A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America

by Ted Cruz

  The next day, I met with Josh for a couple of hours, and next thing I knew I had a job on the campaign, as one of the domestic policy advisors to George W. Bush. Within two weeks, I had backed out of the townhouse deal, packed up my things, and headed for Austin.*

  When I arrived, the campaign was nascent, a small operation on the second floor of 301 Congress, a high-rise building in Austin, less than a mile from the governor’s office. Most of the staffers sat in cubicles in a series of big rooms. My portfolio was domestic policy, basically anything that touched on law. It included criminal justice, tort reform, judicial appointments, civil rights, abortion, gay marriage, religious liberty, immigration, gun rights, and campaign finance reform.

  Governor Bush intended from the outset to run a campaign that was policy-driven and substantive. There was a lot of pressure on those of us on the policy team to help develop meaningful policy proposals that would underpin the political messaging.

  Part of the imperative was that the media caricature of Bush was that he was not terribly bright and was a celebrity candidate coasting on his parents’ reputation. A serious and coherent policy platform would directly counteract that false and unfair narrative.

  The policy team was led by three outside senior advisors. Former Federal Reserve governor and Harvard professor Larry Lindsey led economic policy; Stanford provost and Russia expert Condoleezza Rice led foreign policy; and former Indianapolis mayor Steve Goldsmith led domestic policy.

  Each had a full-time staff liaison in Austin. Rice’s liaison with the campaign was Joel Shin, who became my roommate. Joel and the rest of the team definitely did not fit the media-created stereotype of the Bush team as a bunch of ultraconservative, evangelical white males. Josh Bolten, for example, was Jewish. I was Cuban-American, of course. And Joel was a Korean-American Rhodes scholar from Alabama with three degrees from Harvard and an encyclopedic mind.

  For the first couple of months of the campaign, Joel had slept at the office. He kept his suitcase under his desk, showered in the building’s gym, and would work around the clock, until he literally slumped over in his chair.

  When I arrived, Josh had just given the edict to Joel that he was not allowed to make the office into his residence. So together we rented a two-bedroom apartment across the street from the campaign. In many ways he was the perfect roommate in that he paid half the rent, and yet worked twenty hours a day and would basically walk across the street, shower, maybe sleep an hour or two, and then go back to the office.

  As a leader, Josh taught us an important lesson in management: He didn’t husband access to his principal. He let each of us on the policy team engage directly with Governor Bush, and answer his questions.

  Many people, especially those who were veterans of Capitol Hill, would have behaved differently. One of the keys to success on the Hill is to control access to those who hold power, and so a lot of staffers try to shut their principal off from having interaction with anyone else. Josh understood that if he had a dozen experts spending all of their time delving into different subject matters, each of them could be far more informed on a particular subject than he possibly could (although he was awfully well informed himself). Granting them full access was a better service to his boss.

  We would usually have an hour or two of policy time each week scheduled with the governor. We’d go to his living room at the Governor’s Mansion, rather than his office, because he couldn’t campaign from a government office.

  Bolten also encouraged us to take personal ownership of our work. He instructed us to put our names on the bottom of our memos—which had to be succinct—as well as our cell phone numbers so that the governor could call us with any questions. Unfortunately, he tended to exercise this option at what I considered to be an inconvenient hour. Indeed, one of the areas where he and I were at odds from the beginning was that George W. Bush is a morning person.

  Usually around 6 a.m., I would be dead to the world, having gotten home from the office at two or three in the morning. When the phone rang that early, I knew who it was—nobody else who knows me would call me that early—so I’d sit up in bed, reach back, and slap myself across the face as hard as I could to wake myself up.

  Bush was not someone who engaged in a lot of chitchat or stopped to ask how your morning was going. His opening question would be something like, “So, is Congress going to pass this thing?” Half asleep, I would be confused enough that I’d almost wonder, “There’s a Congress?” Then I would have to remember what I had written a memo on so I knew what the “thing” was.

