George W. Bush: The American Presidents Series: The 43rd President, 2001-2009

by James Mann

  These efforts were largely successful. Bush defeated his Democratic opponent Garry Mauro in a landslide: 68 percent to 31 percent. The demographics of Bush’s support were even more impressive: he won 49 percent of the Hispanic vote, 65 percent of women, and 70 percent of political independents.

  After such a convincing reelection, Bush became not just a leading candidate for the Republication nomination but the favorite. “The race is his to lose,” declared the conservative National Review only days after the 1998 results came in. A Washington Post poll taken in March 1999 found that 52 percent of registered Republican voters said they would vote for Bush. These promising early polls enabled Bush to raise unprecedented sums of money. The Bush campaign developed and refined the then novel fund-raising technique of “bundling.” Instead of having the campaign seek donations one by one, the Bush team asked key supporters to raise money from their families, friends, business associates, and former classmates. The top fund-raisers, called Pioneers, each raised $100,000 or more. The result was that in the year 1999 alone, the Bush campaign took in nearly $70 million, far more than any other candidate.

  Bush’s fund-raising prowess deterred some candidates from declaring for the presidency and pushed others out of the race. In April 1999 Kemp announced that he would not run. In September, Quayle, who had declared his candidacy earlier in the year, dropped out, saying he couldn’t raise enough money to compete. In October, Elizabeth Dole quit, too. “The bottom line remains money,” she explained.

  Bush did not formally declare his own candidacy until June 1999. But the reality was that he had been carefully putting together his team and organization for more than a year. His father also played a crucial role. In August 1998, the former president invited one of his former national security aides, Condoleezza Rice, to the family compound at Kennebunkport for a weekend at a time when George W. was also visiting. That weekend, Bush and Rice spent time together, just as his father hoped they would. Bush told her that he was thinking of running for president. They talked about sports (Rice, like Bush, was an avid sports fan) and about her upbringing in segregated Birmingham. But Rice also began to talk to Bush about foreign policy, starting to prepare him for what he might need to know in a campaign. She found him “funny and irreverent, but serious about policy.” Bush soon picked Rice as his principal campaign adviser on foreign policy. Over the following year, Rice helped put together a small advisory group of other former officials, all of them veterans of past Republican administrations. On a whim, this group called itself the Vulcans, a reference to the Roman god of the forge, who is immortalized in a huge statue in Rice’s hometown of Birmingham.

  Bush and Rove similarly put together an economic team composed in large part of former officials from past Republican administrations, a group headed by economist Lawrence Lindsey. A former Federal Reserve official, Lindsey was a devotee of supply-side economics, the tax-cutting philosophy embraced by Ronald Reagan that George H. W. Bush had once dismissively derided as “voodoo economics.” At the beginning of his presidential campaign, George W. Bush endorsed a proposal for a sizable tax cut.

  Thus, by the beginning of 2000, as the candidates entered the primaries, Bush had adroitly managed to win support across the spectrum of Republican Party politics. He was the favored candidate of the Wall Street establishment and of moderate Republicans, inheriting his father’s supporters and donors. His proposed tax cut appealed to economic conservatives. He maintained the amicable ties with social conservatives and the Christian Right that he had forged during his father’s 1988 campaign and deepened during his years in Texas. By appealing to these disparate constituencies, Bush held the Republicans’ intraparty bickering to a minimum. In the process, however, he drove the Republican Party considerably further to the right than it had been during his father’s administration.

  The only opponent who mounted a serious primary challenge to Bush was Senator John McCain of Arizona, who had won a reputation as a maverick legislator willing to challenge special interests. McCain attracted support from party reformers and from some moderate Republicans and independents. He was also the favorite candidate of the party’s neoconservatives: the foreign-policy hawks, many of them former Democrats, who had supported Ronald Reagan because of his anticommunist views. At the time of the 2000 primaries, Bush’s views on foreign policy were barely formed, and the neoconservatives had for years mistrusted his father. By contrast, McCain, a former Vietnam prisoner of war whose father and grandfather were admirals, supported an assertive American role overseas.

