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The Bush camp was trying not to panic, though top fund raisers were tapped to call up big donors and hold their hands. "Everyone thought we were so good that we were gonna walk away with this thing," sighs a top adviser to the Texas Governor. "Even we started believing it." Last week there was no shortage of Republican operatives who said they had seen trouble coming for weeks, even months, but none of the cocky co-pilots in Austin would listen. Some image advisers inside the campaign and back in Washington at Republican headquarters had said for weeks the Bush campaign had to start ripping into Gore. The ads were in the can. It was time to go.
But at that point Bush believed his mud-free, high-road approach was working for him--which it was. He was leading in the polls, killing Gore in key states and steadily building his strength among women, independents and other swing voters. Why spend the money and risk a backlash when everything was going just great?
Following the Democratic Convention last month, Gore was jabbed by the commentariat for his down-market populism--all that talk about "fighting for working families"--but the campaign can now claim that it worked to bring home restless Democrats. So just as they had planned in Los Angeles, Gore last week was ready to broaden his message to say he was fighting for "hard-working middle-class families"--gradually moving up the economic ladder to the more affluent suburbanites Gore needs to pull way ahead. It was all humming along so smoothly that the man himself seemed transformed. He spent Labor Day in a round-the-clock workathon, bonding with his buddy Joe, changing outfits like Diana Ross, but sticking to his message of targeted tax cuts, Medicare drug benefits and some bright new strands for the safety net. "We knew that when it came time to engage, good things would happen," says a Gore adviser, "that we would go to terrain very favorable for us."
"We let the guy come back to life," says a Republican who had worked on the G.O.P. ads that never ran. "It was a great blunder." Once Gore got his footing and started throwing out policy positions like knuckle balls aimed at Bush's head, Bush faced a different challenge: to make the case that issues don't matter without character. Though Bush at times makes an ideological pitch, that he trusts the people with their own money while Gore puts his faith in archaic bureaucracies, it may never be sharp enough to punch through general contentment. So Bush is left trying to argue that Gore is a fraud, his promises hollow. It is as though he is saying, "We both want to save Social Security and give Grandma cheaper drugs and fix the schools, but he's a liar. You can't trust him to get it done, and I'm a leader so you can."