What It Took

(9 of 11)

"No, Karl," came Evans' curt reply. "We're already here."

Whoops. Rove realized he had the wrong church. He pulled a U-turn in the middle of the highway, but by the time they finally made it to the right church, steam was coming out of Bush's ears. "He's not a man who hides his emotions," said someone who was in the room. "He was pissed." They started practice 40 minutes behind schedule, and by the time it was over, they wished they hadn't started at all. Bush had bungled and fumbled his way through the 90 minutes. "It was not a crackerjack performance," said a senior aide.

It was not all that surprising that Rove got lost. By then Bush had practiced in so many secret places that it was easy to forget which venue might be on the schedule. Back in the spring, his staff members had rented a small auditorium at the Texas State Bar Association building in Austin. The site was perfect: it was relatively new, was close to Bush's office in the State Capitol and had a small back entrance that made it easy for Bush to slip in and out. But then a Democratic member of the bar group objected, and the state association evicted the campaign. Next the campaign rented a sound stage. They also practiced in churches; they practiced in Kennebunkport; and later they just repaired to Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Often Bush's staff, led by media aide Stuart Stevens, turned up to fire questions at the Governor. So all through September, when Bush seemed to be trying to dodge the debates, he was actually practicing for them somewhere, under the guise of what were called "communications meetings" on all the internal campaign schedules. Gore read the Texan's surprisingly light schedule and immediately realized what was going on. "No one has that much down time," Gore told his aides wryly. And his instincts were right; by the time Bush walked across the stage in Boston, he and his aides had been preparing for five months.

"I Thought He Was Going to Hit George"
Bush stalled about debates for weeks in August and September so that by the time his negotiating team turned up in Washington to hammer out the details of a fall schedule, they had little choice but to concede on dates, times, cities and length of debates. Then the two sides got down to the details. It took six days to produce a 50-page legal agreement governing lights, sets, timing, logistics, order of arrival, order of departure and order of speaking--even the kinds of pencils and notepads that would be available onstage.

Each side played the usual psych-war games in these talks: Gore's team said he wanted lapel mikes for the first debate (that was designed to fool Bush into thinking Gore was going to walk around); Bush wanted swivel chairs for the second debate (to make him look as tall as the Vice President). And for the third debate, the two sides spent a lot of time discussing rules of movement and space in ways that would have made an air-traffic controller proud, including arguments about privacy areas, zones of separation and what constituted interference. "The Bush people seemed constantly concerned that Gore was going to move," someone involved in the talks said later. "They seemed spooked by Gore's size." At one point, the two sides discussed a warning light that would fire if one candidate violated another's space. In the end, all that was scrapped for a large no-man's-land and a tiny zone of privacy around each man's chair. In retrospect, Bush might have wished for a fence. During the third debate, Gore ranged so widely over the stage--and at one point came so close to Bush--that after it was over, Barbara Bush quipped, "I thought he was going to hit George."

Indeed, it is a wonder that Gore, the self-proclaimed master of preparation, did not practice until the final week--or give more thought to how things might look. He spent three days in Sarasota, Fla., at the Mote Marine Laboratory with a prep team of about 15. The sessions were crunchy: figuring out the issues, tightening Gore's answers into the two-minute, one-minute time limits. But for all the questions they thought out, there was no discussion of stagecraft. And Gore, of all people, should have known the importance of the little things.

He arrived late at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and didn't have time for a check under the lights, an ironic mistake for a man who had written his college thesis on the power of television and the presidency. Gore's makeup artist did not allow for his Florida tan. And with only a few minutes to spare before going on, Gore was told something new: the pool camera might "cut away" to him during Bush's responses. That meant Gore had to be careful about how he looked when he wasn't talking--even though he hadn't prepared that way.

Gore entered the stage with his face painted orange. He sighed while Bush gave his answers. The repeated interruptions of Bush and moderator Jim Lehrer astonished Evans, who was sitting right behind Lehrer. "I couldn't believe it," he said. "I looked at him [Bush] and said, 'My friend is going to be the President of the U.S.'"