Bush In High Gear

It was a gathering of eagles, but they were eating like good ole boys. On Monday night last week, after George W. Bush had given his first real campaign speech of the season to Republican Governors, he invited five of them back to the White House for dinner and a chance to spend the night in the presidential mansion. Over a batter-dipped feast in his private dining room that would have given Dick Cheney's cardiologist the bends fried shrimp, fried onion rings, corn on the cob, French fries, cole slaw and cheesecake Bush was jovial, confident. He told the group George Pataki of New York, Dirk Kempthorne of Idaho, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, Jim Douglas of Vermont and his Floridian brother Jeb that the presidential race would be close but that he would win. Bush's legendary self-confidence was on full display. "You guys have the best job in government." He smiled, leaning back. "Actually, you have the second best job in government."

Over the past two months, some Republicans have wondered whether in November Bush would manage to lose his government job. His once solid poll ratings have gone wobbly, and in a variety of surveys he even trails his likely challenger, Senator John Kerry. Now the White House is gearing up to take on Kerry and repair the damage of the past eight weeks everything from missing weapons of mass destruction and confusing job-creation estimates to strange policy detours about Mars and steroid use.

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If this were the Clinton White House, the plunging polls would have spurred hastily assembled late-night meetings, presidential phone calls to allies at all hours, a round of firings. Not so in Bushland. At the offices of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Arlington, Va., there's the same placid quality that Bush showed during his fried-food fest. The headquarters have got all the pizazz of an insurance office. Top staff have private offices that circle a vast maze, there are standard-issue cubicles, the desks are neat, most of the men wear a tie (except on casual Fridays, when jeans are the norm). Like Bush, staff members sweat only when they work out, which some seem to do to nearly the same manic degree as the President. The Clinton War Room has given way to the Bush Office Park. In this mien, the Bushies are eerily confident that things are going to turn around for them in the coming months. Here are what they see as the touchstones of their re-election:

WHEN THE GOING GETS ROUGH, BUY AIRTIME
This week the empire will strike back. The President's re-election team, which has raised more than $140 million, will air its first television ads of the presidential campaign a salvo designed to re-establish the President in the public mind as a decisive, principled leader, uniquely equipped to strengthen the economy and win the war on terrorism. These spots will not go after Kerry because that would set the wrong tone, say Bush advisers. "We're going through a process: first, correct everything that's been said about the President, and then we're going to correct the impressions about the [Democratic] nominee," says pollster Matthew Dowd. The ads, made by consultant Mark McKinnon of Austin, Texas, promise to be edgy but warm. In the corporate world of Bush, the onetime singer-songwriter stands out. Most of the staff members use PCs; he has a PowerBook. Most are lifelong Republicans; he is a former Democrat with an iPod playing Kenny Chesney and a candle in his office. McKinnon became a Bush believer during Bush's first term as Governor and did Bush's ads in 2000. He is determined to convince Americans that the man he signed on with six years ago should stay in office.

DANCE WITH THE ONE WHO BRUNG YOU
It's not just Bush's ad team, though, that has been busy. Bush himself has staked out turf designed to help his re-election, most notably with social conservatives. When he announced that he wanted to amend the Constitution for only the 28th time in the nation's history, to establish marriage as solely between a man and a woman, the White House portrayed the move as an act of principle. But even Bush's supporters across the country saw the move in purely political terms, rejoicing that Bush had "locked up" that crucial portion of his supporters. He also cemented his conservative support in other, less visible ways: supporting legislation that establishes harm to a fetus as a crime and, as ABC News first reported, having the Justice Department demand that six Planned Parenthood clinics produce records of abortions they had performed to see if last year's ban on so-called partial-birth abortions was being violated. And it appears the White House would have no problem with letting the 10-year ban on assault weapons expire this September.

DEFINE YOUR ENEMY
How will the campaign take on Kerry? The multipronged strategy is to portray him as too liberal on issues like defense and tax cuts and too unsteady about important principles. That's why the Bush campaign rushed a Web ad comparing Kerry's vows to take on the special interests with his record as the Senate's leading recipient of special-interest money. Bush takes a far greater amount of such lobbyist money, Federal Election Commission records show, but proving Kerry's hypocrisy was worth exposing Bush's cozy relationship with corporate special pleaders.