by Peter Baker
The Cheneys watched the debate on television at a hotel in Pittsburgh. When the moderator, Bob Schieffer of CBS News, asked if homosexuality was a choice, Kerry, like John Edwards the week before, raised Mary Cheney. “I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as,” Kerry said.
In her hotel room, Mary looked up from the travel schedule she had been working on and shouted at the television. “You son of a bitch,” she said.
Then she went down to her parents’ suite to watch the rest of the debate with them. Her mother and sister were equally incensed. “A complete and total sleazeball,” fumed Liz. Lynne was so hot she finally retreated to the bedroom to keep from distracting her husband, who was trying to concentrate on the rest of the debate. “Mom was especially furious that John Kerry had just used her child to try to score political points,” Liz recalled. “She couldn’t quit talking about it, she was so mad.”
The Cheneys grew even more incensed afterward when they heard Mary Beth Cahill, the Kerry campaign manager, say on television that Mary was “fair game.” The vice president huddled with his family and advisers to decide whether to hit back. The vice president called Steve Schmidt.
“Well, sir, as long as Mary’s comfortable with it, I don’t see any reason not to,” Schmidt said.
Mary overheard. “Make it hurt,” she told her father.
Lynne jumped in and said she wanted to address the post-debate rally downstairs, although she had not been scheduled to speak.
Schmidt asked what she would say.
“That this is a man with a dark hole in his soul,” she said. “He can have all the fake suntans and manicures he wants, but deep down inside he’s rotten.”
There was a long pause on the phone, and the campaign staffers on the other end could almost be heard shifting uncomfortably.
Scooter Libby spoke up. Let’s just be smart about this, he said.
“She’s my daughter and I’m angry and I’m going to say it,” Lynne said.
Libby pulled Liz aside and asked her to talk with her mother.
“Look,” Lynne said. “I know I’m not going to be stupid. I’m under control. But I’m mad and I’m going to say something about it.”
Appearing before the crowd downstairs, the vice president’s wife let loose. “I did have a chance to assess John Kerry once more,” she said. “And the only thing I could conclude is this is not a good man. This is not a good man. And, of course, I am speaking as a mom and a pretty indignant mom. This is not a good man. What a cheap and tawdry political trick.”
Dick Cheney saved his criticism for the next day, October 14, when he addressed a rally of twenty-five hundred supporters at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myer. “You saw a man who will say and do anything in order to get elected,” Cheney said. “And I am not speaking just as a father here—though I am a pretty angry father. But I’m also speaking as a citizen.”
The Cheneys, both out of genuine anger and with a measure of political calculation, had successfully punished Kerry for bringing Mary into the campaign. Kerry issued a tepid written statement that neither reaffirmed his comment nor apologized for it. “I love my daughters,” he said. “They love their daughter. I was trying to say something positive about the way strong families deal with this issue.” Elizabeth Edwards, wife of the vice presidential candidate, was less measured, accusing Lynne Cheney of being embarrassed by her daughter. “I think that it indicates a certain degree of shame with respect to her daughter’s sexual preferences,” she told an interviewer. The public, though, sided with Cheney. He called the bump in the polls the “Mary Cheney bounce.”
THE TEAM WAS confident, even cocky, heading into the final stretch. Bush and Cheney had defined Kerry as unreliable. Television ads showed an effete challenger windsurfing one way and then the other. A group of Kerry’s war colleagues backed by conservative allies of the president and calling themselves Swift Boat Veterans for Truth challenged his war record with over-the-top attacks that, while factually suspect, took a toll on his national security credentials in a national security election. A counterattack on Bush’s own record in the Air National Guard backfired when Dan Rather of CBS News had to retract a story based on forged documents.
By the time Bush landed in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 23, Karl Rove was feeling so sure of victory that he found the White House press pool and started joking around off the record. Rove said he had Osama bin Laden in his basement ready as a last-minute surprise, but the terrorist leader was a real pain, only bathed once a week, ate all the caramel popcorn, and did not even let the dogs out during the day.