  In January 2000, Bush won the Iowa caucuses, a contest in which McCain did not compete. Instead, McCain allocated virtually all of his time, energy, and money to defeating Bush in the New Hampshire primary one week later. Taking the attack, McCain repeatedly criticized Bush’s proposal for a large tax cut. McCain argued that the Bush tax plan would hurt low- and middle-income Americans and put the Social Security trust fund in danger. One McCain television advertisement said that Bush would “take every last dime of the surplus and spend it on tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy.” McCain won New Hampshire overwhelmingly, with 49 percent of the vote to Bush’s 30 percent.

  That set up an epic showdown between Bush and McCain in South Carolina. In at least one instance, a Bush supporter sent out a scurrilous email saying that McCain “chose to sire children without marriage,” adding that one of those children was not white. (The truth was that McCain and his wife, Cindy, had adopted a child from Bangladesh.) Rove has long maintained that he and the Bush campaign had nothing to do with these tactics, which were said to be the work of individual supporters. The acrimony became so great that, after one debate, Bush put his arm around McCain and said he had nothing to do with the slander campaign against him. McCain retorted, “Don’t give me that shit. And take your hands off me.”

  In the end, South Carolina went for Bush, who won 53 percent of the vote to McCain’s 42 percent. With that result, Bush effectively won the Republican nomination. McCain did not have the money or organization for a prolonged, nationwide battle. Two weeks after South Carolina, Bush won nine of thirteen primaries, including California, New York, and Ohio, and McCain withdrew from the race. Nonetheless, it took McCain two months to endorse Bush, before finally campaigning with him against the Democrats in the fall.

  * * *

  Bush devoted the next seven months to his general-election campaign against Vice President Al Gore, who had easily won the Democratic nomination. Bush’s principal campaign issue was not one of policy but of character: the Monica Lewinsky scandal was still fresh, and Bush promised voters that he would “restore honor and dignity” to the White House. Bush pressed Gore to tell voters whether he approved of Bill Clinton’s conduct. Gore handled the issue awkwardly, offering conflicting messages and keeping his distance from the president.

  Despite his family lineage, his wealth, and his elite education, Bush skillfully presented himself to voters as an ordinary, down-to-earth person, one who was more in touch with their daily lives than Gore, who came across as wooden. On his campaign plane, Bush sometimes charmed reporters with his love of nicknames and his self-deprecating jokes. He mangled words and phrases with regularity: he called the Greeks the “Grecians” and once voiced sympathy for voters struggling to “put food on their family.” Yet he made light of his mistakes. At the start of his campaign, he took his plane’s public-address system to tell reporters traveling with him, “Please stow your expectations securely in your overhead bins.” On the final flight before Election Day, he announced, “Last chance for malaprops.”

  In July, Bush made the most important decision of the campaign, one that would determine the course, the policies, and indeed the very character of his future administration. Bush appointed Dick Cheney, his father’s former secretary of defense, to search for and vet the possible candidates to be his running mate. Cheney compiled dossiers on a long list of current or former senators and governors. Each one was required to fill out extensiv
e questionnaires on their financial holdings and personal life, and to submit to rigorous interviews by Cheney. However, while the process was still under way, Bush decided he wanted Cheney himself.

  Rove resisted. He contended that in political terms Cheney would do little to help Bush’s chances of election; his home state of Wyoming had only three electoral votes and was reliably Republican. Rove also noted that Cheney had health issues and an extensive conservative voting record in Congress, one that Democrats would attack. Finally, he argued that the selection of Cheney would revive criticisms that George W. Bush represented merely a restoration of the George H. W. Bush administration.

