Gore needed an enemy to attack. He seemed motivated less by a vision for the country than by the need to best an opponent. It didn’t much matter which one. He hadn’t disliked Bill Bradley. His attitude toward Bradley’s challenge was more “let’s get it over with,” said an aide. Yet even after Gore had sewn up the nomination, he kept on robotically attacking Bradley in primaries that were, for all intents and purposes, meaningless. At a rehearsal for a California debate on March 1, former CNN president Rick Kaplan joked, “Let’s do the debate now.” Gore’s sparring partner, Tom Downey, intoned, “I’m going to kick your a–.” Without missing a beat or cracking a smile, Gore mechanically launched into his standard rap, attacking Bradley’s health-care plan.
Gore had been lucky to face a Democrat even less personable than himself. But in retrospect his victory was a little too overwhelming. As he ran up the score against Bradley, Gore was portrayed in the press as an attack dog who would say anything to win. By April his aides were wondering if they had won the primaries but were losing the phony war. The campaign reverted to its sour mood of the previous summer. To Gore’s field organizer, Michael Whouley, the period was reminiscent of Irish music, all melancholy. To Bill Knapp, another aide, it was the “Blue Period II.” Lacking any direction, the Gore advisers fell to blaming each other for the campaign’s missteps.
The most egregious was Gore’s bungling of the Elian Gonzalez case. Polls showed that a majority of Americans backed the effort of the Clinton Justice Department to send the young shipwreck survivor back to his father in Cuba, over the vehement objections of his Miami relatives. In early April, Gore jumped into the controversy, endorsing a move in Congress to pass a law allowing Elian to stay in the United States. Gore was immediately denounced in the press for undermining his own administration and for pandering to the Cuban-American vote in a desperate and probably futile attempt to win Florida in November. Gore’s chief media adviser, Carter Eskew, was in despair. “We f—ed up, and I take responsibility. Gore should have said, ‘Look, folks, I’m more conservative on this issue than the administration. I think Castro is a bad guy.’ Instead we managed to take a principled position that was also unpopular and turn it into both an unpopular and unprincipled position. Not an easy thing to do.”
Campaign chairman Tony Coelho, who had urged Gore to put out a statement on Elian, took most of the blame for the fiasco. Coelho was politically tone-deaf, other staffers grumbled. The congressman’s experience was buying off constituent groups, not winning the votes of the masses. When a New York Times article on Coelho’s tangled business dealings suggested that the Gore campaign chief was better at politics than business, one sen-ior aide bitterly cracked, “He’s no f—ing good at politics, either.”
Increasingly obsessed with maintaining total control over the campaign, Coelho had failed to inform his number two, Donna Brazile, that Gore would make his statement on Elian. Earlier, Brazile had warned that African-American voters would be angry over any appearance of special treatment for Cuban immigrants (Haitian boat people were routinely sent home). Now she was furious at her colleagues on the campaign. “If you disagree, you get dissed,” complained Brazile. She thought she was being further punished for her own impolitic remarks: she had called Gen. Colin Powell a “token” for the Republicans. Feeling persecuted, she had begun putting her bad press into a folder labeled Willie Mae Horton, after the infamous 1988 Republican ad designed to stir up white fear of black criminals. A street fighter, Brazile felt at loose ends once Gore had locked up the nomination. “Come March, April, what’s a girl like me to do? That’s when the boys came back.” The “boys” were Coelho, who took away Brazile’s control of campaign spending, and the assorted consultants who always seemed to be hovering around.
