Exclusive: A team of NEWSWEEK reporters unveils the untold fears, secret battles and private emotions behind a historic election
Charles Ommanney / Contact for Newsweek
The president and First Lady at a New Hampshire rally
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.
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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.
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• Behind the Bush Win NEWSWEEK's Editor Mark Whitaker discusses how the Republicans got the better of John Kerry (Courtesy of CNN)
NEWSWEEK
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.
HOW BUSH DID IT
NEWSWEEK's exclusive, behind-the-scenes account of the presidential campaign
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.
