What It Took

Money Does Grow on Trees
"This is what the valley has been waiting for! This is what the valley has been waiting for!"

The old lady at the table in the center of the room is shouting like a high school cheerleader. It's April 1998, and George W. Bush is standing in front of a huge plate-glass window that frames much of Silicon Valley. Bush is out near Sand Hill Road, home to the venture capitalists, and he is talking with unusual passion about education, the New Economy and his record in Texas. The small banquet room is overflowing with VCs, dotcomers and gearheads who have paid $1,000 a plate to meet the man who might be the next President. Some arrived at the last minute, crashing the party, while others, like Katy Boyd, 78, a veteran Republican fund raiser, had apparently been eyeing this moment for years. "This is what the valley has been waiting for!"

When Bush heard the spontaneous outburst, he looked at the crowd and decided to unbuckle his full sermon for them--about his past, his family, his relationship with Democrats, the need for a "responsibility era" in Washington. Republicans had ignored Silicon Valley for years, but here was Bush, putting them at the top of his list. "He was in the zone," remembers Karl Rove, his chief strategist, who masterminded Bush's presidential run and was there that day. Even as Bush talked, he was working the crowd with his eyes, and couldn't help noticing one guy in particular whose head was bearing down on a note card. It was John Doerr, founder of TechNet, the new pipeline to Washington for high-tech California political money. Doerr was a Gore man, but he was taking down W.'s lengthy riff on education because he was impressed with it and realized that this guy could be a competitor for the hearts and dollars of Silicon Valley. By the time the candidate hit his stride, the venture capitalist's tiny handwriting had piled up into something looking like a ransom note. Bush could see what was happening, so when a question came about the Texas Governor's national ambitions, he fired his response not to the questioner in the crowd but directly at Doerr. "I hope you'll keep your powder dry, John," said Bush. "I hope you'll keep an open mind."

It would be like this for the next two years, really: Bush traveling the country, working the money guys, giving his spiel and sucking up most of the oxygen in the G.O.P.'s big tent. It would not be long before the Postal Service began delivering trays and trays of envelopes to the Virginia offices of the group hired to sort the dollars. The money would come in at a rate of about $300,000 a day, three times as much as any candidate had ever raised. The money machine would capture so much cash that Bush could not only win the G.O.P. primary, he could eliminate it.

All he had to do was convince the right people in the party that he could win. Which is why after the breakfast on Sand Hill Road, it was off to George Shultz's house on the Stanford University campus to re-enact a piece of political history of almost totemic importance. Dubya was going to pay a call on Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State and try to bring him on board. All Bush had to do was pass the oral exam--in the same way Reagan had with Shultz two decades before. The courtesy call was the first step toward capturing California's Balkanized Republican Party, but it was hardly a lay-up. The old Nixon and Reagan Cabinet officer had got crossways with Dubya's father and with his successor at State, James Baker. The trick was for W. to prove to Shultz that he wasn't a dunce--and that he could win.

And so for four hours, Bush and Shultz talked about the IMF and Bosnia and Russia and pretty much took a tour of the world. Condoleezza Rice and Michael Buskin were there. The conversation just went on and on, Rove recalled. Bush knew he had done fine when Shultz recalled the Reagan meeting and said, "I hope some of the luck wears off."

The Sundance Kid
"A morgue!" Tony Coelho could not believe his eyes. Al Gore's campaign manager stared, astonished, at what lay on his desk. Gore had just announced he was going to pick up the campaign, scrape it off K Street and ship the whole thing to Tennessee. Except when an aide brought in the architectural plans and spread them out on Coelho's desk, "the place" turned out to be a former morgue. It was all there on the floor plan: the boning room, the tanning room, the cutting room. It was another ghastly metaphor in the making for the can't-get-started Gore campaign. Coelho couldn't believe it. "We were in a panic to find another place before the press found out about this one," said Coelho.

How did Gore's campaign get temporarily lost in his old backyard? Bill Clinton was the Man from Hope, and Bush likes to say he's from West Texas. Gore began the race with a huge disadvantage: voters couldn't tell who he was because they didn't know where he was from. Was he the prefect of St. Albans or the farm boy from Carthage, Tenn.? The twangy tobacco grower or the earnest arms controller?