And even the boys were bickering. Coelho alienated Gore’s able press handler, Chris Lehane, by muzzling the candidate. At one point in the spring, Coelho barred Lehane from making Gore available to reporters on the road. Frustrated, Lehane went on vacation to Italy for a couple of weeks. When he returned, he was immediately summoned to Nashville by Coelho’s assistant, who said Coelho wanted to dress him down about campaign leaks. Lehane was fed up. “Here’s my answer,” he told the assistant. “F–k you.” Coelho also battled with the campaign’s high-priced, big-ego consultants like Bob Shrum and Eskew. Media consultants take a hefty slice of a campaign’s ad budget, sometimes as much as 15 percent. Since Gore would spend tens of millions on advertising, Coelho balked at paying the usual percentage. He finally succeeded in slicing the consultants’ fees roughly in half, but the haggling created an atmosphere of suspicion and ill will. Coelho grumbled about the “greed” of the consultants. He couldn’t believe, for instance, that pop-culture adviser Naomi Wolf was demanding to be reimbursed for her meals at Burger King.
When the sniping between Coelho and Brazile began to surface in the press, along with a steady drumbeat of stories bemoaning the campaign’s poor showing, Gore angrily summoned his two top aides. The come-to-Jesus meeting took place on May 25 at a skybox at Nashville’s football stadium, where Gore had gone for a publicity event. He told Coelho that he needed to “work on your relationships.” Coelho took umbrage; he thought he was better at that than the vice president. Recalled Brazile: “Basically, he blamed us for everything. He just laid us out. It was a takeout, only we didn’t know who was going to be taken out.” They left the meeting asking each other, “Does he want us to go?” Brazile flippantly said, “McDonald’s is hiring. I’ll go.” “No,” Coelho said, “I’ll go.” Increasingly given to dark angers, convinced that he was constantly being undercut and end-run, Coelho knew he was finished as campaign chairman. The press vultures were starting to circle, poking again into his finances. His colon was inflamed, his blood pressure was spiking and he was unable to control his epileptic seizures. By mid-June he was gone. Oddly, he and Brazile bonded. She visited him in the hospital. He called her “Donna Lou.”
Once more, Gore was searching for a campaign chief–and Election Day was now less than six months away. In the awkward interregnum before Coelho officially stepped down, media man Eskew tried to handle day-to-day decisions in Nashville. He sat, juggling phone calls, in a small conference room known as the Mosh Pit. By late afternoon it had the sweaty aroma of a locker room. Eskew was desperate for someone to take over the daily grind, and in early June another political consultant, Tad Devine, stepped in. A working-class kid from Providence, R.I., Devine had a reputation for street smarts. Over the phone, Gore instructed Devine to “get this thing rolling in the right direction.” Gore wasn’t even sure what his latest Mr. Fix-It looked like. At a meeting in Nashville, he cast his eyes around the room and stopped with a puzzled look when he came to Devine. The consultant quickly prompted him: “Hi, Mr. Vice President, Tad Devine.”
With Gore trailing Bush by double digits in the polls, even former outcasts returned to the inner circle, as they had a habit of doing in the Gore campaign. Banished for nine months, pollster Mark Penn made a comeback. He wrote a memo arguing that the campaign should go after a new breed of swing voter whom he called “wired workers,” mostly young dot-comers who were just forming their political allegiances. These voters were sick of the old politics, Penn warned. They were turned off by partisanship, pandering and class warfare. Penn was avidly listened to, but he was told to keep his involvement a secret. Penn thought he was edging aside pollster Harrison Hickman, who had replaced Penn. But then a third pollster, Stanley Greenberg, started showing up at meetings. The cast kept changing. Even the discredited pop guru Naomi Wolf still had a role. “We’ve got a lot of political experts, but no one else is out there reading People magazine,” Eskew explained.
Gore was deluged with specific policy proposals. “What are we running for–college professor?” scoffed Brazile. Gore seemed to soak it all up, indiscriminately. He would ponder the facts–any facts–searching for some quick fix to his political woes. “He’s a sponge,” Brazile said, sighing; she was constantly trying to buck up the candidate. “If you tell him, ‘Al, it’s cloudy today and the sun isn’t going to shine,’ he ponders that s–t all the damn day! So I tell him, ‘You’re in fighting shape. You’re kicking a–.’ They tell him, ‘You’re losing in New York.’ He wonders all day, ‘Why am I losing in New York?’ I tell him, ‘Honey, you’re winning in Michigan.’ He -doesn’t read newspapers; he reads clips. He reads talking points. They have scripted this man so bad. You got to get people around him with good spirit, and take those damn 9-to-5ers off.”