  Over the course of the next year and a half, I came to know Governor Bush fairly well. Perhaps because I came off as super-serious, his nickname for me was “Theodore.” I don’t know if he assumed that was my full name, which it is not, but it didn’t really matter for his purposes. I came off lucky next to Karl Rove, whose nickname, famously, was “Turd Blossom.”

  Bush has remarkable charisma, particularly one-on-one or with a small group of people, which is invaluable to a politician. He’s one of the most natural people-persons I’ve ever seen. The key component to that charm is his self-deprecation. We once were having a discussion over the death tax, also known as the inheritance tax, which is obviously of significant concern to families with a lot of money. Bush bluntly said, “The best cure for family money . . . is a third generation.” It was hard not to laugh at that, and also to be impressed, since Bush was a third-generation grandson of the wealthy Prescott Bush and, as was widely known, his track record in business had not been an unmitigated success.

  Throughout the course of the campaign I was also impressed with Bush’s inquisitive approach to the issues at hand. He never accepted our policy papers at face value. He would ask hard questions of us, and those questions seemed to me to spring from conservative principles. He believed strongly in freedom as the natural state of human beings, as God’s gift to humanity. Throughout his presidency, his deeply held beliefs made him an instinctive soulmate to Wiesel, Natan Sharansky, and other dissidents across the world.

  Bush’s conservatism was a different sort from that of, say, Ronald Reagan. Reagan had spent a lot of years thinking about first principles, reading Milton Friedman and free-market economists. He was someone who addressed public policy issues from his core positions and reasoned from there.

  Bush’s was a sort of gut conservatism shared by a lot of small business owners in West Texas. Although he was bright and asked incisive questions, he didn’t tend to reason from abstract principles. Nevertheless, I got the feeling that at any campaign meeting, perhaps with the exception of a few junior staffers like me, Bush was always the most conservative person in the room.

  That, as it turned out, was a problem. Bush often found himself being urged by pointy-headed policy advisors to tack to the center, or even the left, on a variety of issues on the grounds that it would make him seem more “reasonable” and less of a Texas cowboy whom the advisors feared might look scary to the electorate. Throughout the campaign and in the early years of his administration, Bush tended to resist that pressure.

  One of the first policy sessions I sat in concerned Social Security reform. Virtually every staff member in the room was advising Bush to stay away from the subject, following the conventional wisdom that Social Security is the proverbial “third rail” of politics: If you touch it, you’ll get electrocuted. This was, I soon learned, the prevailing sentiment in Washington, D.C.—avoid anything controversial or courageous. One staff member in the room said, “This issue polls terribly.” In his opinion, that should have been that.

  There were few things you could do to tick Bush off more than make an argument based solely on opinion polls. In that meeting, Governor Bush pounded the table. “Damn it, this is the right thing to do,” he said, and asked us to come up with a specific proposal. There were a number of issues on which I disagreed with Governor Bush, both as a candidate and as a president, but one thing that I will very much credit him with is the courage of h
is convictions, that he was willing to stand by what he believed, even in the face of daunting odds.

  I stayed quiet during that discussion, because I’d just started on the campaign. But it made a real impression on me. He told the team, “It’s your job to give me the best advice on what the right policy is. It’s my job to figure out how to sell it.” I agreed with that proposition: Substantive policy should not be derived by polling. Over and over again in the campaign, anytime a policy person invoked polling, it provoked an immediate and negative visceral reaction from Governor Bush.

  Now, that’s not to say polling had no legitimate role. Karl Rove and Karen Hughes were both looking to polling in terms of how to describe an issue. Obviously Bush’s goal was to get elected, and he couldn’t completely ignore their data. But in terms of arriving at the substantive policy position, polling was never the driver.

  Bush’s views on immigration during the campaign were quite different from what ultimately materialized as the administration’s comprehensive immigration plan, which caused such controversy in 2007. The focus on immigration in the campaign was twofold. In the campaign, the focus was on securing the border and improving and streamlining legal immigration. There was not an amnesty component to the 2000 proposal.

