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There are several competing visions of Bush's presidential journey. In one he is a rock, his personality and beliefs so immutable that not even the extraordinary experience of running for President could affect them. "He's exactly the same good guy, 100%," says Brad Freeman, a friend of two decades who served as Bush's California finance chairman and who occasionally turned up on the campaign trail to keep the candidate in good spirits. "There are some situations when I can't kid around with him as much. He's more serious. But he's the same guy." Says campaign chairman and close friend Don Evans: "The important things haven't changed--his faith, his values, his belief that there's a higher authority."
Evans is right, for the most part. Bush has an immutable core. For one thing, he is a man of habits, and even a presidential campaign did not compel him to break many. He insisted on returning home from the campaign most weekends, even at the very end, so he could sleep in his own bed and play with his pets. He kept his days relatively short, often finishing the last speech by seven or nine. Bush didn't care about appearing lazy. And although he was criticized for talking openly about his faith during the primaries, Bush's religion wasn't just for the consumption of Christian conservative voters. During the October debates with Al Gore, he dealt with the pressure by squeezing a small cross he had tucked away in his pants pocket.
Yet if Bush stayed the same in some core ways, he changed profoundly in others. The campaign, say aides and others close to Bush, taught humility and patience to the lucky son of a President who is not naturally endowed with either quality. His loss in the New Hampshire primary was the turning point, but it took a while for the lesson to sink in. Three weeks after the blow, when he lost again to McCain in the Michigan primary, the Texas Governor was so angry at the way McCain had portrayed him to Roman Catholic voters that he refused to make the customary congratulatory telephone call to the victor. Nonetheless, that period, Bush told TIME, "was an important moment because it showed people that the guy who, for some, was running on his daddy's name, could take a punch--and then turn around and recover."
It also forced him to learn how to improvise. When he launched his presidential campaign, his chief political strategist, Karl Rove, stuck with what had worked in Texas--a carefully laid-out strategy and message, to be executed with total discipline. When that plan was blown away in New Hampshire, no one knew whether the Texas Governor was capable of adjusting to his new reality. "There was a suspicion among some Republicans that once you shattered the myth of inevitability, Bush would go down," says a top adviser.