CHAPTER

ELEVEN

Overtime: The 2000 Election

Before the pollsters, the computers, and the projection wizards came to power, election nights in close contests were suspense stories, stretching through hours of uncertainty as the votes were counted. In all but the landslides, writing about elections was telling a story as it happened, unfolding toward an often unknown ending. You could read the clues and anticipate the winner, but you couldn’t be sure. Come the millennium, all that suspense and excitement was history, we thought. In the last campaign of my career as a political reporter, I harbored a nostalgic wish that there might an election to defy the system—the art, science, or whatever it was—of projecting the outcomes before a vote had been counted. But by 2000, we thought the process of voter polling and computerized projections had to be infallible, or close to it.

The experts were always right, or almost always. They’d blown a New Hampshire Senate election call in 1998, declaring the wrong winner, but that was just a glitch, the projections people said, and they’d made the system fail proof for 2000. Sure they had. I got my suspense that election night and five weeks beyond it as George W. Bush and Al Gore struggled for the presidency in a deadlock over Florida, where the margin was too close to call with certainty even after the state’s electoral votes and so the presidency were awarded to Bush.

Neither Bush nor Gore nor anybody else will ever know who really got more votes in Florida. At 0.00009 of 1 percent of the vote, the margin by which Bush was certified the winner and ultimately the forty-third president, there could be no absolute proof of the outcome. Despite the never-again promises of Congress and the states to create a more perfect process for casting and counting votes, no voting system could guarantee the accuracy of a count as close as Florida’s in 2000. Perhaps in a laboratory scientists could engineer one, but not in the schoolhouses, town halls, and myriad other precinct settings of a diverse American election. (The organization that conducted voter exit interviews and projected outcomes for the media, Voter News Service, a consortium of the TV networks and the AP, not only failed in Florida in 2000, a two-year effort to fix the system failed as well. Before the polls closed in the election of 2002, VNS said it could not deliver reliable data and gave up for the night. After those failures, VNS was disbanded in January 2003.)

Presidential elections usually are settled by clear margins, two or three percentage points even when they are close. When the vote count is even closer, as between Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, the electoral college system tends to magnify the winner’s margin. In 1996, Clinton was reelected with less than half the popular vote but a 70 percent count in electoral votes. But in 2000 the old generalities didn’t apply; the projections were not reliable, and the TV commentators had to swallow their announcements that Bush had won, made and retracted in the early morning hours after election day. The election of November 7 was settled for Bush on December 12, after the Supreme Court ended the Florida recounts. Bush lost the national popular vote but won the White House with an electoral college majority plus one.

It was the election that ran overtime. My career did, too. I was sixty-five years old that January 11, retirement age. It was not mandatory for me to retire as a reporter, but as an AP vice president, I served one-year terms and thought I was in my last in 1999. After nearly forty-five years, it was time to go. Then Lou Boccardi, the AP president, asked me to stay through the 2000 election and cover one last presidential campaign. I was flattered and delighted.

The first campaign of the twenty-first Century began taking shape two years before the millennium, with Vice President Gore and Texas Governor Bush installed long in advance as the consensus front-runners for the presidential nominations. For both men, politics was the family business. I’d reported on their fathers, the first Tennessee Senator Gore and the first President Bush. The vice president and the governor had the name recognition, the poll ratings, and, therefore, the campaign cash to become the favored candidates of their rival party establishments. That standing propped them up when they slipped, enabling them to withstand the challengers who stalled each of them early in the 2000 primary election season.

I first encountered George W. Bush in 1988 as he traveled the presidential campaign path with his father. “I was a loyalty enforcer and a listening ear,” he said later. “I earned and deserved a reputation for being feisty and tough, sometimes too tough.” The younger Bush was a brusque-to-bristling insider who usually kept reporters at a defensive distance. As the political saying goes, he wouldn’t tell you if your pants were on fire. He was an unofficial adviser in the Bush White House, the guy who got the tough assignments, including the task of telling Chief of Staff John Sununu that he had to go in 1991. George W. was aboard the 1992 reelection campaign, too, and no friendlier, especially as the odds worsened for his father against Clinton. The uptight style and the hard edges yielded to the more relaxed, cordial Governor Bush I saw at the capitol in Austin in 1999. I asked him where the tough guy went. Bush said he was more at ease about his own job and his own political prospects than about his father’s. “I saw my Dad losing,” he remembered. “It was a very difficult time. Ninety-two was a rough year, a difficult year.” But an instructive one, he said, with a trace of the old bitterness when he spoke of Republicans—no names—who had been allies in good political times but turned away when the president’s reelection prospects began foundering. “I think I learned a lot about Washington loyalty,” Bush told me. “Everybody loves a winner. You learn the character of people when things are not so good.”