Gore himself protested that he was being overprogrammed. His favorite new movie was “Being John Malkovich,” a darkly funny, offbeat film about an actor whose persona is invaded by strangers. “That’s what I feel like,” he complained to Carter Eskew. “A guy whose head is occupied by all these people telling me what to do.” In June the campaign reached for a new slogan and came up with “Progress and Prosperity,” which Gore sometimes reversed as “Prosperity and Progress.” No one seemed to notice.
The campaign increasingly blamed the “media elite,” the large news organizations and smaller but influential periodicals headquartered in New York and Washington. Bob Shrum figured the press was suffering from “impeachment hangover,” a close cousin of Clinton fatigue. The press failed to get Clinton, so now they’re going to get Gore, Shrum theorized. Coelho had affected a breezy bravado about the East Coast establishment press. “I don’t care what The Washington Post says,” scoffed Coelho. “I do care what they say in Cleveland and Chicago and Florida and California.” But media adviser Knapp disagreed. “Managing the elite press,” he said, “truly is one of our biggest problems. The day he’s sworn in, it’ll be ‘Gore sworn in despite voters’ dislike of his toenails’.” In Knapp’s view, the press saw Gore as “smarmy” and filtered everything through that lens. Former vice presidential chief of staff Ron Klain thought the press saw Gore as a “liar or an exaggerator.” Gore felt wounded by his bad press, said Klain. He had been a journalist himself, and he had gone out of his way to befriend a number of longtime Washington reporters and editors. They had repaid his friendship and understanding with scorn and ridicule. “The idea they don’t like him seems inconceivable to him,” said Klain. “He’s known some of them for 20 years. How can they feel that way? He’s not said that in so many words, but paraphrasing, yes.”
Gore granted plenty of interviews, but he tended merely to recite his stump speech one-on-one with reporters. In earlier campaigns he had loosened up off the record, especially after a beer or two, telling over-the-top jokes with a sort of exaggerated deadpan sarcasm. But, burned by his former reporter friends and tired of wooing them, he was generally guarded or perfunctory when he went back to the press section of Air Force Two.
Gore was particularly vexed by three prominent women reporters: Ceci Connolly of The Washington Post, Katharine (Kit) Seelye of The New York Times–the two most influential papers covering Gore–and Sandra Sobieraj of the Associated Press, the most important wire service. Campaign staffers (and some other reporters) called the trio the “Spice Girls” or the “Three Witches of Eastwick” or the “Bitches on the Bus.” The women were regarded, perhaps unfairly, by the Gore campaign as humorless and hyper- critical. When Gore proudly announced that he had won endorsements from 15 of the 17 members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Connolly demanded, “What about the other two?” The campaign blamed an error by Seelye for exacerbating the impression that Gore stretched the truth. When Gore was discussing his congressional role in cleaning up toxic waste, he brought up the Love Canal scandal and said, “It started it all.” Seelye printed, “But I was the one that started it all.”
While Gore was getting picked apart in the press, George W. Bush seemed to be cruising along on a wave of favorable publicity. All spring, Bush was seen smiling and joking as he made a series of centrist proposals under his compassionate-conservative banner. Gone was the hard-right South Carolina slasher. He was treated in the press as a reasonable, amiable man, the sort of fellow you’d like to have over for a barbecue. To the disgruntled Gore lieutenants, the Bush press seemed totally snowed. How, they wondered, did he do it? And why was he getting away with it?
