Bush Ready and Bursting to Bring It On
By ELISABETH BUMILLER - NYT
WASHINGTON
A restless President Bush finally jumped into the political ring last week, happy that he had a Democratic target he could attack by name and enough money to start a $60 million advertising campaign, probably the most expensive in presidential history.
At the same time, Bush campaign officials were instructed not to refer publicly to Senator John Kerry as simply a "Massachusetts liberal," because it was an imprecise label that didn't tell people much, or so the thinking went. The preferred shorthand, campaign officials were told, was "the senator from Massachusetts who has a record of weakening national defense and raising taxes."
The two actions — the extent of the initial advertising buy and the early definition of Mr. Kerry — were pivotal. More revealing, Republican officials said that both were decreed by the president himself.
"I don't think there are any major decisions coming out of the campaign that he's not making," said one Republican official close to the re-election effort who did not want to be named for fear of angering Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, who is overseeing the campaign. "For example, this media buy wasn't decided by Karl. It was decided by the president. You don't have a situation where the president is removed, as maybe his father might have been."
Friends who have talked with the president in recent weeks say he is consumed by the campaign, the polls and Mr. Kerry.
"He knows his voting record cold," said the Republican close to the campaign. Mr. Bush talks to Mr. Rove daily, and sends messages through his political adviser to his campaign staff in Arlington, Va.
Of course, no one in Arlington is suggesting that Mr. Bush scored any knockout punches on the trail his first week, when he got into a public fight with some families of 9/11 victims over the appropriateness of using images of the smoldering World Trade Center, and a flag-draped body, in his advertisements. The families demanded that Mr. Bush pull the advertisements off the air, but he refused to back down.
Despite the bruising, White House officials described the president last week as in an unusually good mood, and revved up to engage politically after a protracted weigh-in on the sidelines of the primaries. Mr. Bush was remarkably acquiescent, they added, during the two to three hours of camera work it took to get his lead campaign commercial ready to broadcast; the 60-second spot, shot about three weeks ago, features Mr. Bush talking about his presidency as he sits next to his wife, Laura, at the White House.
"There were a lot of different takes," said one White House official. "He has an unbelievable level of patience for these things, and you wouldn't expect him to."
Mr. Bush was in an equally good mood at a $25,000-a-person fund-raiser for the Republican National Committee last Wednesday at the Bel Air home of A. Jerrold Perenchio, the chairman and chief executive of Univision Communications, the leading Spanish-language television network in the United States. Mr. Bush, who is aggressively trying to make inroads this year among Latino voters, greeted guests who included Nancy Reagan and Terry Semel, the chief executive of Yahoo, the Internet portal.
Mr. Bush was in such a good mood last week, Republicans said, that he took the unusual action of calling Mr. Kerry to congratulate him on Tuesday night, after the senator swept 9 of 10 states to become the presumptive Democratic nominee. The call was described by one Republican close to the White House as "pure Bush"; that is, it had the gentlemanly aura of good manners but was designed to knock Mr. Kerry slightly off balance and remind him that the man he would spend the next eight months attacking was the person on the other end of the line.
If the call did not have its desired effect — Mr. Kerry immediately went out and criticized Mr. Bush — it also caused no surprise at the White House. The Kerry campaign, the Republican said, "has excellent pitch, and when they go negative, they go negative in a way that really sticks." The Republican said he did not want to be named because "I don't want every reporter in America calling me every five minutes."
Finally, Mr. Bush may have been in a really good mood this past week because he ignored the annual Gridiron dinner, a 119-year tradition of Washington journalists, for a meeting with President Vicente Fox of Mexico at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Tex.
Mr. Bush, who intensely dislikes such formal inside-the-Beltway events, instead sent Vice President Dick Cheney, who joked that he had become alarmed earlier in the evening over some tightness in his chest, but "then I realized it's called laughing."
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