No one was laughing a week later when bin Laden appeared in a videotape aired on Al Jazeera. Bin Laden, who had eluded American intelligence since Tora Bora, took on Bush, rebutting his claim that al-Qaeda attacked the United States because it hated freedom—if that were it, he told voters, ask Bush “why we did not attack Sweden.” He hinted al-Qaeda would stage another devastating attack if Bush was reelected. “Despite entering the fourth year after September 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened.”
Bush retreated to a private room to discuss the impact. Eventually, he decided it would work in his favor by reminding voters how much bin Laden hated him. But advisers fell into a sharp debate about how to respond. John Ashcroft, with support from Donald Rumsfeld, wanted to raise the nation’s threat level. Tom Ridge thought no intelligence justified it. Is this about security or politics? he wondered. “A vigorous, some might say dramatic, discussion ensued,” he recalled. Ridge had his aide Susan Neely call Air Force One to ask Dan Bartlett to appeal to the president.
Bartlett got the point and raised it with Bush. “I don’t have to tell you,” Bartlett said, referring to the danger of politicizing national security.
“I know,” Bush said. Soon word came down: the threat level would not be raised.
Operating from strength, Cheney engaged in a bit of psychological fake out by making a last-minute foray to Hawaii. While it was a Democratic bastion, polls suggested Republicans were within striking distance, and the campaign brain trust decided that a surprise visit would throw off the opposition. There was a reason no national candidate had campaigned in Hawaii in decades: it’s a long flight for little electoral gain. But Lynne Cheney suggested it would be worth it, and the vice president agreed.
On October 31, Cheney started his day in Toledo, Ohio, then flew to Romulus, Michigan; Fort Dodge, Iowa; and Los Lunas, New Mexico, before heading out across the Pacific to hold a late-night rally in Honolulu, where he gamely wore a lei. After just two hours on the ground, he boarded his plane and took off again for Jackson Hole. Over twenty-four hours, he logged nearly eleven thousand miles and eighteen and a half hours in the air.
Still, more than ten thousand people showed up at 11:00 p.m. for the Hawaii rally, possibly his biggest crowd of the campaign. He and his team felt pumped up. Everything, they felt, was in hand.
19
“The election that will never end”
President Bush woke up on Election Day at the ranch and stepped out into the overcast but relatively warm Texas morning. This was the day that would determine whether he would surpass his father by winning a coveted second term or go down in history as a transitional figure who only got into office after a fluky recount. He had rallied the nation after catastrophe, then plunged it into a war on wrong assumptions. Now came the verdict, what he would later call his “accountability moment.”
He braced himself for a long day and headed to the Crawford Fire Department to vote. Then he got back into his motorcade for the short ride to the airport.
On the way, he called Matthew Dowd, his chief strategist. “What is going to happen tonight?” he asked.
“You should win,” Dowd said. “It will be close, but you should be fine.”
His str
ategists considered Ohio and Florida critical. If he won both, he would be reelected. Just hours earlier, some time after one o’clock in the morning, Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman had tried to figure a last-minute way to get him to both states on Election Day, but Rove checked with Joe Hagin and discovered it was logistically impossible.
“Only one,” Rove told Mehlman. “You decide.”
“Ohio,” Mehlman said.
So Bush flew to Ohio, and his staff set up satellite interviews with Florida television stations. Even then, technical difficulties made it hard to get connected, and Bush grew irritated. “What is Karl making me do on Election Day?” he grumbled.
Bush got back on the plane and headed for Washington, anxious for information. As the plane descended toward Andrews Air Force Base, Rove heard from Sara Taylor, one of his deputies back at campaign headquarters outside Washington. The first exit polls were horrible. Taylor read them over the phone to Rove as matter-of-factly as she could without emotion, but that did not soften the impact. Rove’s hand was shaking as he cradled the phone in his ear and tried to scribble down the numbers on a note card on his knee. Dan Bartlett held the paper for him.
