampshire primary, to find that the sound was piped into the men’s room, so that he could flee there without missing anything. Inside the trailer, Gore’s aides high-fived when their champion browbeat Bush about prescription drugs and groaned heartily when Bush dismissed Gore’s attacks on his tax plan as “fuzzy math.” Begala was complaining in mock frustration that the real Bush wasn’t performing as skillfully as Begala’s ersatz Bush. When Gore became a little too agitated, the trailer rang with good-natured cries of “Down, boy!” Aides chuckled when the microphone picked up the sound of Gore sighing at Bush’s fumbling answers. To the hopped-up Gore team, it seemed amusing.
Afterward, Gore asked his handlers how he’d looked on TV. He was told that TV commentators Chris Matthews and George Stephanopoulos (both loyal Democrats before they became pundits) had pronounced him the victor. Gore preened and accepted congratulatory handshakes from his aides and hugs from Tipper and Karenna. Mike Feldman, a senior Gore aide, didn’t have an inkling that anything had gone wrong until his mother called him with a complaint about Gore’s performance. “I just wish he didn’t sigh as much,” she said. Feldman hadn’t even heard the sighs over the din in the trailer.
The first reality check came from the campaign’s “dial groups.” Following standard practice, the Gore campaign hired teams of swing voters to watch the debate while wired up to a kind of crude applause meter. When these voters liked what they saw, they turned the dial up; when they didn’t, they turned the dial down. The Gore high command fell into a funk when they reviewed the dial-group results the next morning, along with the postdebate comments of various focus groups. Bush had actually gained on the question of who would “fight for working families,” which was supposed to be Gore’s mantra. The undecideds had been essentially unmoved. Bush had managed to fog the debate over the tax numbers, undercutting Gore’s most effective line of attack. All the back-and-forth over who was telling the truth about which numbers had just left voters confused. “So many numbers, not enough principles,” was the verdict on the candidates by a focus group run by Stanley Greenberg. “Like he was showing who was smartest,” said one voter about Gore.
Worse, in the debate aftermath, reporters were steadily picking away at Gore’s rhetorical exaggerations. Gore had said that he accompanied Federal Emergency Management Agency Director James Lee Witt on a trip to Texas after severe fires. Gore had actually been at a Houston fund-raiser at the time. He also cited the experience of a Florida schoolgirl forced to stand because of classroom overcrowding. The girl got a seat the next day. These slip-ups were fairly trivial measured by the norms of political discourse. Gore had traveled with Witt at least 17 times–just not on this trip. And the girl’s classroom was, in fact, overcrowded. But Gore’s reputation for stretching the truth left him no margin for error. The Candygram Committee fanned the fire by calling the vice president a “serial exaggerator.” Gore’s staff saw the potential for serious damage. “The old Gore is back in the public’s eye,” said a weary aide. Each mild misstatement seemed to reconnect Gore to Clinton. The day after the first debate, a discouraged Gore adviser parroted the obvious Bush line: “How can you have a guy you can’t trust–he’s just like Clinton.” Sure enough, that same day the Bush camp went up with an ad called “Trust,” extolling Bush as a man who kept his promises and denigrating Gore, by implication, as a politician who did not.
The 60-second spot began with Bush talking about “personal responsibility,” a theme that tested well in focus groups run by pollster Fred Steeper. In the White House, went the message, Bush would earn voters’ trust by his own code of personal responsibility. And he would, in turn, trust voters, and not big government, to make wise choices about the way they spent their money and lived their lives. While Bush “trusted” the taxpayers to keep their own money, the ad proclaimed, Gore wanted to waste it on government bureaucrats.
The timing was perfect, but it was a coincidence. The ad was originally designed as a “closer,” a kind of summing up to be aired in the final days of the campaign. But it tested so well that the Bush team put it right up after the first debate. It seemed to move the numbers in all the battleground states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Oregon, Ohio. Gore’s mild fibbing at Debate I made the ads resonate. “Gore walked right into it,” McKinnon said.
Bush was on a high coming off the Boston debate. His first call, as always, was to his father. “How’d I do, Dad?” he asked President Bush, who had been in his usual nervous state all day. “Great!” the elder Bush exclaimed. (Always eager to help, Bush senior had arranged to have his personal masseuse drive from Kennebunkport, Maine, to Boston to give his son a soothing rubdown.) To their parents’ surprise, the Bush twins had watched the debate in their college dorms and lavished praise on their father over the phone. “They’re kind of oblivious,” explained Laura. “Which is good. We really want them to be. We want them to be able to go and just do their deal and not be nervous about Dad.”
