by Peter Baker
Heading out on the trail, Cheney was sent to South Florida, where he visited a couple of schools on August 31, only to realize he was delivering a speech on school bond financing to an audience of grade schoolers. He thought it was a fiasco and resolved to take control of his own schedule. “He basically sort of laid down the law to a certain degree and became, I think, an active partner in the overall process of determining what states, what events, what messages, and so forth,” said Holliday. As the campaign progressed, Austin eventually got the message—no reading to children, not a lot of rope lines, no cocktail parties, no tailgating at college football games. Aides in Austin joked that they would just make a cardboard cutout of Cheney and send it on the trail.
Cheney joined up with Bush a few days later for a Labor Day event in Naperville, Illinois, on September 4. Waving to a boisterous crowd, Bush in a casual blue shirt turned to Cheney in a blazer and nodded toward the press section.
“There’s Adam Clymer, major league asshole from the New York Times,” Bush said.
“Oh yeah,” Cheney responded. “He is, big time.”
Neither realized that the microphones picked up the remarks; the audience could not hear, but journalists plugged into the sound system could and quickly asked whether Bush was living up to his vow of civility. Back aboard the campaign plane, Cheney’s staff debated whether to smooth it over by inviting Clymer to the front for a drink with the candidate. Cheney had no interest. But from then on, his staff delighted in playing the Peter Gabriel song “Big Time” at campaign rallies.
Bush had been preparing for weeks to debate Gore, tapping Senator Judd Gregg to play the Democratic candidate in rehearsals in Kennebunkport and Crawford. Gregg spent hundreds of hours studying Gore tapes and transcripts. He badgered and interrupted and “was careful to break almost every rule of the debate agreement,” as Stuart Stevens, the consultant playing the moderator, put it, just as he presumed Gore would. “There was no quarter given in these debate preps,” Gregg said. “I was not deferential at all.” But they were relatively loose affairs, with Bush not going through a full ninety-minute evening rehearsal until just days before the first debate. When he did, he was “flat,” Stevens recalled. Bush looked as tired as anyone had seen him. Mark McKinnon fretted. “Lambs to the slaughter,” he told Stevens.
Afraid of protesters in a liberal state, Karl Rove decided Bush should not fly to Boston the night before the first debate and should instead stay over in West Virginia. But when the governor and his entourage arrived at the hotel and found a table in the restaurant, the kitchen was empty of everything but chicken, and the staff was overwhelmed, making the increasingly impatient candidate wait an hour for his food. Don Evans, his friend and campaign chairman, kept going back to the kitchen to prod the staff, passing out $20 bills to speed up the service. Already irritated, Bush headed to his room to lie down, only to hear train whistles and barge horns outside the window all night.
Not well rested, he flew to Boston the next day, October 3. To avoid protesters, Bush’s staff arranged for him to arrive at the University of Massachusetts campus by boat. In the holding room beforehand, he called Kirbyjon Caldwell, a minister from Texas, and prayed with him over the phone, beginning what would become a tradition before big events. He headed onstage and shook hands with Gore, who squeezed hard as if trying to intimidate him. Bush took his watch off and placed it on the podium rather than repeat his father’s mistake from eight years earlier, when he was caught glancing at his timepiece in the middle of a debate.
Bush used the opportunity to lay out his vision of a humbler America stepping more gingerly on the world stage. “He believes in nation building,” Bush said of Gore. “I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place.” Overall, he added, “I believe we’re overextended in too many places.”
In the end, though, as often happens in modern presidential debates, the words mattered less than the pictures. Gore, his makeup caked on too thick, was caught reacting scornfully to Bush’s comments in split-screen images. Gore rolled his eyes and sighed in exasperation at Bush’s answers, making him look haughty to many viewers. Bush won mainly by keeping his sighs to himself.
NEXT UP WAS Cheney, who had not faced an opponent in years and now confronted Senator Joseph Lieberman, a confident and skilled debater. Cheney watched Lieberman’s debates from his 1988 Senate race and studied thick briefing books on plane rides. By late September, he had retreated to his home in Wyoming, where Liz ran a more rigorous preparation than Bush’s.