By the Spring of 2000, George Bush was spending so much time back in the press section of his campaign plane that reporters were beginning to half-seriously complain. With his restless energy and infinite desire to charm, Bush, who began calling himself “Mr. Accessible,” made a campaign of winning over the traveling press corps. Though the reporters grumbled that Bush was a little too accessible, most of them were flattered, and in some cases privately thrilled, by his attention. The media magazine Brill’s Content featured Bush on its cover, grinning as he held a drink tray for reporters. “The whole idea is to show he’s a good guy, a nice guy,” Wayne Slater of The Dallas Morning News told the magazine in early summer. “That’s been his calling card for his whole life… The question is, ‘Will we let him get away with it?’ And at the moment we are.”
Bush had always been an equal-opportunity hugger, pincher and grabber. Whenever Bush said goodbye to Gerry Parsky, his California campaign chairman, each would reach up with the hand that wasn’t shaking and give a light slap, mafioso style, on the jaw. As he mingled with reporters in the cramped aisle of the plane, he would often grab and wag their cheeks with both hands, palm the top of balding pates, hold their heads, vicelike, between his two hands for five seconds at a shot, or give them a spontaneous bearhug. Once, late at night on the plane, as he stooped down to attend to a female TV producer who had twisted her ankle, he kissed her left foot.
Bush treated reporters like pledges at Deke. He liked to clown around, sometimes sophomorically. He would cover his head with a napkin or one of the hot towels passed out by the flight attendants before meals, just sit there for a few seconds giggling to himself, then look at his audience like a toddler playing peekaboo. One day in early May, he walked to the back of the plane holding up a supermarket tabloid featuring a cover with himself and an alien shaking hands. “Who leaked it?” he said with a straight face, before breaking into his familiar west Texas cackle. “Shows I’m willing to reach across certain de-mograph-ic lines,” he said with a guffaw. Bush routinely tried to deflate earnest reporters with jokey pantomimes. When The Washington Post’s Ceci Connolly, one of the three “Spice Girls” from the Gore plane, switched over to Bush for a trip, she asked him whether the GOP candidate would demand that Al Gore stop lying about his record. Bush paused, slumped his shoulders, jerked his head down and mock frowned–a common piece of Bush body language, signaling a routine coming on. Then he rolled up a newspaper into a megaphone and boomed into it, “Good one, Ceci! Nice try!”
Bush’s mood was changeable, and he could be prickly with reporters. As a campaign-plane joke, a CNN producer wore a T shirt, made by the Democratic National Committee, that read BOB JONES REDEMPTION TOUR. Strolling to the back of the plane, Bush stared coldly at the producer. “Not funny,” he said, and went back to the front. He did not return for the rest of the trip. And yet, by flirting and teasing and asking about kids and favorite ball teams, Bush gradually won over the regulars. He gave them silly or affectionate nicknames, like “Panchito” for Frank Bruni of The New York Times. Bush carefully courted Bruni, probably the most influential beat reporter on the plane. He played jokes on him and goofed around, once offering a mini-exegesis of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, then suddenly spouting, “Ooobie-doobie, ga-doobie, oh where oh where is my underwear? You know that? It’s Latin?” Bruni, a former feature writer who was less hard-edged than the Spice Girls on the Gore plane, took it all in good humor. He sensed that for all his banter, Bush was clever and a quick study. Importantly for Bush, Bruni stated as much in the paper: Bush, he wrote, can convey a “disdain for intellectualism,” but his “frequently sharp wit suggests that he is plenty bright.”
To a certain degree, Bush was merely manipulating reporters, charming them while sneering behind their backs. “Time to feed the beast,” he would say with a sigh as he headed back to the press section. The Bush family has long distinguished between the press corps as a whole and certain individuals who happen to be reporters. As a type, reporters are regarded by the Bushes as a kind of lower order, often fickle, lazy or mean. But some newspeople are deemed to be genial and, within limits, trustworthy. Bush could be remarkably unguarded with journalists he regarded as “family.” He treated photographer Charles Ommanney (a frequent contributor to NEWSWEEK) as a wayward brother, relentlessly chiding him. At one point Ommanney was overheard saying, “You’ll like me someday.” Bush quickly responded, “No, I won’t. You’re me.” Ommanney seemed to be taken aback and perplexed by Bush’s remark. Did he somehow think that the photographer, a former hard drinker who was intense and gregarious like Bush, represented some kind of repressed dark side? For all his sunny affability, Bush occasionally let slip how hard he had to struggle to maintain self-control. Bush “has said there’s a fat person inside him who is trying to get out,” his sister Dorothy confided. “He has tremendous discipline.”