Things were good that spring in Austin. Bush was riding high, the campaign treasury was swelling and the candidate hadn’t said he’d run, hadn’t even left town, saying that he had to be on duty as governor until the Texas legislature finished its work. That led to a procession of Republicans to Austin to see him. Party leaders from Congress and his father’s Cabinet signed on to advise him. More than half the Republican governors endorsed him before he declared his candidacy. So did more than eighty congressional Republicans. I’d never seen anything like it, probably because there hadn’t been anything quite like it since William McKinley won the presidency after staying put in Canton, Ohio, in his front-porch campaign of 1896. Bush’s stay-at-home start was part of a campaign strategy shaped even before his runaway reelection as governor in 1998.

In May 1998, a national public opinion poll had shown Bush narrowly preferred over Gore for president in 2000. “I’m mystified,” Bush said. He insisted he wasn’t going to be distracted by White House talk while he had a job as governor and an election to win in Texas. But the Texas reelection campaign was shaped to flow into a presidential operation, and there was no missing the hints that a reelected Governor Bush would be looking at the White House in 2000. Before he began campaigning for president, he had a carefully constructed Republican bandwagon waiting. Bush was a winner, the party line went. Republican leaders convinced themselves and each other that he represented their best shot at reclaiming the presidency after eight years.

In the party that usually rewarded its veterans by nominating them—Dole, the elder Bush, Reagan—Governor Bush was a relative rookie, just into his second term in his first elective office. But he was the favorite of the party hierarchy before spring training ended and the regular campaign season began. A dozen challengers would surface at one point or another, but most of them didn’t get as far as the first presidential primary. Senator John McCain of Arizona overtook Bush and won the opener in New Hampshire, but he couldn’t topple the national leader. Bush was too strong, too well financed, the chosen nominee of party powers who didn’t want an iconoclast like McCain. So it was going to be Bush. I talked with assorted Republicans and got assorted theories to explain the rise of the second Bush. There was nostalgia for the first among people who remembered his best times and forgot about the fumbling 1992 campaign that led to his political fall. Then, too, there was Clinton fatigue, the feeling that enough was more than enough of the Democrats after the president whose sexual flings and lies got him impeached. George W. began with an advantage over other Republicans—a name people knew. In the earliest preliminaries for a presidential campaign, name recognition is what counts in the polls. Dan Quayle was up there for a while, not because most people wanted him to be elected president in 2000 but because most people knew who he was. For the governor, the Bush family name and his father’s legacy of fame were sendoff advantages.

Gore’s Democratic head start was obvious. Vice presidents who want to be nominated for president almost always are. Still, the office that made Gore the logical nominee in 2000 also came with liabilities. He was vice president to Clinton, a president impeached, acquitted, and still embroiled in scandal, in a party scarred by illicit campaign contributions. Gore’s hand showed in the fund-raising excesses of 1996; he was spared the attentions of a special prosecutor, but it was a near thing. Loyalty is part of the vice presidential job description. Gore overdid it when, on the day of Clinton’s impeachment, he told a strange rally of congressional Democrats at the White House that history would regard his boss as “one of our greatest presidents.” The scene was as bizarre as his fawning praise—Democrats called to the South Lawn to applaud the president on the day of his disgrace. Even if Gore actually believed that he was standing beside one of the greatest presidents, impeachment day was not the day to say so.

Since taking office, Gore had been the man always two steps behind the president at White House proceedings, looking like a courtier or perhaps a caddy. Now he had to campaign to change his image at the same time he took on challenger Bill Bradley, the former senator from New Jersey who made his name and the Hall of Fame in professional basketball before making it in politics. And Bradley made Gore nervous. The vice president had intended to ignore the pretender to his presumed nomination, but in the spring of 1999 Bradley was beginning to look like a real candidate who could raise the money and find the support to make a contest of it—a real rival, not a pushover. Gore had planned on a pushover and wasn’t prepared for the challenge.