They practiced at a local theater with overstuffed red velvet seats that “felt like a cross between a frontier opera house and a bordello,” as Stuart Stevens remembered it. After drawing too much attention, they retreated to the house, where they conducted a mock debate each night at a round table covered by a bedsheet against Representative Rob Portman of Ohio playing Lieberman. Portman needled Cheney about Halliburton and other issues, getting under the candidate’s skin. The advisers tutored him on making his answers more digestible. “His tendency is to give a very long, substantive, heavy answer,” Liz said. “We’d be like, ‘Let’s think about how we can personalize that.’ ” Liz also learned to keep her mother out of Cheney’s line of sight because “she would throw him off.”
Cheney cleared his mind the day before the debate by taking Portman fly-fishing and telling stories about the Nixon-Ford days. Then he flew to Kentucky the morning of October 5 and called Matthew Dowd, Bush’s campaign strategist. How should he handle Lieberman? he asked. “He was getting all kinds of advice to be an attack dog,” Dowd recalled. Dowd thought that would backfire and urged Cheney to resist what seemed to be pressure from his family.
“Whatever you want to do, Mr. Cheney,” Dowd said, “but if you do that, you are making a huge mistake.”
Cheney paused for a moment before finally saying, “Okay.”
Lieberman came to the same conclusion. His staff had drafted attack lines against Cheney, including a hit on his growing wealth at Halliburton. Lieberman should note that most people were better off than eight years earlier and “I think that probably includes you too,” according to a campaign memo. In years to come, though, Lieberman said he was later urged to stand down. “It is a loser, don’t attack him,” Lieberman remembered his political adviser, Stan Greenberg, telling him. Greenberg and his colleague, Robert Shrum, recalled it differently, saying they urged the candidate to go after Cheney vigorously and were surprised when he did not.
The two candidates met onstage at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, sitting at a table as if on a Sunday talk show, a format Cheney had insisted on. The seating arrangement had the effect of turning the showdown into a civil conversation. Indeed, the only time Lieberman turned to one of the scripted attack lines, it backfired.
Lieberman said most Americans were better off. “I’m pleased to see, Dick, from the newspapers that you’re better off than you were eight years ago too,” he added.
“I can tell you, Joe, that the government had absolutely nothing to do with it,” Cheney responded, provoking laughter in the hall.
Lieberman, realizing Cheney had gotten the better of him, tried humor too. “I can see my wife and I think she’s thinking, ‘Gee, I wish he would go out into the private sector.’ ”
Cheney took the opening. “Well, I’m going to try to help you do that, Joe,” he said.
Of course, when Cheney said the government had nothing to do with his financial success, that conveniently overlooked the $763 million in federal contracts Halliburton received in 2000 alone. But Cheney’s dry wit turned Lieberman’s attack back on him. Cheney was deemed to have won, frustrating Democrats who considered it a missed opportunity. Both Cheney and Lieberman for years would take pride in the discussion. “The debate was actually very high-toned, I thought,” Lieberman said. “I was proud of it, civil debate.”
Bush eme
rged unscathed from his second debate with Gore on Octo- ber 11 at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and then set about preparing for the final debate with a town-hall-style format, this time with Portman serving as his practice opponent. Stools were set up in the Governor’s Mansion to simulate the setting. Portman, who had been studying Gore’s primary debates with Bill Bradley, surprised Bush by standing up in the middle of a rehearsal and walking over into the governor’s space. Bush reacted playfully, leaning over and kissing Portman on the head, but he scoffed at the idea that Gore would try it.
“He’s not going to do that,” Bush said. “It’s ridiculous.”
“You bet he will,” Portman responded. “He’s going to try to intimidate you. Gore did it to Bradley.”