The numbers made no sense. They were down in states where they should be up. They were even further down in states where they should at least be competitive. The exit polls had them losing by 18 percentage points in Pennsylvania and by several points in Florida and Ohio; they were fighting just to win stalwart states like South Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi, and Alabama. How could that be? If these numbers were right, they were heading for a landslide defeat. As Rove read the numbers aloud, Bush “felt like he had just punched me in the stomach.”
Everyone in the cabin was shocked. “That doesn’t make any sense—losing Virginia?” said Karen Hughes, who had been traveling with Bush. An upset Condoleezza Rice rushed out and took refuge in the restroom, unable to look Bush in the eye.
Bush was deflated. “Look, if it is what it is, we’ll deal with it,” he said. “But I don’t believe it. We’ve been here before.”
He began working his way around the plane, thanking aides for their hard work. “Whatever happens, I love you guys,” he said.
Awash in emotion, he ended up thanking Nicolle Devenish, his communications director, twice. She was crying, as was Mark McKinnon, the media consultant.
Bush phoned Ken Mehlman back at headquarters to learn more. Mehlman ran through the numbers. They were grim. But then Mehlman began pulling them apart.
“Here’s why I think it’s wrong,” he said. Mehlman was a data-driven person, not given to trusting his gut. So he gave his evidence to the president for why the exit polls must be mistaken.
“This is really good,” Bush said, momentarily encouraged. “Hold on.”
From the plane, the president had the White House switchboard patch in his father, who was waiting back at the mansion.
“Say that again,” the president ordered Mehlman, who repeated his analysis.
At the White House and at campaign headquarters, word of the exit polls spread quickly, and a deep depression sank in. Suddenly the spirit and energy of the morning had vanished. Campaign advisers found Dowd in his office lying on the floor in the fetal position, refusing to go downstairs to brief reporters. “He was in a dark place,” Taylor recalled. She went down instead and gamely argued that it was too early to judge. “A lot of people got into an incredible funk,” she remembered. “At that moment, it looked real, and people thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re losing.’ ”
Despite Mehlman’s reassurance, Bush thought so too, and he was gloomy as the plane landed at Andrews, not sure what to think but increasingly worried that he had lost reelection just as his father had. As he prepared to disembark, he told aides, “Whatever happens, we left it all on the field.”
Hughes reminded him that everyone was looking to him, so he should keep his game face on. “There are people still voting,” she told him. “When you come down the stairs of Air Force One, smile and wave.”
Bush complied, smiling and waving for the cameras, but he felt as if he were “in a daze” as he crossed the tarmac to Marine One. The short helicopter flight to the White House seemed to take an hour. He put his happy face on again as he made the short walk across the South Lawn into the mansion. As soon as he crossed the threshold and out of camera range, aides noticed the upward curve of his mouth instantly turn down.
He headed upstairs to the residence, unprepared to face aides who had come with him so far on the journey, only to lose like this. He “moped around the Treaty Room” and tried to gird himself for what could be a crushing night. Just as John Quincy Adams, the only other son of a president to reach the White House, lost reelection, now it looked as if George W. Bush were again following in his footsteps.
ON BOARD Air Force Two, Vice President Cheney maintained more equanimity as Mary got the same bad news from Sara Taylor. His family members, especially Lynne, “were feeling a little sick to our stomachs.” But the vice president felt jaded about polls and was willing to believe these were as messed up as the ones in 2000. “I blew it off,” he said.
From a last stop in Wisconsin, Cheney flew back to Washington in time to host an election night party at the vice presidential mansion starting at 6:00 p.m. Like Hughes, Lynne kept telling herself to smile, lest her face give away her anxiety. Many of their closest friends came, including Donald Rumsfeld, Alan Simpson, and Nick Brady and their wives, as well as Mary Matalin. Even after four years of partnership, Cheney and Bush were spending the most critical evening of their tenure in their separate spheres. There was the Cheney party, and there was the Bush party. Cheney would join the president for the official declaration of victory, but until then he had his own crowd.
