Bush: The Secret History of a Reelection
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By Vincent Jauvert
Le Nouvel Observateur
Week of 20 January 2005
Traps, marketing, and dirty tricks... Today one of his team's strategists confesses: "In July 2004, we thought we were done for." And yet, in spite of the Iraqi disaster, in spite of abysmal deficits and social breakdown, Bush turned the situation around. And beat Kerry by 3.5 million votes. Vincent Jauvert describes the underbelly of a campaign as incredibly sophisticated as it was devoid of any scruples.
That Wednesday, August 4, 2004, John Kerry believed he was protected from any low blow. He had just been nominated by the Democratic convention and all the polls gave him the advantage. He could breathe for a few days. Relax his attention. The opposing side would not attack before September - not in full midsummer. So he thought.
But Bush's men are extremely skillful killers. They chose to strike August 4 precisely because no one expected it. And to strike where it would do the most harm. The surprise attack was a series of advertisements, financed underhandedly by a rich Texas real estate developer, a close friend of "W." There one saw suppositious Kerry comrades-in-arms from Vietnam. They are full of hatred. They utter cries of rage. They assert that the Senator from Massachusetts didn't deserve the prestigious decorations he received in 1971, that he is not the war hero America had respected for thirty years, but a liar and a coward. To hear them, Kerry had not saved his comrades as he claimed. He had, on the contrary, abandoned and betrayed them.
All that is nothing but a barefaced lie, a put-up, a pitch. So gross that Kerry didn't react right away. He hemmed and hawed. He waited for the maneuver to turn against its instigators. But his silence instilled a doubt among hesitant voters. The manipulators hit their mark. Their prey was wounded: mortally: in a few days, Kerry's odds fell. They never returned to their August 4 level. And Bush will remain at the head of America for four more years - to the despair of millions of Democrats and the rest of the planet.
Kerry went up against a remarkable political marketing team - the best in the history of the United States, they say in Washington. A team composed essentially of Texans, disciplined and welded together. Totally devoted to George Bush for more than ten years. A team without scruples and formidably organized. A few days before George Bush's swearing-in ceremony this January 20, we interviewed a few of the artisans of this reelection.
They told the behind the scenes story of "W.'s" campaign, a campaign unlike any other, secretly begun four years ago.
Jan van Lohuizen owns a polling institute in Houston, Texas, but has lived in Washington, near his boss George Bush, since 2001. With a round head and round eyeglasses, he is the public opinion polling specialist for the clan. It was along with him that Karl Rove, "W.'s" all-powerful political advisor, buffed the reelection strategy to a shine. Originally from the Netherlands, Jan van Lohuizen maintains a slight accent and the bearing of a pastor from his Batavian years. In his wood house on Capitol Hill, he relates: "We established our plan for 2004 four years ago, right after our near-failure with Gore. The observation was simple: in 2000, we believed that presidential campaigns were always won from the center. Consequently, we sought to appeal to hesitating Democrats. But they didn't join us, while part of the right dropped us. So to win in 2004, we had to change strategy and win back millions of abstaining Republicans." By any and all means.
From the day of his inauguration in January 2001, Bush subordinated every act of the new administration to a single goal: his reelection. Every proposed bill, every appointment, every trip had to serve this ultimate objective. "What's happening in the White House is unprecedented in modern history (...). Everything -I mean everything - is shaped by political marketing," revealed one of the rare initiates to have deserted the clan, John Dilulio, in 2003.
The master craftsman of this permanent electoral campaign is the friend of thirty years, the strategist, the guru: Karl Rove. At fifty, this brusque and jovial autodidact has the president's absolute trust. Never, say political scientists, has an advisor been so powerful. From his office on the ground floor of the White House, Rove, whom Bush nicknames "Turdblossom," terrorizes the apparatus of State. Every week, he convenes all the Cabinet members' chiefs of staff. He verifies that the least expenses are useful to the President's reelection. "He analyzes the electoral consequences of contemplated programs right down to the county level!" says political scientist Paul Light.
For four years, Rove - "architect" of the reelection, Bush will say the day after his victory - operates and maneuvers. He secretly talks to the most reactionary religious leaders every week. He takes great care of them. He has the very devil of a need for their support: the extreme Christian right massively abstained from voting in 2000. Especially white Evangelical Protestants. Four million of them didn't vote. They thought Bush was too left wing...
