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A Sweet Victory ... And a Tough Loss
Bush Two: They liked his war on terror, and his moral stance. How Bush topped his father, defeating Kerry on the strength of his strength.
By Howard Fineman
Newsweek
Nov. 15 issue - The place to be in the White House was the Roosevelt Room, where the portraits of patrician men of war—TR and FDR—stare down from the walls. George W. Bush's staff gathered there on election night to await the fate of their boss, who had anointed himself a "wartime president" and run for a second term as one. The place was fitted out with split-screen televisions and computers, its long mahogany table filled with sandwiches and crudites. That evening a distinguished houseguest came down from the residence to cheer the troops: none other than the former president George H.W. Bush. "We're going to win!" he told reporters lurking in the hallway.
In the end, the father turned out to be right about his son, who defeated Sen. John F. Kerry by more than 3 million popular votes and 34 in the Electoral College. But it took a roller-coaster ride eerily reminiscent of 2000, when Bush beat Al Gore by 537 disputed votes in Florida. Once again, exit polls showed a Democrat leading, then real returns showed a Republican surging, then a state materialized that both candidates had to have but neither could immediately and officially possess. This time that state was Ohio. By noon, Kerry and his circle in Boston couldn't contain their glee at the numbers from Ohio and elsewhere as he doled out campaign souvenirs and aides called friends to crow. White House officials were glum, and the mood in the residence was wary. As the numbers brightened, Bush in the wee hours sought advice on whether to declare victory. Karl Rove, his lifelong political helpmate, told him to hold back.
This time, unlike Florida, there was a quick resolution. There simply weren't enough uncounted "provisional ballots" in Ohio to make it clear that counting them would change the result. After a night of semi-defiance—he had sent John Edwards out to deliver a nonconcession concession speech at 1 a.m.—Kerry graciously decided to concede rather than put the country through the agony of a full Florida rerun. Kerry and Edwards were briefed by Democratic lawyer Ron Klain, a veteran of the 2000 campaign, on the provisional-ballot numbers and their legal options for challenging the overall result. When Kerry saw the numbers, he'd had enough. "I don't want the country to be divided anymore," he said, deciding to call it quits during a final two-hour conference call between Boston and D.C. Twenty minutes later he made the call he had dreaded—and that the president had been waiting for since late on election night. He reached the president in the Oval Office. "You waged one tough campaign," Bush said, speaking as one Yale man (and Skull and Bones member) to another. "I hope you are proud of the effort you put in. You should be." Afterward the president, hugging aides, grew weepy.
In the first presidential contest since 9/11, Bush triumphed on the strength of his strength: the strength voters saw in his sometimes imperious character, in his religious faith and in his willingness to use force to fight terrorism. Much of the country saw in him a stubborn leader, unwilling to admit error, correct mistakes or change his style of leadership. But even more voters saw instead a man of conviction, and rewarded him, even though—and perhaps even because—much of the world had come to despise him for his policy in Iraq.
The president's victory in the country's 55th national election echoed loudly in history—and in the Bush family's own remarkable saga. Bush Two won a majority of the popular vote for the first time since Dad did it in 1988. Bush Two became the first son of a president to win re-election. (President John Quincy Adams, son of President John Adams, lost his bid for a second term to Andrew Jackson in 1828.) And Bush Two evened the family scorecard, and ensured—as if any more proof were needed—that Barbara Pierce Bush would be regarded as one of the most consequential women in the annals of America: wife and mother to presidents.
A politician who had laid the foundation of his career in the rural Bible belt of Texas, Bush finished the building project on Election Day. "Moral values" was, perhaps surprisingly, the voters' top concern—and of those who said so, an astonishing 78 percent supported Bush. Nearly as many voters described terrorism as their leading concern. Those voters backed Bush by an overwhelming 85 percent margin. He won 76 percent of the evangelical vote and a majority among those who attend religious services regularly. One reason was clear: anti-gay-marriage measures on the ballots in 11 states, including—crucially—Ohio, which Bush won largely on the strength of turnout in rural areas. The measure was approved in Ohio by a 3:2-vote margin.