At 6 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 5, less than 48 hours after Debate I, polling expert Matthew Dowd briefed the top Bush team on the focus groups. The debate itself was judged a draw, but the voters had focused on Gore’s grimace, his sighs, his mannerisms. One man called the vice president “Eddie Haskell,” after the unctuous character in “Leave It to Beaver.” The message was clear: Gore was hurting himself. There was no need to pile on. Later that morning Dowd counseled Dick Cheney to lay off Gore in his debate against Joe Lieberman that night. “What about all this credibility stuff that’s coming out?” asked Cheney. The voters are “getting it,” said Dowd. “They’re already starting to talk about it. [Gore’s] already making your point for you.” Cheney, trying to be the good soldier, pressed, “Couldn’t I bring it up?” Dowd cautioned him: “I wouldn’t go personal.” Dowd was feeling good. He realized he hadn’t felt good three days in a row since Labor Day.
In the Gore camp, Greenberg and Shrum were exhausted and grumpy as they flew back to Washington from Danville, Ky., on the Friday morning after the Cheney-Lieberman debate. Shrum was defensive about Gore’s performance in Boston, insisting that the vice president had won and that the media, egged on by the Bush camp, were bent on denying Gore a victory. Reporters personally dislike Gore, Shrum said, and the press always wants to keep the race close, so it needs to knock down the favorite. But Greenberg and several other aides were unhappy with Gore’s pit-bull performance. Shrum testily insisted that Gore was who he was, that he -couldn’t be changed, and there was nothing left to do but to try to dissect Bush. The others protested: couldn’t Gore show a little more grace and majesty? A little more passion for his own programs and a little less eagerness to rip up his opponent? Could he defend his ideas more and attack Bush less?
The private bickering erupted into an embarrassing public squabble at the airport, with voices raised between the normally low-key Greenberg and the sometimes bombastic Shrum. The two men, who are friends, quickly patched up their differences, but many Gore staffers were growing uneasy about the performance of the campaign’s high-priced consultants. Shrum and Greenberg had long and glittery resumes; Shrum in particular was a legendary figure in the world of Democratic politicos for his rhetorical gifts and slasher instincts. But both men seemed distracted at times. Staffers blamed their multiple obligations: Shrum’s 2000 election clients included the extremely well financed Jon Corzine’s Senate campaign in New Jersey, while Greenberg continued to play guru to Tony Blair of Britain and Ehud Barak of Israel. “It’s very unsettling,” said a second-level Gore campaign operative. “Most of the time Shrum is half there and Stanley is jet-lagged.”
Under stress, Shrum could be prickly and harsh. Behind his back, staffers called the former scholarship student “Lord Shrum” and joked about his villa in Italy. Shrum was known for unloading on staffers who dared question his work. A young media adviser asked if the press might raise questions about the fairness of an ad that reminded black voters of Bush’s opposition to hate-crimes legislation in the wake of a brutal racial killing in Texas. “Why would anybody on the planet bother to worry about that!” Shrum exclaimed in his most biting way. He was impatient with any strictures on his attack ads. “Shrum, very deep inside of him, believes you should rip limbs off unless it’s proven this is the one time in a million when you shouldn’t,” said an aide.
The grumbling over the consultants grew after the vice presidential debate. Though that encounter was regarded as a model of civility and reasoned discourse by the press and most viewers, some Gore staffers were unhappy with Joe Lieberman’s showing. He seemed overcoached and dull, not the “authentic” Lieberman who appealed to independent voters. The GOP’s Cheney, the Gore advisers believed, had been prepared solely by a policy expert, former Bush Defense Department official Paul Wolfowitz. (Actually, Cheney had been prepped by the usual consultants.) Lifeless on the stump, Cheney was a calmly assured and occasionally witty presence in the debate. Lieberman, so lively and free-spirited on the campaign trial, had been dumbed down by a gang of consultants who coached him to begin every sentence, it seemed, with “Al Gore and I.” Lieberman didn’t seem to mind; “Al Gore and I” was his locution, he said, and he felt he had done fine in the debate. His sense of wonder at being on the ticket was undiminished. But Gore staffers muttered about “Little Gore” and a lost opportunity.