Richard Land is one of these much-courted religious leaders. He participates in the weekly telephone conferences with Rove. Land is imposing. Big, brown haired, square, this "sixth generation" Texan (he specifies) wears a signet ring, a black suit, and a red tie. Fifty-seven years old ("three months younger than George"), he directs the powerful Southern Baptist Convention. With 16 million members, it's the second largest American religious organization, behind the Catholic Church. Its headquarters is located in Nashville, in the Deep South. There, on the first floor of a brick building adjacent to famous country music bars, this doctor of philosophy swaggers: "Bush needs us, needs our strike force. That's what Karl organizes these phone calls for the last four years. We had contacts in the Reagan team, but nothing so regular, so formalized. With the Bush team, we talk all the time about everything: appointments to key posts, planned laws, coming elections..."
When necessary, the power shows itself ecumenical. It also cajoles Catholics, on account of ever more numerous Latinos. When he comes to Europe, Bush almost always makes a detour to the Vatican, to display himself with Jean-Paul II. He never misses an opportunity to remind people that his brother Jeb, governor of Florida, converted to "Papism" and married Columba, a devout Mexican. Since Bush's arrival in power, the White House even has a "liaison officer" for the Catholic community - with a part of it anyway. This intercessor is in permanent and discreet contact with several right wing (and even extreme right wing) Catholic figures.
He brings them together every week, far from prying eyes, listens to their complaints and their advice. Then he makes a report to Karl Rove, to Bush if necessary.
Editor-in-Chief of a fundamentalist journal, the go-between in question is Deal Hudson. He refuses to reveal the names of the participants in these meetings. He no doubt fears for the reputation of certain bishops whom he has succeeded in leading astray into politicians' politics. A strange sort of person, this Hudson. Nice face and signet ring, a graying fifty-year-old or thereabouts, you would say he came out of a sitcom for the elderly along the lines of "Fires of Love." Nevertheless, he talks like a female deck chair attendant. In his Washington office, he moans against the degradation of morals and sexual promiscuity. He curses Kerry, the Catholic, who - Can you imagine! - took communion in a black Methodist church, "a most serious sin."
However Hudson the bigot is also a marketing pro. Aside from his White House functions, he directs the campaign cell charged with mobilizing Catholics. To "sell" his nineteenth century ideas, he uses twenty-first century techniques. "GPS has radically changed the way we work," he tells me. "We had to distribute pro-Bush pamphlets in 6000 churches. 25,000 people volunteered. Which ones should we choose? With GPS and a special program, we were able to identify those whose homes were closest to the churches. They were the ones who did it. Incredible, isn't it?" Miraculous, even.
With the Bush team, fishing for votes is no longer an art; it's a state-of-the-art technique. Jan van Lohuizen, recounts: "In the swing states, we succeeded in reaching millions of Republican sympathizers, one by one, in a personalized way." How? The operation, which mobilized all the best programmers, is unique in American political history. "In America," he explains, "there are companies that specialize in collecting and selling information about individuals. It's entirely legal. They can supply an incredible amount of data about each person: the brand of their car, their income, their level of education, their favorite magazines, their favorite television programs, whether the person is a home owner or a renter, the number of telephone calls made abroad, the church a person goes to, their children's schools... Big firms like Visa constantly use this information for their advertising operations." But no one had used it yet to get a president elected. "We bought all the data about everyone (!) registered to vote," Van Lohuizen explains. One important point: some citizens' party affiliation was known from these lists. We crunched all this information in our computers. That allowed us to identify about thirty different types of voter and then to imagine the most convincing arguments for each one of those types. Then all we had to do was classify each individual within those categories and send that person the corresponding message."
Useless, for example, to contact a Volvo driver who does yoga: the probability is 90% he/she is a Democrat. A BMW owner and hunter is certainly Republican. We have to write to him. But what? That depends on other factors. If he makes many long distance phone calls, he probably votes less often than the average person. And if he goes to church regularly, he's certain to oppose abortion. "So the computer will send him several letters explaining that if Kerry is elected, there will be more abortions. And that he absolutely must vote to prevent these massacres." But if he's a Latino, he will surely go to the polls (statistically, abstention is rare among Hispanics). Rather than trying to mobilize him, the automatic message will ask him to campaign in his neighborhood.
Bush's men target their messages with an unheard of precision. Even billboards. County by county, their computers indicate the typical route "Republican sympathizers" take from home to work. All they have to do is reserve the billboards along the way. The same for the small screen. Buying big blocks of television time is now out of the question. They want everything tailored. They know which are the favorite programs of each category of electors. With some surprises sometimes. White House advertisers nearly fainted when they discovered that women "moderately sympathetic to the Republican Party" adore a gay TV series. But they got over it quickly and conceived some commercials specifically for that audience, carefully avoiding, naturally, any reference to Bush's frankly homophobic discourse (that specifically intended for white Protestant men who drive 4x4s and read "Hunting Magazine").