Once again, the country on Election Day produced a portrait in Red and Blue. Only this time the hues were deeper and more glaring, divided between the devout and the secular, the traditional and the socially less so. The president won a majority of married women and married moms, whites, white born-again Christians, military families and those who attend religious services weekly. Kerry, by contrast, received strong support from single women, working women, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, young voters, gays and lesbians and those who rarely or never attend religious services. Geographically, Bush swept the South and the Plains and Mountain States; Kerry once again was largely confined to what has become a largely bicoastal party.
In backing Bush, voters rejected Kerry's argument that Bush's doctrine of pre-emption had led America into a quagmire in Iraq, and that the terrorists could be vanquished only by the shrewd deployment of diplomacy and international institutions. Kerry, voters decided, was too nuanced and calculating to be trusted. On many issues—among them Iraq—the president's stands were less than popular. But Kerry, preferring the role of prosecutor or professor, never managed to sell himself. "Bush bet the farm on a particular theory of war," said Democratic polltaker Geoffrey Garin. "Voters never could get a sense of what Kerry really believed." Bush polltaker Matt Dowd concurred. "Voters trusted Bush," he said. "They just kind of liked the guy, flaws and all. They never were comfortable with John Kerry."
Bush won his own victory, but Kerry lost the race as much as the president won it. Buffeted in the Democratic primary season by the insurgency of Howard Dean, Kerry never repaired the damage caused by the rhetorical and legislative moves he made, and the explanations he gave on Iraq. His 19 years in the Senate left him with the voting record that it was hard to argue did not constitute classic Massachusetts liberalism.
Kerry's role as a Washington insider made him even more vulnerable. After Election Day, advisers were unanimous about the fatal moment: when he bragged, how- ever facetiously: "I actually voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it." His position on the conflict was complicated enough as it was—essentially for the war resolution but against the invasion—without adding a sound bite to encapsulate it.
The Bush campaign set out to capitalize on Kerry's often too-cute-by-half political maneuvering and his left-leaning voting record. BC04 dumped $60 million into television advertising on the Democrat—before he was even nominated at his own convention. It was the Doctrine of Pre-emption, Domestic Political Edition. Bush was the first president ever to "go negative" on the challenger so early, and the first to attack him by name before the fall campaign. In the summer the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth established a beachhead, denigrating Kerry's Vietnam service in a series of deadly ads that ran until Election Day.
And it worked. Winning 286 electoral votes and 58.4 popular votes (compared with 252 electoral votes and 54.8 million popular votes for Kerry), Bush confirmed patterns of history. No wartime president who sought re-election had ever lost—and, from 9/11 on, Rove had positioned his boss as just that, beginning with a direct-mail appeal distributed by the Republican National Committee only days after the calamity. Even in peacetime, incumbents tend to win, especially when, as in Bush's case, their party is unified.
Even if Bush had history behind him, his victory was a devastating defeat not just for Kerry—who had aimed for the presidency from the time he was a boy—but for the Democratic Party as a whole. On paper, the Democrats had good reason to believe they could beat Bush. His administration was the first since Herbert Hoover's to preside over a simultaneous decline in payroll jobs and the stock market, and Bush had led the nation into an increasingly controversial war in Iraq. A large majority of voters said that they thought the country was headed in the wrong direction—often a sign of an incumbent's weakness.
Still, not only did Kerry fail to capitalize, so did Democrats in Congress, who now face a daunting 54-vote Republican majority in the Senate and a decadelong GOP hegemony in the House. A furious fight among Democrats is sure to ensue, pitting the remnants of the Beltway establishment Kerry embodied against grass-roots insurgents who found a home in Howard Dean's primary-season crusade.
Hardly a philosophical man, and certainly not an intellectual, this Bush nevertheless succeeded by propounding big ideas—moral or strategic—and by turning every argument about domestic policy or war into a Manichaean clash of conflicting world views. The war in Iraq wasn't just a way to fight terrorism, but a means to spread liberty across the planet. Tax cuts weren't just stimulative, they were the emblems and engines of freedom. When Kerry raised questions about the disappearance of high-potency explosives at Al Qaqaa ammo dump in Iraq, Bush called the criticism an unpatriotic attack on the military—and got away with it. "The Bush campaign turned everything into a matter of an ultimate choice between right and wrong," said GOP strategist Tony Fabrizio. "They painted bright yellow lines everywhere. It was brilliant."
