Bush did not argue. He, too, had seen the wave coming. Back in 1993, when he decided to run for governor, he had told his wife, Laura, that if he ran and won, and then won again, there would be enormous pressure on him to seek the presidency. But as the Republican moneymen began shuttling down to Austin in their corporate jets throughout 1999, anointing Bush with promises of financial support, “W” was not sure he really wanted to try for the White House. He had a good life in Austin: a strong and loving but publicity-shy wife; teenage twins he doted on; a dog to walk and trails to jog; an important job he liked and was good at. He tried not to show it, but he may have been anxious about reaching for the pinnacle once occupied by his father.
George W. Bush’s campaign has been a family drama. Bush’s devotion to his kin has at once hobbled and inspired him. His sometimes frantic efforts to live up to his father–and avenge the Old Man’s defeat in 1992–have left many voters with an uneasy sensation. At times Bush seems to be riding on his father’s coattails, at others trying too hard to prove himself. None of the family pressure on George W has been overt; on the contrary, his parents have bent over backward not to meddle. Yet one can almost feel the burden of legacy on the man chosen by the Republican establishment to restore the GOP to the office his father lost. Bush wanted to do it his way, with high-minded appeals (“I’m a uniter, not a divider”). Faced with defeat, however, he felt compelled to go back to the hardball tactics his father had used to come back from the brink in 1988.
Bush’s cockiness–and his smirk–masks a streak of insecurity. In the Bush family, brother Jeb–not George W–was long seen as the true politician, the best chance to redeem the Bush family reputation as winners. George W’s political ascendancy was partly an accident: Jeb came up just short in his first try to become governor of Florida, while George W had the good luck to run as a Republican against a liberal in a very conservative state. The eldest son had long been a restless soul. Growing up, George W mixed lazy playfulness with bursts of manic energy. At Yale, his roommate Roland Betts recalled, there were “coasters” and “grinds.” Bush was an “aggressive coaster” who would razz Betts about studying. Only when exams were almost upon him would Bush make a mad dash for the library. George W’s approach to winning the Republican nomination has followed a similar pattern. For months Bush coasted, trying to get by on the political equivalent of a gentleman’s C. Only when faced with the prospect of flunking has Bush gone all out.
Last September Bush repeatedly told a NEWSWEEK reporter, who hadn’t asked, “I’m ready.” But he wasn’t, not for prime time. True, he had a $60 million-plus war chest and the backing of the Republican establishment, but he lacked some of the particular skills of presidential primary campaigning, notably debating on TV. Bush had needed to debate only once in his shoo-in 1998 campaign for governor, and he had agreed to do it on a Friday night, when many Texans are more interested in high-school football games. Following the conventional wisdom that front runners should not dignify their opponents with a stage, Karl Rove, Bush’s longtime top adviser, had decided that Bush should not enter any debate in 1999. After the governor was criticized for skipping the first face-off in New Hampshire, the pressure was on for him to appear at a debate at Dartmouth College in late October. Bush begged off. He had a family obligation that evening, watching his wife, Laura, accept an honorary degree from her alma mater in Dallas, Southern Methodist University. An only child, Laura had just her mother remaining as family. Bush wanted to be by her side as well. Besides, the invitations had been engraved. According to Karen Hughes, Bush’s communications director, the staff never even discussed with Bush the option of skipping Laura’s ceremony.
In New Hampshire, Bush’s local backers fretted. The Dartmouth debate was hosted in part by WMUR, a powerful local TV station. To mollify WMUR, Bush and Laura agreed to be interviewed before the debate. Laura, innocently seeking to show her devotion, offered that if George had asked, she would have been glad to let him go to New Hampshire. Watching on TV, one of Bush’s local handlers, Tom Rath, cringed. “It was the worst of both worlds,” he recalled. “Missing the debate was kind of an exclamation point,” Bush told NEWSWEEK last week. “It was symbolic.” At the time, however, the real lesson of the Dartmouth debate–that Bush could not afford to float above the fray–did not sink in. Bush continued to believe in his front-runner strategy, trying to stay “on message” and to appear “presidential.”
When Bush finally did debate in December, he, too, often looked like he was trying to remember his cue cards. On the stump, the Bush campaign seemed ponderous. Bush traveled surrounded by burly security men, the governor’s protective detail in shades. The traveling press was kept behind ropes; one reporter had T shirts printed up: us–for the staff–and them–for the press. In John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express,” the candidate sat in a leather chair surrounded by reporters. The Bush bus looked more like Air Force One, with a fake Persian carpet, a portrait of the candidate and a bed for naps (though Bush was usually too agitated to lie down).
At times in December and January, Bush seemed lonely and tired. He missed his family. Rath recalled Bush’s moping over Christmas week: “Laura was doing a dinner, the girls were finishing their college applications, and New Hampshire was the last place he wanted to be.” Bush was delighted when he found he could take a day trip to New Hampshire and still be back for dinner. In a rare moment of candor with reporters, Bush allowed that he was “exhausted, dead tired.” He had trouble sleeping on the road, he said, and had brought along his own feather pillow. Bush referred to himself as a “high-energy guy.” Why was he sleepwalking now?
