President's campaign unifying Republicans
By Jeff Zeleny
Chicago Tribune national correspondent
November 3, 2003
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Never in her 72 years has Dorothy George stood squarely in the middle of a political protest.
She came here one day last week, to the downtown intersection of Nationwide Boulevard and High Street, to catch a glimpse of President Bush. He is her favorite Republican ever to sit in the Oval Office, she explained, and couldn't pass up the chance to see him as he enters what she fears may be a difficult re-election year.
Suddenly, several dozen people surrounded her, chanting "Fire the Liar!" and "Send Bush to War." She closed her eyes, uttered not a word to the protesters, and concentrated on thinking only positive thoughts.
"This is all so nasty," George said, clutching a Bush-Cheney sign. "He's just too good of a man to be beaten. I'm praying that the Lord will put him back in office."
The president's re-election campaign hopes to mimic the approach taken by this retired Ohio woman and convince Americans that Bush is the lone candidate in the race with a positive agenda. As the nine Democratic candidates deliver a daily pummeling, the president has been quietly building a national campaign with unprecedented reach, technology and resources to counter his critics.
With the 2004 general election one year away, the Bush-Cheney campaign already has surpassed the halfway point of raising at least $170 million for a primary contest in which it has no opponent, an often-overlooked advantage. At the same time, the campaign is creating an intricate grass-roots operation designed to have the intensity of a local City Hall race.
Even with the president's assertion during a Rose Garden news conference last week that he has yet to flip the switch on his campaign, the Bush-Cheney political machine has been in engaged for months and will publicly come alive the moment a Democratic nominee is chosen next year, if not sooner.
"We're preparing different strategies in order to run a viable campaign," Bush said, allowing barely a peek into his re-election effort. "But in terms of the balloon drops and all that business, it will be a little while for me to be catching the confetti, as they say."
The Republican Party, though, is on its way to signing up 3 million new voters, with state-by-state goals in places where Bush either won or lost by a sliver in the 2000 race against then-Vice President Al Gore.
An elaborate get-out-the-vote program that was tested during last year's successful Republican midterm election, called the 72-hour plan, is being strengthened. And supporters have at their fingertips a variety of new tools intended to spread Bush's positive message.
An admirer in Peoria, Ill., for example, can find out on the campaign's Web site -- www.georgewbush.com -- where to send a letter to the editor or how to get the telephone number of the nearby talk radio station to rebut Democratic attacks against Bush.
"The more they run this all-negative, completely `Vote us because we're not them' strategy, they are going to less and less connect with the general public," said Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for the Bush campaign. "The public may be concerned or frustrated about certain things, but they always want some element of optimism."
Visions of 1992
As the White House nervously watches confidence eroding for the president's Iraq policy and becomes increasingly concerned over the climb in the casualty count from incidents such as Sunday's deadly downing of a U.S. helicopter, some Democratic strategists say the mere mechanics of the Bush-Cheney campaign are daunting.
And within Bush's party, in which he is supported by up to 95 percent of conservative and moderate Republicans, he is more popular than Ronald Reagan when Reagan sought his second term.
"There clearly is a stripe of the Democratic Party electorate that hates him," said Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee. "At the same time, he unifies Republicans in a way I haven't seen since Ronald Reagan. And he has an appeal to voters in the middle."
While some Democrats are eager to compare next year's election to the 1992 race, with a similar economic pattern, a war and a candidate named Bush, there is one significant difference: This president is not facing a challenge when the nominating season begins in three months, unlike his father who struggled to recover from a primary with Pat Buchanan in New Hampshire. Buchanan lost there, but garnered 36 percent of the GOP vote.
Even some Democrats, who hunger to produce a replay of the election 12 years ago, are not entirely hopeful.
"It's very difficult for Democrats," said Sibley Arnebeck, a 58-year-old Columbus resident, who protested outside a Bush fundraiser. "He's got the bully pulpit. He's got millions and millions to blast TV ads."
Dave Regan, the president of the local Service Employees International Union representing 22,000 workers, concurred that Bush has several weighty advantages.
"He's got some personal charisma, and in the age of television, that works," Regan said. "He's assembled a very competent team. That's his strength."
Indeed, the strategy department of the Bush campaign is filled with top ad makers and pollsters, many of whom have been with Bush since he first ran for Texas governor. Ten media-consulting firms have been retained by the campaign, representing outfits from Hollywood to New York, all of whom have a specific task in creating the Bush 2004 brand.
Top-notch campaign team
Harold Kaplan, a Madison Avenue advertising executive who met Bush when he owned the Texas Rangers baseball team and Kaplan was filming an Advil ad with pitcher Nolan Ryan, is joined by Fred Davis of Hollywood, Stuart Stevens of Santa Monica, Calif., and Alex Castellanos of Alexandria, Va. At the same time, five polling companies have been hired.
Comparing the Bush operation to his Democratic rivals, a senior Republican strategist crowed: "You're really talking about IBM versus a start-up."
But Democrats say no amount of money, advertisements or sophistication can change the statistics: 3.1 million American jobs have gone away in the last two years and 9.4 million Americans are unemployed.
Even with the news last week that the economy had grown in the last quarter at the fastest rate since 1984, the challenges for Bush were plain during his 13th visit to Ohio, one of the dozen or so states expected to be battlegrounds in the election. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the unemployment rate has increased from 3.9 to 5.8 percent in Ohio since Bush took office.
While Democrats believe Bush is beatable, there is little consensus over which candidate should be nominated to assume the task.
Many party strategists in Washington still think Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who leads all of his rivals in fundraising and organization, could produce a reprise of 1972 when a popular Richard Nixon crushed the anti-war candidacy of George McGovern to win a second term.
That line of thinking helped inspire the candidacy of retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, who joined the race six weeks ago. Other contenders, including Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, argue that their candidacies offer the best hope to beat Bush.
Each candidate has coined a line of attack against Bush.
"The president is taking punches right now, both because of what the Democrats are saying and because of what's happening in the world," said John Sides, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin.
"But the advantage of what he can do, essentially, is sit back and watch each of the candidate's dirty laundry get aired before he even enters the fray," he said.
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