  One of the many things Bush understood was that with immigration, tone matters. In Midland, Bush grew up surrounded by the Hispanic community, and he understood their concerns in a real way that many Republican politicians simply don’t.

  This was brought home to me during the 2008 campaign when I joined a number of other Hispanic Republicans from Texas in attending a Republican debate in Miami that was sponsored by Univision. At times it felt to us like the candidates were basically saying, “You people need to vote for us.”

  I and the other conservative Hispanics around me were looking at each other going, “Who, exactly, are ‘you people’?”

  The Bush 2000 campaign was exceptionally well run, but it’s most frequent failing was a continuing sense of entitlement. Over and over again, when we were ahead in the polls, we’d relax and stop drawing meaningful distinctions. Our ads would focus instead on fuzzy pictures of kids, saying essentially “we like children” (as if somehow the other candidates were anti-kid).

  This is the wrong way to run. As the old political saying goes, there are two ways to run: scared and unopposed. We were neither.

  In early 2000 Bush won the first presidential contest, the Iowa caucuses, and so the campaign promptly relaxed. It was as if we expected some sort of coronation. In the following contest in New Hampshire, we didn’t run a hard-hitting campaign—on the day of the primary, John McCain held a rally with thousands of people, and Bush went sledding with his family—and we paid the price. We had played the equivalent of a “prevent defense” in football, and as a result we got our teeth kicked in, losing to McCain in New Hampshire by 19 points.

  That was the best thing that happened to the Bush campaign. Finally, the senior campaign leadership decided to draw serious distinctions between Governor Bush and his opponent. As it happened, there were two issues on which Senator McCain’s record was substantially to the left of George W. Bush’s: campaign finance reform and tort reform. Both were in my portfolio.

  Until the South Carolina campaign—which followed the New Hampshire primary—I had largely been confined to Austin with most other policy staffers. In South Carolina, however, I spent the entire week before the primary on the road with Governor Bush. We went city to city in a decked-out Greyhound bus and for the first time I saw Bush up close for a prolonged period.

  I quickly understood Bush’s advantage over McCain. Bush was a Texan, and he connected easily with voters in a southern state like South Carolina. Like Texas, South Carolina is home to a lot of military families, evangelicals, gun owners, and cultural conservatives. As we traveled the state, Governor Bush’s message resonated with those voters, and the two policy issues that he rolled out there made his differences with John McCain crystal clear. Bush ended up winning that primary by a substantial margin. And he was back on the road to the nomination and the tension-filled, close-as-could-be general election that followed it.

  Election day was somewhat surreal. The policy team, which had worked twenty hours a day for a year and a half, was suddenly irrelevant. Nobody cares about policy on election day.

  And so we went bowling. With Bo Derek.

  As it so happened, my boss, Josh Bolten, was a big devotee of bowling. And he was dating actress Bo Derek. They had met at the 2000 Republican National Convention and had curiously sparked up a romance.

  So when Josh took the entire policy team bowling on election day, Bo joined us. Let me just say, Bo Derek is spectacularly beautiful. In person, she is even more stunning than on the silver screen. At the bowling alley, she bowled barefoot, with two hands, in a white pantsuit. Every man on the policy team was mesmerized.

  Indeed, later that night, as we were walking home from the never-ending election results, I paid the price for that afternoon. My girlfriend and future wife, Heidi, asked me the seemingly innocuous question, “So, do you think Bo Derek is pretty?” Sober, I can answer that question just fine. But that night, at four in the morning, I wasn’t sober. And my response had far too much enthusiasm. To this day, Heidi gives me (justifiable) grief over my effusive response to her query.

  Two days after the general election, with the Florida results still in doubt, Josh called me to his office. Even in this crisis, he spoke in his customary calm, business-as-usual cadence.

  “Ted, I’m going to need you to go down to Florida for me,” he said. “Right now.”