That Lieberman did not trounce Cheney was surprising enough. More disturbing to the Gore team was the perception that Gore was beginning to lose on the issues, particularly with swing voters. It had been axiomatic in much of the media and certainly within Gore’s campaign that while the Democratic candidate might be less likable, he was more often “right” on key voting issues, especially taxes and health care. Now Gore’s own polls began to shake that assumption. Bush had been chipping away at Gore as a big-government liberal. While Bill Clinton had been careful to come across as a New Democrat by stressing that the era of big government was over, Gore–with all his spending promises–had been sounding very much like an Old Democrat. At least that’s how it looked to swing voters, who tended to be centrists and wary of overpromising politicians. Bush’s “Trust” ad was playing on their anxieties by making Gore look like a guardian of the Nanny State, telling people what to do with their money and their lives. In a conference call after the first debate, Greenberg warned the Gore team that Bush was making headway by grabbing the word “choice.” The GOP’s “mantra,” said Greenberg, “is choice versus Democratic paternalism, where government tells you what choices to make and if you’re the right person. This has power. We’ve got to get that word back.”
Even more galling, Bush was having luck with an old Democratic trick: scaring the elderly. In an ad that seemed to move the numbers among seniors, the GOP warned that Gore’s health-care plan would force seniors into a “government-run HMO.” In states where the ad ran, local officials were getting calls from anxious old people demanding to know, “Are you going to make me join an HMO?” The GOP ad was something of a distortion. The “government-run HMO” it referred to was the same Medicare program that seniors already relied on. “It was the best kind of demagoguery,” said a Gore adviser ruefully, “in that it worked.”
In another conference call on the Friday morning after the first debate, Greenberg argued that Gore needed to do more to sell his own tax cut, to overcome the charge that he was a tax-and-spend liberal. Shrum agreed, declaring, “We’ve got to have an ad that talks about the tuition tax cut.” Polling showed that voters were especially partial to a tax cut to help them finance their kids’ college educations. Another aide somewhat hesitantly pointed out that the campaign was already running an ad touting the tuition tax credit.
The Gore camp’s strain was showing in small but telling ways. On conference calls, the gourmand Shrum could always be heard eating. The more nervous he became, the more he dipped into his office’s well-stocked snack cabinet. Shrum and other ex-smokers, like pollster Harrison Hickman, popped Nicorette gum at a furious rate. Media man Bill Knapp carried bags of small supermarket carrots, which he dipped into at high-stress moments. Indeed, beneath the sound of edgy voices at senior staff meetings ran a steady undertone of chomping, crunching and chewing. With less than five weeks left before Election Day, Gore’s team was a little punch-drunk. Sure that if he could only find the right “message,” Gore would win, Greenberg was constantly tweaking the candidate’s carefully calibrated populist slogans: “Fighting for working families,” “Fighting for working families and the middle class,” “Fighting for hardworking families.” Speaking to a reporter, an aide ran down all the formulations until he twisted his tongue and burbled, “Struggling to work for fighting families.” He broke into giddy laughter.
On the weekend before the second debate, Greenberg put his candidate’s odds of winning at two to one. The electoral map seemed to favor Gore: he was running well ahead in the giant states, New York and California, and seemed reasonably safe in some other big ones, including New Jersey and Illinois. But there were some patches of concern: Gore was in trouble in states like West Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee, reliably Democratic in the past two elections. Rural, blue-collar males had liked Bill Clinton. Al Gore, for all his old-time Southern populism, still showed a little too much of his St. Albans breeding to appeal to the Elvis vote.
It was a gloomy group of top Gore advisers, several in their jogging shorts, who sat around a slightly down-at-the-heels resort hotel a couple of days before the second debate. The hotel was being remodeled and the restaurant was closed, cramping the culinary style of the consultants. Greenberg was running down the polling numbers, which were discouraging. “We don’t really need to discuss this,” interjected Shrum. Greenberg kept going. “We don’t need to hear this,” said Shrum, more insistent. Greenberg bristled. “Look, I’ve got my job and you’ve got yours,” he said. Campaign chairman Bill Daley stepped in. “OK, boys, that’s enough.” The room immediately quieted. “It was like, boom, he’s the adult,” said one of the group later. “He’s the headmaster. He has an air of authority. He’s non-egotistical.” For weeks Daley had been managing the complicated rivalries between the consultants while keeping staffers upbeat and focused. He was almost universally admired within the campaign for his skill and presence. But as Gore’s numbers slipped and Election Day grew closer, his job was becoming more difficult.
The candidate seemed very down on himself for the week after the first debate. He had thought he’d scored a clear win–and then watched, appalled, as he dropped 5 points in some polls, including his own. Gore was disturbed by the fuss in the press over his exaggerations and the growing public perception that he was a blithe prevaricator. “It’s so ironic,” said Begala. “Gore has a very sensitive conscience, and that’s why the notion that he’s some kind of serial exaggerator is crapola. He’s really a deeply moral person.” Gore decided that he had to find some way, in the second debate, to apologize for his misstatements in the first.