The Bush team segments its message with perfect cynicism. An example: "We made lots of radio commercials for rural areas, but we made sure that the radio stations in question were not broadcast in the cities," explains Paul Curcio, one of the most frequently seen advertising specialists in Republican circles. Why take such precautions? "Because rural people on the right are very very right wing," he explains. "So we speak to them in very muscular tones. Urban dwellers, generally more moderate, mustn't hear it. They would be frightened."
One theme, skillfully chosen, federates, mobilizes, and enrages rural people and the entire traditionalist right: homosexual marriage. Pro-Bush activists asserted that if Kerry were elected, legalization of these unions would be inevitable (even though the Democratic candidate had said and repeated that he was not in favor of them). To inflame the passions, referendums on the subject were opportunely organized in a dozen key states on the same day as the presidential election. The goal: to attract even more Evangelicals and right wing Catholics to the polls, the ones who intended to abstain from the presidential election, betting that if they went out to vote in the referendum, they would also vote for the supreme payload - Bush obviously.
Give unto Caesar...The idea of focusing the campaign on gay marriage was not Karl Rove's. Richard Land, the Southern Baptist, was the one who "sold" it to him. The doctor of philosophy (graduate of Oxford, no less!) tells how, in his own words: "It was the end of January 2004. The mayor of San Francisco had just married 3000 gay couples and the Massachusetts Supreme Court had determined that such a union was possible. I called Karl and told him he had to jump on the opportunity, that that subject would move mountains. He wasn't too hot about it as a theme for a national campaign; he was afraid of alienating moderate Republicans. But I told him that our base was enraged, that there was a chance they'd abstain again.
So then he gave in. And 78% of white Evangelical Protestants voted for Bush!" Thank-you, Reverend Land.
The other big theme of the campaign, its veritable leitmotiv, was, of course, the "war against terrorism." The catch-all expression doesn't make much strategic sense, but it allows the Republicans to keep public opinion under pressure. Bush and Rove had sniffed out its electoral potential immediately after September 11. In January 2002, four months after the attacks, Rove already declared to Republican Party leaders meeting in a closed door session: "The war against terrorism is a subject that can make us win. Americans trust Republicans better than Democrats to protect them."
Was the Iraq invasion part of the reelection plan? Nothing proves it. But if that were the case, what a blooper! For the bogging down of the conflict in Baghdad very nearly cost Bush his second term. "In the last months of the campaign," says Jan van Lohuizen, "our problem was the war in Iraq. It could easily have cost us the election. Our goal was to distract the voters' attention." Towards what? The "terrorist menace," by gum! To make the country forget the disaster in Baghdad, it was necessary to scare the heartland so it would throw itself intro the arms of the courageous and inflexible president. Just before the election, Bush's publicists concocted a terrifying ad: ravenous wolves (the terrorists, you understand) ready to devour innocents (the Americans, of course). "That paid off, paid off a lot, even," confides Jan van Lohuizen with a smile.
And the famous Bin Laden tape, broadcast the weekend before the vote, was that also a last minute maneuver? "Of course not," he says. "We didn't have anything to do with it. But we researched to see whether it had an impact." The answer: "No." Whatever.
Anticipate the opponent's moves and draw him out onto the terrain they've chosen: that's the Bush men's credo. March 15, 2004, the Massachusetts Senator had just won the primaries and was getting ready to give an important foreign policy speech. "W.'s" team decides to lay a trap. That same morning, it broadcast a spot conceived the day before: a serious voice asks Kerry whether he voted for or against funding the war in Iraq; they would like to know. The Democratic candidate wants to give an up to the minute answer. But he hadn't prepared anything and his case is complicated. Yes, he wants to vote for the funding, but on one condition: that Congress first adopt an amendment to the law reducing rich people's taxes. Consequently he voted in favor of that amendment, then, when it was rejected, he voted against the military funding. But he gets unnerved; he gets muddled up and says: "Yes, I voted for the 87 billion dollars before... voting against it." Bingo! He fell right into the trap. In this phrase, Kerry suggests he is hesitant, indecisive, fickle - in English, a flip-flopper. Exactly what the Bush team was waiting for to define their adversary, largely unknown to the general public that March 15, 2004. They would pick up this shambolic phrase in a fantastic ad campaign (100 million dollars) starting the following week. And Kerry would be definitively catalogued as a flip-flopper: a weather vane. An image that would stick with him until November 2.
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