  Yet at this juncture, continuity with his father’s administration was precisely what George W. Bush seemed to want and to need. He chose Cheney not to win the election but to help him govern afterward. He wanted a vice president who knew the internal workings and processes of the federal government. Cheney, who had served not only as secretary of defense but also as White House chief of staff in the Ford administration and as House minority whip, possessed experience that no other candidate could match. George H. W. Bush appears to have played an important role behind the scenes, much as he did in introducing his son to Condoleezza Rice. He told his son that Cheney would be “a great choice.”

  The selection of Cheney had an impact that was tinged with irony: seeking continuity with his father’s administration, Bush unintentionally opened the way for a shift away from it. During the George H. W. Bush administration, Cheney’s strong conservatism had been counterbalanced by other figures such as National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. However, as George W. Bush’s vice president, Cheney would hold higher rank and greater authority to propagate his own deeply held views of American power.

  In advance of the fall debates, the campaign team worried about how Bush would perform. They sought to handle the problem by lowering expectations, pointing reporters to a magazine article that portrayed Gore as an experienced debater who had easily handled any opponent who came his way. The ploy worked; in dealing with Gore, Bush simply held his ground and avoided any major gaffes. The coverage of the debates focused more on Gore’s idiosyncrasies: he sighed frequently in one debate, was overly made up in another, and sometimes came across as overbearing or patronizing. There was one moment that was little noticed at the time but took on greater significance years later. Asked about America’s role in the world, Bush emphasized, above all, the importance of humility. “If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll view us that way, but if we’re a humble nation, they’ll respect us,” he answered.

  In late October, immediately after the final presidential debate, surveys showed that Bush led by a substantial margin, in some national polls by as much as 10 percentage points. Then the lead suddenly slipped away. On the Thursday before the election, the story broke about Bush’s 1976 arrest in Kennebunkport, Maine, for driving under the influence of alcohol.

  For the Bush campaign, this was not merely some long-forgotten episode. Bush had already discussed with his closest aides how to handle the DUI case, if it were to come to light. They had even considered disclosing it on their own in some nonsensational manner. Instead, they had decided to keep it secret. The incident had taken place not in Texas but in Maine, where reporters and political opponents would be less likely to search the records.

  Pressed by reporters, Bush responded with an updated version of his old standard campaign line that he had been irresponsible in his youth. “I’ve often times said that years ago, I made some mistakes. I occasionally drank too much,” he told reporters. He was helped by the fact that the incident was not reported until five days before the election and therefore was given much less coverage than it would have been accorded earlier in the campaign; a Bush friend phoned John Newcombe in Sydney, Australia, and he went into hiding to avoid any inquiries from the press.

  Nevertheless, the DUI story did hurt Bush. In the final days and hours of the campaign, the Bush team found itself on the defensive, answering questions about his past drinking: had he really quit, had he been arrested elsewhere? The revelation also seemed to conflict with the broader themes of honesty and virtue on which Bush had based his entire presidential campaign. “It was jarring for people to hear him admit he’d been arrested,” Rove acknowledged years later. “Many Americans had been drawn by his pledge to restore integrity to the Oval Office, and now he had surprised them with a DUI.”

  On Election Night, using exit polls and early returns, the television networks began to tabulate and call the fifty states for either Bush or Gore. One of the earliest states where the results seemed clear was Florida, which NBC called for Gore at 7:49 p.m. CBS and ABC quickly followed suit. Over the following two hours, the networks reported that Gore had won enough states that he needed only one more to win the election. Shortly before 10 p.m., Gore won New Mexico, and the networks began to call the entire election for Gore.

  But then, the Bush and Gore camps and the networks all began to get phone calls from Florida telling them that the vote there seemed extremely close, contrary to the networks’ earlier reports. As a result, Florida was shifted back into the undecided category, leaving the election still open. Shortly after 2:00 a.m., first Fox News and then the other networks switched ground and called Florida for Bush, announcing that he had won the presidency.