But how? Greenberg, looking at the numbers, felt that the only way to stop the slide was for the candidate to flat-out say he was sorry. Greenberg, Shrum and media consultant Carter Eskew advised Gore to turn to moderator Jim Lehrer in Debate II and say, “I’m sorry, Jim–I want to tell the country how sorry I am.” But Begala, along with several others in the Gore retinue like Tad Devine, worried that Gore was looking hangdog and needed to get his confidence back. At rehearsal, after Gore had dutifully practiced his apology, Begala, playing the role of Bush, waited until a few answers had gone by and interjected, “You know, Mr. Vice President, you’re going to have a whole lot more to apologize for next week because you just told a whole other set of whoppers.” Begala was trying to demonstrate that a confession by Gore would just open the door to a new round of attacks. Breaking out of his role at rehearsal, he blurted, “This is crazy! You’ve got nothing to apologize for!” Begala’s outburst infuriated Greenberg, who denounced the former Clinton aide for not being a “team player.”
Gore listened impassively. He wanted to improve his performance and was willing to do what it took. Before the first debate, he had wolfed down two Power Bars and three Diet Cokes. Buzzing with high doses of carbs and caffeine, Gore had been competely wired. For the second debate he vowed to cut down (though he couldn’t resist sneaking a couple of Power Bars in the makeup room). He docilely listened to an aide tell him, “Don’t be so difficult. Don’t argue with the moderator.” At rehearsal for Debate I, his coach, Michael Sheehan, had suggested that Gore occasional-ly shake his head “no” while his opponent was talking. Ever unsubtle, Gore had apparently taken his advice to an extreme, mugging and sighing.
Gore’s final bit of predebate conditioning was to watch a tape of a “Saturday Night Live” skit mocking his performance as a hyperactive know-it-all in the first debate. Media man Carter Eskew was hoping to cure Gore’s sighs and expostulations with a bit of gentle ridicule. (Shrum scoffed at a New York Times report that the idea to watch the video came from President Clinton.) Gore laughed as he watched, but the satire may have cut a little too close to home. By the time Gore took the stage at Wake Forest University in North Carolina on the night of Oct. 11, Attack Al had overcorrected into a self-parody of somnolent contrition and politesse.
In the holding room backstage, about 20 Bush staffers punched the air with their fists and whooped, “Yes!” A few even jumped out of their chairs. Mark McKinnon kept yelling, “He’s in the zone!” Bush was riffing along, with apparent ease and confidence, on foreign policy, his shakiest subject. Among the debate watchers, -only Condi Rice, Bush’s foreign-policy adviser, seemed subdued. She may have realized that Bush’s success was more a matter of style than of substance. Bush was playing loose with some facts, recklessly accusing former Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin of pocketing international relief money and calling on the Europeans to “put troops on the ground” to handle peacekeeping in the Balkans when they already did. No matter. The Bushies were in full cry, trying to catch Gore in mid-fib. “Check that one!” Karen -Hughes or Karl Rove would shout over and over again. When Gore pointed out that only a handful of American troops were still stationed in Haiti, Hughes demanded, “A handful?” “Yeah,” replied Rice. “Between 200 and 300.” Dan Bartlett of the Candygram Committee was trying to field all the questions, with his rapid-response team working computers along the back wall. Finally, Bartlett put his foot down. “Y’all calm down!” he said. “Everything that comes out of his mouth is not a lie.”
Onstage, meanwhile, Bush continued to lean back in his chair, as if he were discussing an interesting baseball trade. He later remarked that he noticed how nervous Gore was by the tightly clenched fists on the table before him. “He just seemed really wound up,” said Bush.
A few Gore aides sensed trouble looming as the candidates droned on. Carter Eskew leaned over to Greenberg and whispered, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this is a disaster.” Still, many of Gore’s advisers were sure the press would attack Bush for his misstatements. When Bush said he would bring the troops home from Haiti, someone shouted out to Leon Fuerth, Gore’s national-security adviser, “I bet we don’t have 20 guys in Haiti.” But in the roundups and postmortems, the press by and large gave Bush a free pass. The explosion of violence in the Middle East overwhelmed the headlines. The second debate was quickly forgotten, though not by Gore, who seemed tired and dispirited as he flew home to Nashville.