Sure enough, at Washington University in St. Louis on October 17, Gore got up from his stool in the middle of a Bush answer on health care, walked over, and stood right next to him. Bush, looking surprised, gave Gore a quick nod and then returned to his answer. It was just the right dismissive reaction, and once again a debate dominated by body language favored Bush. “He put the move on me,” Bush exclaimed to aides afterward.
By the end of October, Bush was feeling confident. He was ahead in the polls and saw no obstacle to victory. “I’ll be the most surprised man in America if I don’t win,” he told Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin. His mother was not so sure. “ ‘Miss Pessimistic’ (me) really doesn’t think he is going to win as we are at peace and because we have a strong economy,” Barbara Bush wrote in her diary on October 31.
She had reason to worry. Two days later, on November 2, with just five days until the election, Karen Hughes rushed into Bush’s room to tell him a reporter had found out about his drunk-driving arrest in Maine. “His face didn’t change, but his body slumped a little,” Hughes recalled. Bush had kept the arrest secret from all but a handful of trusted advisers and ignored their advice to disclose it earlier in his campaign autobiography, where it would have been received in the context of a redemption narrative. He rationalized by saying he did not want his teenage daughters to know. He likewise refused to say whether he had tried cocaine. At one point during the campaign, his press aide Scott McClellan overheard him telling someone on the phone, “You know, the truth is I honestly don’t remember whether I tried it or not,” which McClellan considered an act of elaborate self-deception.
The report on Bush’s arrest broke as a huge scandal days before the vote. Without telling anyone, Matthew Dowd commissioned last-minute polls in three states and found that Bush’s lead had disappeared in Florida and Ohio, while Michigan was now out of reach. Swing voters might not have cared, but social conservatives were disturbed. “This thing has gone from probably-win to I-have-no-idea,” Dowd told Dan Bartlett as they went golfing on the morning of Election Day. Karl Rove would later calculate that four million evangelical voters stayed home. Stuart Stevens concluded the story might have shifted enough votes to cost Bush the states of New Mexico, Iowa, Oregon, and Maine—and almost Florida.
Still, when the campaign’s lawyers got together for brunch in Austin just before the election, they chewed over all sorts of scenarios—all but one. “The one thing on which there was absolute unanimity,” recalled Michael Toner, the campaign’s general counsel, “was we didn’t have to worry about a recount.”
BUSH AND CHENEY organized separate dinners for separate entourages on election night, November 7, expecting to join together late in the evening to declare victory. The campaign was confident enough to distribute a schedule showing that Bush would deliver his victory speech at precisely 10:39 p.m. Texas time, but the candidate himself was not so sure.
Bush and his family went to dinner at the Shoreline Grill, a restaurant in Austin. “It could be a long night,” he told his parents on the way.
At the restaurant, tables were set and appetizers ready, but Bush kept checking out the television in the corner. At 6:48 p.m. in Texas, or 7:48 p.m. back east, the networks began calling Florida for Gore. Bush and his brother Jeb, the Florida governor, were irritated; polls were still open for another twelve minutes in the conservative panhandle, where Bush had strong support. More important, Florida was critical to a Republican majority in the Electoral College.
Jeb Bush had tears in his eyes as he hugged his brother apologetically. “I felt like I had let him down,” Jeb told his sister, Doro, afterward.
Already antsy, the candidate grew more agitated when the restaurant’s television broke. “I’m not going to stay around,” he whispered to his father. “I want to go back to the mansion.”
Skipping dinner, Bush, his wife, and his parents headed out. As the car made its way through the dark, rainy night, the ride struck Bush as ominously quiet.
At the mansion, the family headed upstairs and flipped on the television. Rove, who had confidently predicted that Bush and Cheney would win with 320 electoral votes and a four- to seven-point margin in the popular vote, examined and reexamined the numbers and concluded the networks had gotten it wrong in Florida. He called to berate network executives, and eventually they began to back off.
Jeb Bush, in touch with officials back in Florida, realized his state was still in play and rushed over to the Governor’s Mansion, bounding up the stairs.
“Back from the ashes!” he shouted.