Gore held a long lead in the polls of Democratic support and an even wider one in campaign funds. He had the advantages and trappings of his office. He had the endorsements. But he also had a sluggish, top-heavy campaign operation with political aides who too often competed for influence with his vice presidential staff and advisers, treating them as a sort of palace guard instead of colleagues in a cause. There was internal bickering, and there were insider complaints that the vice president was miring himself in detail work. Bradley was inching up in the polls and congressional Democrats were restive about Gore’s ability to rally the party behind the 2000 ticket on which they’d be running, too. Gore did some early campaign remodeling, appointing Tony Coelho, a former congressman and veteran political manager, to head his political operation. Coelho was a skilled, proven operator, but he’d quit Congress in 1989 to avoid an investigation of his finances, which seemed to me to make him an odd choice by a candidate who was trying to explain away his own fund-raising missteps.

When there were rumors that Clinton was worried about the way things were going in the Gore campaign, the president interceded with a heavy hand, telephoning the New York Times to volunteer that he wasn’t alarmed. Besides, Clinton said, “it’s in a lot better shape now than it was eight weeks ago.” Just what Gore needed: White House intervention to stir a new round of reports that his campaign was a mess. Privately, Gore was irked that Clinton had barged into print to offer counterproductive public advice. “If he did not advise me to loosen up, he would be the only person in the United States who didn’t,” the vice president told Newsweek. He’d been hearing that advice for years and trying to heed it, but he still seemed stiff. Gore was ridiculed for hiring a fancy image consultant who recommended a new wardrobe. Clothes didn’t do it; he appeared as uptight in earth tone sweaters as he had in dark blue suits. His casual garb made him look like the cover of a Land’s End catalogue. A year later when Gore changed managers again, Bill Daley, the new chairman, said one of his goals at the Democratic National Convention would be to chip away at the stereotype. “Obviously, it would be great for those people who have been convinced for eight years that he’s just a boring stiff, an unable-to-speak guy, that he comes through as a real person,” Daley told us, describing the image his candidate just couldn’t seem to shake. You had to admire the candor. Daley had been raised in the Chicago school of politics of his father the mayor, and blunt talk was part of the curriculum. Even when it involved describing your own candidate’s flaws.

By the time Bush ventured out from Austin, the Republican field for the 2000 campaign already had assembled and the odd rites of declaring presidential candidacy were well underway. In that redundant ritual, candidates who already are campaigning for president hire a hall, pack it with backers and announce in solemn tones, “Today, I announce that I am a candidate for president of the United States.” The crowd cheers what they’d known for months, the candidate savors the ovation and gets back to the business of campaigning. I’d been watching these faux announcements for years; the script never changed much, regardless of the candidate or the party. The Announcement is not the real starting point, only a ceremonial confirmation of the obvious. It gets some attention and some television time, even for the long, long shots, most of whom peak on announcement day before being consigned to the list of also-running names. Under the campaign finance laws, candidates have to report their fund-raising and spending whether they are running openly or pretending only to be exploring the possibility. So candidate announcements are playacting, part of the plot line that ends for all but two of them with another, unhappier rite, The Withdrawal, in which losers concede that they are not going to be able to get the nominations. Again, Pat Buchanan was the exception; as a Republican he was getting nowhere, but that didn’t mean he’d concede. Instead, he switched to run to a sorry ending as the Reform Party candidate, with even founder Ross Perot opposing him. At least he began with a bang, as usual. “Mount up and ride to the sound of the guns,” he exhorted his supporters in a belligerent beginning to his Republican candidacy early in 1999. The rhetorical armament was heavier than when he claimed to be leading peasants with pitchforks, but he was a loser from the day he started. So were a dozen others, with names as familiar as Dan Quayle and as obscure as John Kasich, a congressman from Ohio. Kasich ended his brief campaign by endorsing Bush as his soul brother, an exit line that made you wonder why he had entered. Gary Bauer, a conservative activist who had held minor appointments in the Reagan administration, announced, debated, campaigned, and ran dead last in the New Hampshire primary, at 1 percent of the vote. He quit. “I’m a fighter but I’m not delusional,” he said. Delusion is an ailment afflicting politicians who decide for no evident reason that they ought to be president. But Bauer probably got what he wanted; he never pretended that he was going to win the nomination, but campaigning for it enabled him to trumpet his rightist views.