With a few exceptions, the Bush charm offensive paid off. Reporters began to show signs of losing their impartiality toward the GOP candidate. An otherwise tough-minded Wall Street Journal reporter kept a photo of Bush with her two children on the screen saver of her laptop. (Bush sent her a note about the picture: “Two roses and a thorn.”) Reporters asked Bush to pose with them for photos, or to make mobile-phone calls to their homes to surprise their spouses. Only some of the old hands from earlier presidential campaigns, crusty pros like Jules Witcover and Jack Germond of the Baltimore Sun, remained unmoved by Bush’s attempts at intimacy. They warned against getting too close to the candidate. They warned, too, that the press has a way of turning on a candidate who has been a little too cozy.
By mid-May, Bush sensed that he was winning the phony war. His staff was amazed at how well things were going. “We never thought we’d be looking this good right now,” said media guru Mark McKinnon. The avowedly poll-averse Bushies used polls to demonstrate their dominance. They maintained that Al Gore’s support never climbed above 50 percent in the various national voter polls, while Bush won a majority 117 times. Gore was “stuck,” said Karl Rove. “There’s virtually nothing he can do.” At the Austin headquarters, the campaign’s color-coded electoral map tilted heavily in Bush’s favor: in the race for 270 electoral votes, Bush appeared to have locked up 280 to Gore’s 136, with 122 listed as a tossup. Stuart Stevens, the veteran media adviser, sounded a cautionary note. “My fear is that we’re taking Gore’s failure as our success. It’s like, ‘We’re so great that Gore’s doing badly.’ I think he’ll quit doing badly,” said Stevens. “I think we’ve got about a 40 percent chance to win.” One top lieutenant offered this candid appraisal of their man. “We don’t know how good Bush is,” he said. “He hasn’t really been tested. Bush is a very appealing candidate. It’s different from being a good candidate. Adlai Stevenson was appealing.” What are Bush’s weaknesses? he was asked. “He’s kind of arrogant,” the aide replied. “The reason he seems to come across as being arrogant is because sometimes he is arrogant, and he has a tendency to rebel against depth, kind of adolescently.”
Bush was benefiting from a blurring of ideological lines. As soon as the votes were tallied in South Carolina, he had started to steer back to the political center. Karl Rove and Bush’s policy director, Josh Bolton, had concocted a carefully staged issues “rollout,” a series of speeches in which Bush described his program. For about an hour each day during the spring, Rove and Bolton would pore over a five- by two-foot calendar made of plastic and scribbled on with colored felt-tip pens, plotting the candidate’s next move to the middle. For the most part, the press greeted Bush’s pronouncements on Social Security, education, national security and tax cuts with respectful notices. Bush’s staff warned him that the Democrats would lambaste his $1.4 trillion tax cut as a boon to the rich (60 percent of the savings would go to households making more than $100,000 a year). But Bush steadfastly argued that his true aim was social mobility: that by reducing or eliminating the tax rate for the lower-earning taxpayers he was “tearing down the tollbooth to the middle class.”