  There was just enough in his tone to suggest the situation was urgent. Without packing anything I rushed straight to the airport, jumped on a plane, and arrived in Tallahassee that very afternoon.

  Almost everyone in Austin thought the recount would last a couple of days. This would be a quick, perfunctory legal proceeding. The votes had been counted, we figured. Bush had won.

  Indeed, I was astonished that Al Gore had even decided to challenge the election in the courts. In the history of the country there had never been such a legal contest of a presidential election. Even Richard Nixon, who lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 amid widespread allegations of fraud in Chicago and Texas, resisted the urge to contest the results and divide the country indefinitely. I thought it was a rather petulant display by Vice President Gore.

  In our headquarters in Tallahassee there was only a skeleton staff as yet. I immediately connected with Ben Ginsberg, a longtime friend and the lead outside counsel to the Bush campaign. The forty-eight-year-old Ginsberg, with a thin, reddish beard and a bald head, was a seasoned election lawyer. I knew we were in good hands.

  Other lawyers in his position, with the eyes of the world upon him, would have soaked up the media spotlight. But what Ginsberg did was instructive. He knew what most of us did not—that this was not an open-and-shut case, and that it would be headed to court. He recognized that his specialty was not litigation, so he didn’t say, “I’m the leader of this battle.” He instead said, with great humility and restraint, “We’re going to need a lot of lawyers to help on this one.” He was more than willing to surrender his ego to the cause, and to bring in even bigger dogs to take the lead in the case. And the biggest big dog there was—at least in terms of Republican politics—was about to arrive.

  When he ran for president, George W. Bush made a point of differentiating himself from his father, former president George H. W. Bush. At one point he famously looked around a room of advisors, and, referring to prominent members of his father’s administration, noted “Look who’s not here.” The candidate wanted everyone to know he wouldn’t turn to his dad’s friends to bail him out of a jam or to water down his conservative policy agenda.

  So it was a sign of how serious the Florida recount situation was that Bush very quickly tacked in the opposite direction. Wisely so. He called on the most prominent, effective member of the first Bush administratio
n—his father’s longtime friend James A. Baker III.

  Baker had served as President George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state and campaign manager. Before that, Ronald Reagan had made him chief of staff and later secretary of the Treasury. A highly effective, charming, and shrewd negotiator, Baker had played a leading role on five presidential campaigns.

  Tapping Baker was a brilliant pragmatic move by George W. Bush. In a battle that was both the Super Bowl of litigation and the World Series of politics, Baker had the mind of a skilled lawyer, the credibility of a statesman, an easy rapport with reporters, and a well-earned reputation for ruthlessness masked by Texas charm. All of that made him an ideal leader for our legal team.

  When it became clear we were in for a long fight, Ben Ginsberg and I sat down together with a notepad and started to discuss whom we should ask to come down and help us.

  The first person I suggested was my former boss Mike Carvin. There’s no one better if you are in a fast-paced, unpredictable litigation. With blazing speed, he can think through all of the difficult tactical decisions likely to occur.

  When I called Mike, he was at a wedding in Seattle. I said, “Mike, we need you to come down here.” He didn’t hesitate. “I’ll be right there,” he said. Mike got on a plane and flew to Washington, D.C., where his wife met him at the airport with a suitcase full of clothes. Hours later, he was in Tallahassee.

  Another friend I called was the head of Supreme Court litigation at the venerable firm of Hogan & Hartson. It was a fellow named John G. Roberts. While I had been clerking for Chief Justice Rehnquist, the Chief mused to me once that he thought he could get a majority of the Court to say that John was the best Supreme Court litigator in the country. Like Mike, John understood what was at stake in Florida. He jumped on a plane and immediately came down.

  Roberts was not only a brilliant Supreme Court lawyer, but startlingly low-key and self-effacing. Although he was one of the leading Supreme Court litigators in the nation, he had befriended me several years earlier when I was a baby lawyer. He didn’t have to do so, and most people in his position would not. For that, I have always been grateful.