What It Took

(4 of 11)

Some advisers, watching the McCain surge, urged Bush to do as his old man had done 12 years before--hit the enemy hard on the airwaves during that last weekend before voting. But Bush refused. "Our object is to win a nomination that is worth having," said Rove. And so Bush pretty much phoned it in--and got run over. "What the hell happened?" Bush asked his aides, who had not seen it coming--nothing remotely this bad or this big.

And so the Bush team headed down to South Carolina for the next big contest, where the crown that was supposed to be all bought and paid for was suddenly up for grabs. Bush had been up 47 points in South Carolina at one time; the polls were now even. McCain's crowds were huge. Working a rope line in Sumpter, Bush was approached by a man who stretched out his hand and said, "I just want to shake the hand of the next Vice President." Bush's face darkened; his eyes turned to slits.

Bush called old friends that weekend and chewed the thing over, secretly asked for help from outside advisers, handed out his private fax line so the campaign wouldn't know. "Tell me what you're seeing out there," Bush implored, trapped in his own bubble. But he had not given up hope. New Hampshire loves mavericks who live free or die, but the G.O.P. hates them, and the G.O.P. owned South Carolina.

In a suite at the Greenville Grand Hyatt that afternoon, Bush's top aides came together to save the campaign, but they were really plotting a murder. It was the Bush high command, with its South Carolina auxiliary: Rove; spokeswoman Hughes, as well as Warren Tompkins, a longtime G.O.P. operative in the state; state attorney general Charlie Condon; Lieutenant Governor Bob Peeler; and former Governor David Beasley. As a participant put it later, this was the moment "we decided to take the gloves off."

The trick was to try to cast McCain as a phony, take a guy with a consistently conservative voting record and paint him as a dangerous liberal, suggest that the war hero was somehow un-American, or at least un-South Carolinian. Out came the antipersonnel weapons: "He's not one of us," and "He doesn't share our conservative values," and "He's outside the mainstream." On McCain's lack of "conservative values," Rove piped up to say, "We have to get in his face on that. He's vulnerable." Added Tompkins: "He's an insider. When I hear this populist stuff, it makes me wanna throw up."

But who could put out the message, given Bush's promise to be a uniter, not a divider? Several outside groups, including the National Right to Life Coalition, Americans for Tax Reform and the National Rifle Association, stepped right up. "Right to Life will do radio; A.T.R. will do TV ads," said one of Bush's South Carolina advisers. Even though coordinating with third-party groups is illegal, the discussion explicitly revolved around the idea that these groups could be counted on to do whatever it took--whether it was running ads, passing out literature or making phone calls--to destroy McCain and save Bush.

Briefed later that day in his hotel suite, Bush agreed to the battle plan. The next 18 days would be the ugliest of his political career. In the heart of the Confederacy, phone callers and leaflets attacked McCain's wife's drug addiction, made racial attacks on McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter and warned of "McCain's fag army." Bush won the state by 11 points.

Paging Waitress Moms
For weeks Gore strategists Shrum and Tad Devine had been sounding out Stan Greenberg, the pollster with whom they had worked on Ehud Barak's race for Israeli Prime Minister and an old friend of Shrum's. Just about the time Commerce Secretary Bill Daley had replaced Coelho as campaign chairman, Devine called Greenberg and asked him if he would be willing to look at the race. Greenberg went out and did both polling and focus groups nationally. At the time, Gore was down 16 or 17 points, even in Greenberg's surveys, but the pollster thought he saw an opportunity.

Now they were ready to show his results to the boss. In late June, Greenberg set up his Power Point presentation--a laptop projecting onto a screen in Gore's dining room--and began sketching out a message with a more populist edge. Voters, he said, were ready to believe that Bush doesn't understand average people, that he is of a different background and more likely to give his well-to-do friends a break.

The type Greenberg projected onto the screen was tiny. Again and again, Gore got up from his chair and squinted at the stats. But he was getting more and more excited. Greenberg said it was time to pick a fight, which made sense to Gore. It was the kind of campaign in which he could be comfortable. And so the populist campaign was born.