By June, any taint from South Carolina had pretty much vanished. Voters didn’t seem to notice or care that Bush had steered an irregular course to the nomination, veering to the right, then back to the middle. “It’s like the primaries were forgotten,” said McKinnon, smoking a cigar and reflecting amazement at Bush’s progress. “Does anybody even remember them?” John McCain did. A meeting with McCain in early May had been tense and awkward in private, but the anger between the two camps stayed mostly beneath the surface. According to senior aides, McCain didn’t want to be in the same room as Bush. At their long-awaited joint press conference on May 9, McCain declared, a little manically, “I endorse Governor Bush, I endorse Governor Bush, I endorse Governor Bush.” Some of the reporters joked that McCain looked as if he were back in the Hanoi Hilton.
Bush himself was just getting back into physical shape. He had battled a 45-day bronchial infection, made worse by his difficulty sleeping on the road and possibly by his steady diet of junk food: candy bars, chips and his favorite, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Bush blamed his staff for overworking him. “They were grinding me into the dirt, down into the dirt, ya know? Now, may-be it was necessary, but it’s not going to happen again. I made that clear that it’s not going to happen again. Period.” Bush’s thrill of victory in the primaries had been diminished “because I didn’t feel well,” he said. He told his aides: “You’re killing me. You wore me down.” For most of the spring, Bush followed Ronald Reagan’s example, rarely scheduling more than one or two events a day and leaving plenty of downtime for naps or exercise.
The candidate’s cockiness set the tone for the campaign. Bush had always tried to be optimistic. As an unsuccessful oilman drilling dry holes during the oil slump of the early ’80s, he needed to be. He refused to think that allowing taxpayers to invest some of their Social Security money in the stock market was “risky” because he didn’t want to believe the market would crash. In May, when Bush turned to picking a running mate as the GOP convention was approaching, he seemed bemused. He laughed at the self-promotion and posturing of possible veep selections when their names were leaked to the press. “It’s kind of interesting to watch how their names kind of come popping up and how they handle it,” he said. A reporter asked him if choosing a running mate was like choosing a wife. No, he answered, “the president has the possibility of locking the vice president into a closet if it doesn’t work out. You can’t lock your wife into a closet.” Bush doubted that his vice presidential choice would have much political impact. He wasn’t particularly concerned about picking a vote getter, a governor who could deliver a big state like Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania. He did want someone who could help him govern–which is why, in late July, he selected the seasoned but distinctly uncharismatic Richard Cheney of Wyoming.
Bush knew that he would take some heat for picking his father’s secretary of Defense. The “son of” question was a sore spot in the campaign. The elder Bush’s one appearance with his son before the New Hampshire primary had been a disaster. President Bush had twice referred to Governor Bush as his “boy.” After that, the two Bushes avoided appearing together in public. But they talked almost daily on the phone. For the most part, George senior just wanted to know how his son was doing and to buck up his spirits if he was low. The elder Bush was able to read his son’s mood from the first “hello,” said an aide to President Bush. “When George calls me and tells me he’s exhausted,” President Bush told this aide, “that it’s been a tough day, I know exactly what he means. I know what it’s like to be so tired that you can’t imagine shaking one more hand or giving one more speech, but you do.” Bush senior rarely gave substantive advice, according to one of his aides, other than to tell his son to have someone on his campaign staff who could call him “George,” as in, “George, what the hell are you thinking?” (This role, perfected by James A. Baker for Bush senior, was handled by chief money-raiser and close friend Don Evans for George W.)
Bush’s dream candidate for a running mate, Gen. Colin Powell, turned him down, while signaling that he would probably accept the post of secretary of State. Cheney, who was leading the search for a vice president, had also told Bush that he wasn’t interested in the job himself. But Bush had been immensely impressed by Cheney in foreign-policy discussions. He noticed that Cheney would sit back during the meetings, yet when the former Defense secretary spoke up, “the room was dead silent,” said Bush. At lunch at Bush’s ranch in early July, the governor and his advisers were discussing the veep search when Bush made another pass at Cheney. “The only thing is,” said Bush, “the best candidate is the one that’s sitting here. But he won’t do it.” Afterward, Bush and Cheney stood on the porch and looked out at the dusty horizon. “I hope you think about this again,” said Bush. Cheney gave a small smile. Several weeks later he was telling his wife, Lynne, “Honey, sell the house. I’m quitting my job. We’re going back into politics.” Cheney talked twice to Bush senior during this time but insisted that his former commander in chief was low key. “He did not say, ‘Dick, you’ve got to do it’,” said Cheney. “It was really between the governor and me.”
