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The key moment came in May of 1980. Bush was charging ahead without a mathematical chance of overtaking Reagan. With the candidate on the road, Baker virtually yanked him from the race by confirming to reporters that the Bush effort in California was a scam. Bush was furious and convened a senior staff meeting in Houston. The candidate, like all candidates, could not have cared less about the math. He wanted to continue. Baker had a different concern. He knew Reagan would be "terminally ticked off" if Bush pressed ahead into California, Reagan's home state.
Gold notes something else about the Baker method. "Bush is not manageable in the ordinary sense," says Gold. "You have to be extremely tactful to get him to go along with something. He likes his prerogatives. So down in Houston, Jimmy had a bunch of us there who agreed with him about George's dropping out. He didn't need us there, but spreading the burden was important for Jimmy's continuing relationship with George."
After the pullout, and not for the first time, Bush grumbled, "Yeah, Jimmy was right. Why is Jimmy always right?" Bush's pique underscored a lesson Baker has never forgotten: a campaign manager should say no to a candidate only so often. Unfortunately for Baker, he has always been the only member of Bush's inner circle capable of successfully standing up to the boss. (For the record, the President demurs. "There are others who can," says Bush, "but they don't.")
In 1988 it was Baker who regularly needed to keep Bush on board with the fall campaign's attack strategy. By all accounts, the key to his success with Bush was a smooth manner. At every turn, Baker played the high-priced corporate lawyer who subtly guides his client to "choose" the option the lawyer intended from the start. "Everything was couched in the most mild way so as to let Bush make the final decisions," says one of the campaign's senior advisers. "It was always 'Hey, Bushie, the gang here thinks you ought to do thus and such -- but only if it conforms to your own thinking.' "
Even so, Baker didn't win them all. Besides selecting Dan Quayle, which appears to have been a Bush solo, the candidate often free-lanced by adopting a nonconfrontational technique. "Baker would call him on the plane and get him to change some line or another," says a Baker associate. "Bush would say, 'O.K., Jimmy, right,' and then go and do what he wanted to do anyway."
Sometimes, when Baker tired of conveying the handlers' no yet again, he flat-out rebelled. "Once, when Bush thought he could go the kinder-gentler route exclusively, we asked Jimmy to read him the riot act again," says Roger Ailes, Bush's media adviser. "That was one of the few times I've ever seen him blow up. He said, 'You call him yourselves. You're not the ones who have to carry that message and have him say, 'If you're so smart, Jimmy, how come I'm the one who's Vice President?' "