  Minutes later, Gore telephoned Bush at the governor’s mansion in Austin to concede the election. The vice president then left his hotel for Nashville’s War Memorial Plaza to deliver a concession speech. Just as Gore was heading to the podium, aides held him back. The returns from Florida were so close that the situation appeared to qualify for a mandatory recount, they told him. The election was not over yet. Gore phoned Bush back. “Circumstances have changed since I first called you,” the vice president said.

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” asked Bush. “Let me make sure that I understand. You’re calling back to retract that concession?” Bush told Gore his “little brother” Jeb, the governor of Florida, had assured him that he had won the state.

  What followed was without precedent in American history: a thirty-six-day battle in the courts over the election results. It bounced from courthouse to courthouse and, in Florida, from county to county, as lawyers debated the question of who should be awarded that state’s electoral votes and thus be declared president of the United States. The Gore team dispatched a former secretary of state, Warren Christopher, to direct its challenge to the vote tallies in Florida. The Bush campaign countered with another former secretary of state, James Baker, for decades a close friend of the Bush family.

  Immediately after Election Day, the official tallies showed that Bush had a margin of fewer than two thousand votes in Florida out of 5.8 million votes cast. Throughout the long postelection dispute, Baker and his team argued repeatedly that this ballot should be considered official, while Gore and Christopher contended that there were irregularities in the voting that necessitated a recount.

  Gore played an active role in directing the legal battle. Bush, in contrast, stayed detached and left virtually all the decision making up to Baker. He appeared in public occasionally in an effort to show that he was already preparing to take office. But Bush spent most of his time at his own ranch in Crawford, Texas, a place so secluded it had no cable or satellite television.

  The Florida Supreme Court, dominated by Democratic judicial appointees, twice ruled for Gore, ordering a manual recount of those ballots for which no vote for president had been recorded. Ordinarily, such decisions would be final; the Florida Supreme Court was a state court, ruling on a question of state law, and the U.S. Supreme Court does not generally get involved in such disputes. Indeed, the conservative Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist had issued a series of significant decisions on federalism that had emphasized its reluctance to intrude on the authority of state courts.

  However, in this case, wh
ich became known to history as Bush v. Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to intervene in the case to hear claims that the Florida Supreme Court was violating the U.S. Constitution by ordering a recount. On December 12, 2000, the justices voted five to four to overturn the Florida court rulings. The effect of the Supreme Court’s action was to allow the official tally certified by Florida’s Republican secretary of state to stand. Bush was declared the winner of Florida’s electoral votes.

  With that U.S. Supreme Court decision the election was over. Seven weeks after Election Day, Bush became the president-elect, even though Gore had won the popular vote. Once again, Gore called Bush to concede. This time, Gore afterward stepped before cameras to say that he had made the momentous phone call, adding: “And I promised him that I wouldn’t call him back this time.” Within four days, Bush began making his cabinet appointments, starting with his choice for secretary of state, Colin Powell.

  The Bush-Gore race and the prolonged postelection controversy had an impact on the Bush presidency that was profound and enduring. The battle left both Bush and his Democratic opponents with a series of misimpressions that would be damaging, in various ways, to each side.

  The Democrats believed that Bush, having won such a narrow and disputed victory, would need to move to the center. In order to govern, they reasoned, Bush would need to moderate his views and become more conciliatory. They were not prepared to deal with a new president who would prove to be both bold in his initiatives and highly partisan in his approach.

  Bush came to office with his own serious misconceptions. From the long campaign and its aftermath, he derived the impression that he did not need to have any deep grasp of policy or of history because he could rely heavily on his advisers, including, above all, his father’s advisers. Bush had done little more during the campaign than to come up with some phrases or brushstrokes for what he might do in office. He had told voters his own lack of experience didn’t matter, because he possessed an experienced group of aides to assist him. He had persuaded himself that there would always be someone around whom he could trust and to whom he could delegate responsibility, as he had with Baker in Florida.