The Bush camp wanted a political convention at which “almost no politicians would speak,” said media adviser McKinnon with a chuckle. Every speech but one was vetted by Bush headquarters (Elizabeth Dole refused to submit her speech, but it was harmless). Bush wanted to see the stage filled with black and brown faces not routinely seen at Republican conventions. He was delighted that Pat Buchanan, who had given a polarizing speech at the ‘92 convention, would not be on the scene, having picked up the Reform Party banner. And he enlisted the help of Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, to head off the possibility of an outburst from the religious right. “Here’s who you need to sit down with,” Reed said, ticking off a list of politically active religious conservatives.
As he stood backstage on the night of his acceptance speech, Bush was as nervous as he’d ever been in his life. “Be serious. Don’t be funny,” media man Stevens warned him. Bush wasn’t so much worried about his smirk as he was about crying. He was afraid he’d choke up when he mentioned his parents. As he listened to the rising roar from the convention hall when he was introduced, a NASCAR race popped to mind. He imagined the roar of the engines coming off the warm-up lap. “I walked out on that stage, and I mean, it was–it’s hard to describe the feeling. The place just erupted,” Bush later recalled. “I just needed to get through that part about my family, then I knew it would be clear sailing. I was praising my dad and my mother, you know, my wife and kids. I didn’t want to get too emotional… I think when I get a little high-strung or tired my emotions well up inside of me. I can be touched easily. I can be. I love deeply.” When the moment came to thank his family, Bush looked over to his mother and father, his siblings, his wife and daughters, seated in box seats across the arena, and “felt great.” Then he relaxed.
It was no accident that the arena remained dark throughout Bush’s speech. Stuart Stevens ordered the house lights to remain off so the networks couldn’t pick out any bad reaction shots from the crowd. The networks protested angrily to the lighting booth, demanding that the hall be illuminated, but the convention lighting director–with Stevens by his side-turned them down, usually with a profane epithet. Stevens also vetoed the convention planner’s choice for a song after Bush finished. It was supposed to be the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up,” until Stevens explained to the convention’s producer that the lyrics referred to a vibrator.
In the chaotic celebration following Bush’s speech, John McCain was suddenly thrust onstage to stand with Bush in the camera’s eye. The GOP nominee groped for McCain’s left hand. Bush was going for what the pros call the “money shot,” the traditional arms-raised victory salute. McCain headed off the maneuver, turning it into a traditional handshake. “I can’t raise my arms,” he whispered to Bush through a wide, taut smile. Both of McCain’s arms had been badly damaged in Vietnam; Bush apparently had forgotten or had not been briefed. Two nights earlier, McCain had given a strong speech of support for Bush. Listening to her husband praise his once bitter foe, Cindy McCain had been sitting in the VIP box when she felt a tap on her shoulder. It was Bush’s father, who was sitting behind her. The former president was crying.
A few days after the convention, Bush was standing in Springfield, Ill., surrounded by a cheering throng of 5,000 people jammed into a rail yard. As fireworks lit up the sky, Bush bounded off the stage and grabbed a reporter. “These are October crowds! I can’t believe this momentum!” Back in Austin, Bush’s aides were trying to lower expectations. Two weeks before the convention, they had leaked to The Wall Street Journal an “official convention-bounce projection” that forecast a five-point bounce in Bush’s polls coming out of the GOP convention, but a bigger bounce–10 points–for Al Gore after the Democrats convened in Los Angeles. The figures were totally made up. The campaign actually expected Bush to get a bigger bounce than Gore. They would be shocked when their phony prediction would come true.