At 8:54 p.m. in Texas (9:54 p.m. in the East), CNN and CBS News retracted the Florida call but were not yet ready to put the state in Bush’s column.
In a suite across town at the Four Seasons Hotel, Cheney was following the same roller-coaster results with an electoral map of the country he clipped out of the newspaper and a yellow legal pad on which he was scratching out tallies. Joining him were friends and advisers like James Baker, Donald Rumsfeld, Alan Simpson, Nick Brady, Scooter Libby, and David Addington. Bush called Cheney at one point to declare, “We’re still alive.”
Bush’s family crowded into the relatively cramped upstairs of the Governor’s Mansion. Laura Bush made coffee in the kitchen and kept loading the dishwasher (“when she’s stressed, she cleans,” according to her daughter Jenna). Barbara Bush sat on a couch stitching a needlepoint canvas and listening through earphones to an audio version of a Sandra Brown novel. The elder George Bush was nervous and, in Barbara’s eyes, “suddenly looked old, tired, and so worried.” Another person who talked with the former president that night recalled him popping antacids, tormented by suspense.
By midnight Texas time, Bush had picked up West Virginia, Arkansas, and Tennessee—the first a state that had voted Democratic in fourteen of the previous seventeen presidential elections and the other two the home states of the incumbent Democratic president and vice president. If Florida held, victory seemed assured. If.
Just before 1:00 a.m. Texas time, Bush got a call from his cousin John Ellis, who had worked for network election units for years and this night was running the election desk for Fox News.
“What do you think?” John Ellis asked.
“What do you think?” Bush retorted.
“I think you’ve got it.”
Not long after that, at 1:15 a.m. Texas time (2:15 a.m. East Coast time), Fox called Florida for Bush and Cheney, bringing them to 271 electoral votes, one more than needed. All other networks followed within five minutes.
About fifteen minutes later, Bush got the call he had long awaited.
“Congratulations,” Gore told him, conceding the election.
“You’re a formidable opponent and a good man,” Bush said.
“We gave them a cliff-hanger,” Gore said.
“I know it’s hard, and hard on your family. Give my best to Tipper.”
With that, Bush thought he had been elected president and called his running mate. At the Four Seasons, Cheney was as drained as Bush was restless and had ducked into the bedroom to lie down a few minutes earlier. He would later remember his daughter Liz waking him up. “Dad, you just got elected vice president. The president-elect wants to talk to you.”
Mary Cheney remembered her mother being the one to wake Cheney, while Alan Simpson and Nick Brady each recalled being the one to rouse him.
“Get up, bastard!” Simpson remembered calling out. “You’re the vice president of the United States.”
Cheney, in this recollection, reacted cautiously. “It isn’t over yet, Al,” he said.
He emerged from the bedroom with his shirttail hanging out but enough presence of mind to tell his friend David Hume Kennerly, the photographer, not to take his picture when he was looking so disheveled. After Bush told him about the call from Gore, the Cheneys left for the Governor’s Mansion. The Secret Service spirited them through the hotel kitchen for security purposes, and as they passed the cooking stations, Lynne Cheney noticed her husband was the only one not smiling.
“You’ve just been elected vice president of the United States,” she said. “You could at least look happy about it.”
“This just doesn’t feel right,” he said.
His instincts were on target. When they arrived at the mansion, everyone was calling Bush “Mr. President” or “Mr. President-elect.” But they soon noticed Gore had not come out to publicly concede. At 2:30 a.m., Gore called Bush back.
“Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you,” he started. “The state of Florida is too close to call.”
Bush could not believe it. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying? Let me make sure I understand. You’re calling back to retract that concession?”
“Don’t get snippy about it,” Gore retorted. “Let me explain.” He went on to say that if Florida did go for Bush, he would concede, but it was too early to be making statements with the final result still in doubt.
Bush noted that the governor of Florida was standing right there. “My little brother says it’s over,” he said.
“I don’t think this is something your little brother gets to decide,” Gore shot back.
“Do what you have to do,” Bush said sharply.