The Bush campaign drew the brightest lines on cultural issues and symbols. Ballot measures in 11 states limited the definition of marriage to the union of a man and a woman, and the Bush-Cheney campaign used the initiatives—and the issue generally—to paint the Democrats as opponents of traditional values. BC04 derided Kerry—a mass-attending, crucifix-wearing, devout Roman Catholic—as just another secular liberal. Many American bishops, while choosing their words carefully, made their preference for Bush clear. The efforts worked. According to exit polls, Bush won a majority of Catholic votes—the first Republican presidential candidate to do so. He also won 42 percent of the Hispanic vote.
The economy, which had ruined Bush's father's chances for re-election in 1992, cooperated just enough to give the requisite breathing room to his son. The recession, shorter and shallower than many that had preceded it, ended last year, and growth this year had by some measures been robust, despite soaring oil prices and worries over Iraq. Rove carefully targeted small-business owners, framing tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks as a gift to entrepreneurs, not Halliburton. In states such as Iowa—far gone from the days of rust-belt industry, without visible symbols of distress—the strategy worked. "In those states the key to growth is small business, especially among businesswomen," said GOP polltaker Frank Luntz. "The Bush campaign was very good at targeting those people."
Rove fed messages and demographics into what, for the Republicans, was an unprecedented turnout machine—modeled on the one the Democrats (and their union allies) had assembled back in 2000. Using their own organizational model—Amway—BC04 and the Republican National Committee top hands set strict, constantly updated turnout targets for every one of the nation's 193,000 precincts. As he traveled the country with Bush, Rove received detailed briefings from field lieutenant/sales reps. BlackBerry in hand, Rove rarely left Bush's side—and then only to spin a skeptical (but still listening) press corps on tarmacs at campaign stops.
In the end, the focus was where Rove had planned it to be all along—in Ohio. As the lengthy campaign neared a close, BC04 staged a huge rally in a hockey arena in Columbus. The roar was deafening—23,000 screaming fans/voters—but what rallied the president, his advisers said later, was the look in the eyes of the faithful: an intensity he didn't see in 2000, when he won the presidency in the Supreme Court. Only hours from Election Day, he was in Columbus with Arnold Schwarzenegger. A tape of Osama bin Laden had just been shown on American television. In response, Schwarzenegger and Bush posed as a two-man legion of superheroes. There can be no reasoning with a "people that are blinded by hate," said Arnold. "They are no match for the leadership of George W. Bush." Then it was the president's turn. In somber tones he recalled the day Al Qaeda struck. "On that day of tragedy," he declared, "I made a decision. America will no longer respond to terrorist murder with half measures and empty threats. We will no longer look away from gathering dangers and simply hope for the best."
It turned out to be a winning argument. But now it faces new tests. One of them is the risk of Republican hubris—and maybe even Bush's own. To achieve a lasting legacy, aides say, Bush knows he has some healing to do and may have to deal with the Democrats. But with 54 GOP allies in the Senate and Rep. Tom (The Hammer) DeLay in charge in the House, Bush in a second term could be dragged even farther to the right. Bush has no heir apparent—Vice President Dick Cheney has no interest in succeeding him—which leaves an ambitious array of would-be leaders eager to do business with, or challenge, the president. Bush and his party may start in the same place on issues such as the federal debt, Social Security and Medicare, but there is no assurance they will stay there. Bush will surely have a Supreme Court appointment or two to make—maybe more—and if his only concern is satisfying the conservative base that elected him, he may not get the justices he wants.
And then there is the rest of the world: a quasi-quagmire in Iraq, and an implacable and a newly visible bin Laden, who ridiculed the president for reading a children's book to kids while the Twin Towers were in flames. He dared Bush to continue his war policy. Bush had an answer in Columbus. "We will not relent, and we will prevail," the president declared. The voters believe Bush is relentless—they re-elected him partly for that reason. Now they can only hope he's right about the rest.
With Tamara Lipper with Bush, Richard Wolffe with Kerry, Susannah Meadows in Columbus and Rebecca Sinderbrand in Washington
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
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