By Debate III, at Washington University in St. Louis, Gore was fed up with his own advisers. Aboard Air Force Two on the way west, a parade of hired hands brought their briefing books into Gore’s cabin to do their final presentations. Gore barely heard them. “Yeah, yeah. Thanks,” he said and shooed them away with a wave of his hand. At debate prep, held at a bucolic conference center 50 miles outside St. Louis, Gore seemed to be playing a game of Hide From the Staff. He kept canceling rehearsals and meetings and instead hung out with some of the “real people.” There was Nat the Firefighter and Laura from Iowa, who told him, “Don’t be afraid to touch people. We like to be touched. Make a connection with people.”
Gore had only a single formal prep session. It was clear that he was determined to be aggressive. The debate rules called for the candidates to sit on stools and take questions from ordinary voters selected by the Gallup polling organization. Within some agreed-upon limits, the candidates were free to roam like talk-show hosts with a studio audience. The Gore advisers who had negotiated the debate formats told the veep that Bush’s team had dickered endlessly about a “zone of comfort” into which the other candidate could not move. For Gore, who liked to throw elbows under the basket during pick-up games, this was an invitation to ignore the rules. “I think this guy doesn’t like somebody in his face. I’m going to get in his personal space,” Gore announced. Michael Sheehan taught Gore how to sit on a stool without looking like a bump on a log. Hook your heel over the bottom rung and put the other foot flat on the floor, the debate coach instructed. “It’ll be like starting blocks for a sprinter,” said Sheehan. Gore was eager to pounce. His advisers weren’t sure a confrontational strategy would work and told him so. The veep ignored them.
Al Gore was sure that he had won the third debate. He had been aggressive and forceful and, in his own mind at least, more substantial and commanding than Bush. “Now no one can argue I -didn’t win,” he confidently declared to his advisers. With reporters, he tried to be offhand about the uneven course of his three debates. The first had been “too hot,” he said, the second “too cold,” the third “just right.” But voters were left wondering which Gore would show up in the Oval Office. In most tracking polls after the debate he lost a point or two. Bush was brimming with self-confidence when his own polls showed him nudging ahead. On Friday, Oct. 20, three days after Debate III, the GOP candidate summoned a NEWSWEEK reporter up from the press section of the plane and announced, with a big grin, “I’m going to win.” Over the next five hours, he mentioned his polls four times to the reporter.
The wall between Bush and the press was starting to crumble again. At Laura’s insistence in mid-September, Bush had stopped coming back to have on-the-record chats. The reporters, meanwhile, had made it clear they wanted no more off-the-record conversations. But on a flight after the third debate, Bush wandered into the no man’s land between the staff section of the plane and the press section in the rear and began chatting with a few journalists. Several of the regulars refused to join in, but others were glad to see him. “How are you, Mr. President?” asked Fox News’s Carl Cameron, already awarding Bush the White House. “You think so?” replied Bush, putting on his aw-shucks manner. “I feel good.” “You should,” said the reporter. “Looks like things are clicking the way you said they would.”
“Coming down the stretch. We’ll see,” said Bush.
“Just like you said it would, man,” Cameron repeated.
“Yeah, they’re clickin’ right now,” said Bush. He caught sight of CNN’s Candy Crowley about 20 rows away. “Dolce!” he hailed, using the nickname he had bestowed on her. He began inching his way from no man’s land into the press section. Soon he was prattling on about baseball with CBS, Time, the Chicago Tribune. The rush chairman was back.
Bush was in an expansive, folksy mood a little later when he sat down with the NEWSWEEK reporter to relive the debates. He admitted that he had been anxious. Just before the first debate, he said, he had sunk into a “quiet mode where I just got reflective and people stayed away.” He had said “a little prayer, a little just kind of meditation, just kind of calming, just kind of thinking through. You know, kind of just relaxing.” During the first debate, he realized that his opponent “certainly wasn’t Abraham Lincoln.” When he heard Gore’s sighs, Bush was reassured: “I must be scoring. I must be frustrating him.” Gore’s jabs did not bother him. “I’m kind of a needler, and that means I can also take a needle pretty well,” he said.
The first time Gore walked into Bush’s “space” during the third debate, the governor resolved not to react, other than with a wink and a quick look that seemed to say, “You talkin’ to me?” “I was saying to myself, ‘He thinks he’s going to rattle me, but he is not.’ It didn’t bother me in the least. It gave me an opportunity to really kind of brush it off.” He wasn’t interested in scoring debating points, he said. “I was talking to Americans. I’m the kind of guy that realizes I’m not going to get all the votes, but there’s someone out there that’s looking for a leader and they’re looking for humor and they’re looking for style. They want to see. They want to see.”