Behind the scenes, his family rallied to him. Mother Barbara, who told NEWSWEEK that she was watching the debates “with one hand over my eyes,” sent him “cheery” e-mail bromides like “Just be natural.” George the Elder has been a “little obsessed” with his son’s campaign, Barbara Bush said in December. George W calls his father after debates. President Bush “tells him to ‘Hang in there, stick to your guns,’ but he never critiques him. His only advice is, ‘Don’t pay any attention to the media’,” says a family friend. “Actually, George W does most of the talking, trying to shore his dad up.” To NEWSWEEK, Bush said, “Mother and Dad are on pins and needles about debates. I remind them I’m great, I’m doing fine.”
Father joined son on the trail only once. While a country band played at a tennis club in New Hampshire on the Saturday night before the primary, President Bush appeared onstage with the candidate and called him “this boy” three times. Bush always calls his grown sons “boys” or “lads” but the press seemed to insinuate that Bush Jr. wasn’t really a grown-up. The elder Bush was “devastated” by the reaction, said the family friend. So was the younger Bush. “I thought how proud I am to be standing up beside my dad,” he told NEWSWEEK. “Never did it occur to me that he would become the gist [sic] for cartoonists.”
The day before the New Hampshire vote, the campaign was strangely adrift. Fearful of being heckled by Vice President Gore’s supporters in Exeter, Bush’s scheduled campaign stop, the Bush bus went to a family restaurant in Derry, but so few voters were around that Bush sat down to a leisurely lunch with Don Evans, his chief fund-raiser, and his wife. In the afternoon–while McCain was holding his 114th town meeting–Bush went sledding for the photographers. Again the press made fun, but the Bush campaign did not see, or would not see, disaster ahead. Confident of his royal progress, Bush saw no need to spend money on tracking polls.
McCain’s 19-point victory in the Granite State came as a shock. “Are you sure?” asked mother Barbara when Bush told her the early results that afternoon. “Dad, we got whipped,” he told his father. “How bad?” asked Bush Sr. “Bad enough that it’s going to be an ugly week, I can tell you that,” George W replied. According to George W, his father told him, “I love you. Hang in there.” Privately, Bush Sr. agonized. “He would rather go through the darkest moments of 1992 [when he lost the presidency] than what George is going through now,” said a friend.
Bushes are supposed to be graceful in defeat, and George W did not disappoint. Fearful that Bush would blow up at his staff, Karen Hughes hesitated before taking her 12-year-old son to Bush’s suite that afternoon, but she needn’t have worried, and later thanked Bush for his graciousness. At a private dinner that evening he failed to tell his assembled cousins, most of whom had not heard about the early results, that he had lost. Laura had to cry out, “Bushie, back up. They don’t know.” Bush went through one of his elaborate pantomimes, arching his eyebrows and holding up his hands in a “what the hell?” posture. “Bottom line, we lost, and lost bad,” he said. “But it’s not the end, it’s the beginning.”
It was the beginning of a low road. Bush’s first stop after losing the New Hampshire primary was at Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C., in the heart of the Bible belt. Before his speech, Bush met in a holding room with his top man in South Carolina, Warren Tompkins. “I know that you have done this before,” Bush said. “Let’s get out there and do it again.” Do what, exactly? The candidate did not need to be specific. Tompkins, he knew, was an old colleague of the late Lee Atwater, the self-described “Bad Boy” of South Carolina politics who had been instrumental in electing Bush the Elder in 1988. In South Carolina, Atwater and Tompkins had perfected the science of negative campaigning: using polling and research to find weak spots in an opponent’s record and persona, then zeroing in to drive up the “negatives.” Atwater and Tompkins had been particularly effective in conjuring up demons that would frighten and energize the Bible-belt vote. George W knew all this firsthand: in 1988, after his father had tripped up in the Iowa caucuses, Atwater persuaded a reluctant George Bush Sr. to go negative. Atwater also sent Bush Jr. to personally campaign in the South Carolina Bible belt, where Bush effectively sewed up the nomination.
In the press, Bush was criticized for appearing at Bob Jones, a college that bans interracial dating, but Tompkins was unapologetic. “The first thing we had to do was build a wall between McCain and the social conservatives,” he said. “If we didn’t do that, we were dead. That’s why we went to Bob Jones.” Not for the crowd–the more than 5,000 students were required to attend–but as a sign of respect to the Christian right, a group that feels marginalized by the establishment media. Tompkins’s job was to turn out the Bible belt for Bush–or, more precisely, against McCain. Tompkins knew what do. With his soft voice, almost a whisper, his thinning, silvery hair, he seems gentle, but he is known as a hard man. Still, he was worried. South Carolina is changing: interstates are replacing back roads, and Yankees are filling up the new retirement communities. In January, with an anxious eye on the McCain juggernaut, Tompkins muttered to a NEWSWEEK reporter, “I’m getting too old for this.”
