HIS DOMAIN President Bush in the Oval Office in early December
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Expanding the party depended on reaching out to outsiders, the literal ones, pioneers of the new American frontiers that ring the old cities and suburbs--places like Colorado's Douglas County, Ohio's Delaware County and Farmwell Hunt in Ashburn, Va., which advertises itself as a place "where family values, engaged residents, nature, fun and safety come together to form a premier community." And then he went even further, to the rural communities that Presidents don't visit very much because of the potential inefficiencies of spending precious time on such sparsely populated locales. Bush put dozens of such communities on his itinerary, and he can still rattle off their names. In "Poplar Bluff, Mo.," he notes, "23,000 people showed up in a town of 16,000 people." He won 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties in the country--generally by a wide margin. Visiting so many obscure towns, Bush says in retrospect, "was an interesting strategy that really paid off." The President remembers a local official saying to him when he visited Marquette, Mich., "I think you will have seen 50% of the people in this area on this one trip."
Because the strategy worked, Democrats admit they'll have to look hard at their own model, which focused more on turning out loyal voters than on finding new ones. "The President was freshly minting Republicans all over the country, while we were building the greatest turnout machine ever," says Kerry adviser Mike McCurry. "The moral is that I don't think you could do a better job of funding, organizing and deploying a paid get-out-the-vote effort than we did, and it's just not enough to beat a Republican Party that is growing."
Turn into the Wind
If a central drama of the slaloming Kerry campaign was his agreeing with the last person he spoke to, the drama of the Bush campaign was his refusing to. "If you know me, I guess that's called stubborn," the President says. Whenever an aide comes back to him with reports of receiving a hostile reaction to one of his policy proposals, from bureaucrats bucking intelligence reform or members of Congress squealing about his budget, Bush greets the embattled aide with the same phrase: "You must be doing something right." A Bush adviser puts it more bluntly: "He likes being hated. It lets him know he's doing the right thing."
People close to Bush have their theories about this. Some think he likes the cries of outrage because they signal that he's making tough calls, which is how he views his job description. "Part of it could be his faith," says an adviser. "Being persecuted is not always a bad thing." Some of it may be learned. He has hated the political echo chamber ever since he watched insiders he viewed as self-preserving and backbiting carve up his father's Administration. When you're a lie-in-wait politician like Bush, who has gained so much from being underestimated, absorbing criticism toughens your skin and eases the wait for the coming reward. "There's no victory for Bush that is sweeter," says an aide, "than the one he was told he couldn't have."