At the White House, Rove set up a war room he called his “bat cave” in the Family Dining Room, complete with two large-screen televisions and a bank of phones and four computers. Rice, oddly bereft of anything to do, helped Rove track key states. Bush fired up a big cigar and from time to time wandered down to check on the latest or called Rove from upstairs in the residence, where he was joined by family and friends for dinner. Later waves of exit polls had narrowed the implausible Kerry leads but still showed Bush losing nearly every battleground state. As the evening drew on, Rove compared county-by-county numbers from 2000 and was certain the exit polls were wrong. Rove, Mehlman, and a recovered Dowd berated network executives about the obvious flaws in the data.
Actual vote counts proved closer to Rove’s expectations, and Bush and Cheney began piling up the states they needed. After the early gloom, it looked as if they might pull it off after all. Sometime after 11:00 p.m., Bush went downstairs to Rove’s bat cave for an update. “This is the election that will never end,” the president moaned. But ten minutes later, ABC News called Florida for Bush and Cheney. The source of so much consternation four years earlier was now in the bag, and more of the president’s friends and relatives crowded into the war room. Rove was annoyed since “some of them were a little sloshed and in the way,” and he sharply told one Bush pal to stop bothering his staff or “get the hell out.”
Andy Card called Mary Beth Cahill, the Kerry campaign manager, to gently sound her out. Should they expect a call from the senator? No, she said.
At 12:41 a.m., Fox News, this time without Bush’s cousin, called Ohio for Bush and Cheney, putting them an inch away from an Electoral College victory. Bush, back upstairs chewing on a cigar, got the news from Rove over the phone. With any of several outstanding states, they would go over the top.
The president walked out of his bedroom, found Laura, and hugged and kissed her. “He just looked relieved that it was over,” said Eric Draper, the photographer.
But it was not. Around 1:00 a.m., the Cheneys bundled into a motorcade and headed down to the White House, assuming they would soon go to the victory celebration at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. But once they arrived, they learned it was not that clear. The networks, burned
from 2000, were not calling the race, and Democrats showed no signs of conceding. Card called Cahill again after 1:00 a.m. “We’re getting different numbers,” she said. Soon after, she announced to the media that Democrats would insist on counting provisional ballots in Ohio. Rove calculated there were not nearly enough such ballots to overcome the Republican lead, but for a while Bush and Cheney feared a repeat of 2000. A plane of operatives and lawyers, including Sara Taylor and Mehlman’s brother, was dispatched in the middle of the night to Ohio.
Bush worried about his father. The elder Bush might have been more nervous than anyone, anxious about the prospect of his son facing the same ordeal he had a dozen years earlier. At one point, the eighty-year-old former president distracted himself by launching into a long conversation with Cheney’s granddaughter Katie, who was ten years old.
“Katie, you’re the youngest person here and I’m the oldest,” he told her. “We need to talk.”
As the night wore on, the president urged his father to go to sleep. “Go on, nothing’s going to happen,” he said. “I’m going to win.”
With no concession in sight, the Bush and Cheney advisers debated whether to go out and declare victory anyway. Rove, Card, Michael Gerson, and Jim Francis, a close friend of the president’s, argued that they should. Why should they be held hostage to the media if the numbers were on their side? The longer they let this drag on, the bigger the risk of Democrats turning it into another Florida. But Nicolle Devenish had been secretly keeping open a back channel with Michael McCurry, a former Clinton White House press secretary who was advising Kerry. She knew McCurry and trusted him. Hold off, he urged. Kerry and Edwards would get there. After what happened in 2000, he said, they just needed time to satisfy themselves there was no real issue in Ohio.
Hughes, Matalin, Dan Bartlett, and Stephen Hadley urged Bush to heed the advice.