One of the murkier and darker arts of negative campaigning involves the use of outside groups to make “independent expenditures” on behalf of a candidate–or against his opponent. These usually consist of raw and sometimes malicious ads on local talk radio or direct mail or leafleting at a shopping mall. Under the loosely enforced campaign-finance laws, a candidate cannot coordinate these outside attacks. As a practical matter, no one needed to. Tompkins’s friends include Ralph Reed, former director of the Christian Coalition, and Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. Reed and Norquist, in turn, have many friends on the fringes of the right. It did not require a command from on high to persuade the National Right to Life Committee to run ads on Christian radio insinuating that McCain is under the sway of pro-abortionists. Or to persuade lobbyist Richard Hines–an old friend of Tompkins’s–to send out 250,000 letters accusing McCain of waffling on the Confederate flag.
Bush was well insulated from that sort of mudslinging. He was allowed to play the indignant victim, spluttering when McCain ran an ad comparing his trustworthiness to President Clinton’s. Bush’s advisers claim that Bush himself came up with the line for the response ad: “Disagree with me, fine, but do not challenge my integrity.” Bush, his aides say, has insisted on playing hard but fair (while winking at the rough stuff by the independent groups). When his consultants showed him an ad portraying McCain with some smarmy lobbyists puffing cigars in the background, Bush ordered, “Kill it.” Bush may have been following his father’s example, fulfilling the legacy of Lee Atwater by going negative against McCain, but father and son never discuss such tactics in their regular phone calls, according to a family friend. Indeed, Bush Sr. admires McCain and wrote him a fan letter last October after reading the war hero’s memoir of captivity in North Vietnam.
In an effort to catch up to McCain’s “Straight Talk Express,” Bush loosened up with reporters after New Hampshire. Bush jokingly called the campaign plane, alternately, Retooled One and Accessibility Two. On the plane, the curtain between the candidate’s compartment up front and the press in the rear swung open. From time to time, Bush bowled oranges down the aisle with reporters (an old boys-on-the-bus stunt). Bush even made a small show of shaming Karen Hughes, his six-foot-tall minder sometimes known as Nurse Ratchet. In front of reporters, Bush pointedly asked Hughes about a New York Times reporter, Frank Bruni, whom Bush calls Panchito. (Bush has nicknames for everyone.) Bruni had written an article days earlier suggesting that Bush’s campaign schedule was none too strenuous and Hughes had in turn ridiculed Bruni for taking a day and a half off. Bruni was sore, and Bush, sensitive to the power of the Times, demanded of Hughes, “Did you apologize to Panchito?” “Do I have to grovel?” she asked, plaintively.
It was Hughes who came up with the slogan “A Reformer With Results”–on her way to the hairdresser in Austin, while the campaign was regrouping after New Hampshire. More important than slogans was the transformation in Bush’s style. His aides thought that, in his royal progress to the Oval Office, Bush had become too bogged down in the formal policy briefings and seminars, at once staying too close to the script and fearing a screw-up if he drifted “off message.” Voters had failed to see Bush’s natural charm and ebullience. On the road in South Carolina, Bush was all nervous energy. He abandoned the podium and lengthy speeches to work the crowd with a microphone, chattering on, sometimes a little too loudly. He was chesty and defiant. “OK, sit down!” he ordered obstreperous questioners, to cheers and applause. On the bus, he seemed to be carbo-loading, packing down chips and popcorn for energy. In the tradition of George Sr., he still mangled words and syntax, calling for “an economically vile hemisphere,” and asking his listeners if they were “sick and tired of politics of cynicism, polls–and principles!”
The Bush campaign did seem more nimble after New Hampshire, less stately and bureaucratic. Staffers were no longer required to sit in assigned seats on the plane. Ads that once took days to produce were cobbled together on the run. The crowds were large. Yet they still seemed less animated than the throngs around McCain. The Bush campaign still seemed to strain under the weight of expectation.
The day before the vote in South Carolina, Bush declared to two NEWSWEEK reporters, “I am calm,” as he fidgeted and fished for a piece of candy. “I’ve learned patience, I have. I’m patient.” Still, he admitted that he had been so wound up after last Tuesday’s debate that he had slept only three hours. Burned by the homesickness stories, he had vowed not to talk about how much he missed his family, yet he waxed on about Laura. When she’s beside him, he said, “I feel different. The proximity creates a sense of comfort that is hard to describe.” He wanted to leave no doubt that he had shed any ambivalence about running for president. “I don’t want to win? If that were the case why the heck am I on the bus 16 hours a day, shaking thousands of hands, giving hundreds of speeches, getting pillared [sic] in the press and cartoons and still staying on message to win?”
Bush’s reward came with the exit polls shortly after 1:40 p.m. on Saturday. As usual, the most important phone call was to George Sr. “I really feel good about it,” George W said. Bush Sr. had been fretting for the past two days (“more nervous than I was,” said George W), sending out anxious e-mails to the campaign. When Karl Rove called with the exit-poll numbers, the elder Bush exclaimed, “I’m so relieved.” That evening, he went off to eat ribs at Tom’s Bar-B-Q, happy at last.