A crowd of Republican rivals was hunting support to take down Bush when the Republican leader debuted as an active campaigner in mid-June 1999. “I know the expectations are high,” he said. “As my daughter said, ‘Dad, you’re not nearly as cool as people think.’ ” Bush told me he was amazed at his favorite’s role after a brief apprenticeship for national politics. He had watched his father go through the Republican chairs for two decades before he was nominated and elected to the White House. George W. was on the fast track. He said he had a “very long and arduous road” ahead of him, but it didn’t seem to bother him during a relaxed interview in his Austin statehouse office, beside a wall lined with autographed baseballs, memorabilia of his days as managing partner of the Texas Rangers. He was an easy guy to talk with but also a careful one—when he got a difficult question that might become a political problem, his right-hand woman, Karen Hughes, often interceded and sometimes tried to answer for him. Bush also was a man who did not tolerate cell phones lightly; nothing bugged him more than to be interrupted by that ringing noise in somebody’s pocket. My colleague’s cell phone sounded while we were interviewing him that day. Bush gave him a bristling, exasperated stare. My partner, Ron Fournier, fumbled with the phone, got it turned it off, and then yanked out the battery to make sure the thing remained silent. Bush smiled, triumphant over wireless technology. Interview time was up; a church group was waiting to see the governor and an aide was trying to keep him on schedule. But as we walked toward the door, I asked him whether he thought major-league baseball would have to do something to keep competitive balance so that the big city moneybags teams wouldn’t buy all the talent. He did—he favored revenue sharing among the richer and poorer teams—and he lingered for nearly ten minutes, talking about a favorite topic. In one of the Republican debates in 2000, the candidates were asked to tell the biggest mistake they’d ever made. The others talked solemnly about official and personal slipups, while Bush said his was signing off on the trade of slugger Sammy Sosa in 1989. The Rangers got Harold Baines, a fine ballplayer but not a match for Sosa, who became the home run hero of the Chicago Cubs. One of my AP colleagues bumped into Baines at an airport and asked him what he thought. Baines laughed and said the swap was a major-league mistake by Bush. “I can see why he got out of the business,” he joked.

Bush’s political takeoff left the other Republicans frustrated on the political runway. I talked with Quayle about it one day in the Washington office of his campaign pollster, a curious setting for his complaints. “They’re trying to go with the polls rather than ideas and that is a colossal mistake,” the former vice president told me. “You can talk all you want to about polls and all this happy nonsense, who the front-runner is, but you’re not going to know until they vote.” Quayle quit for lack of support and funds long before Republicans began voting. He had insisted he could dispel the bumbling image of his vice presidential days and get rid of the Dan Quayle jokes, but he didn’t have to. His campaign profile didn’t get high enough to draw much sniping from the comedians.

Elizabeth Dole, who had served in two Cabinet posts and as president of the American Red Cross, was campaigning for the nomination her husband had gained in 1996. While women had run before, the most prominent of them Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine in 1964, Mrs. Dole seemed a more serious contender than those of the past. But she wasn’t very good at it. Even the strolling, talk-show-style appearances she’d practiced in 1996 looked stilted and scripted. The speeches sounded like they were coming from the same tape recording. “When you feel strongly about something, you have a passion for it,” she said, but none showed. She displayed about as much passion as the chaperone at the prom. Her caution and restraint were in marked contrast to Bob Dole’s quick wisecracks and ad libs. In one talk with us, she criticized Clinton only after putting her comments off the record. She said Bush would make a fine nominee, an odd compliment as she campaigned to keep him from being one. Bob Dole was helping, working to raise money, but in the early going, his most visible role was a gaffe. He said in a New York Times interview that he might donate money to John McCain’s campaign in order to keep a good man in the Republican field, although he would check with his wife first. “They’re buddies from the Senate,” Mrs. Dole said. Bob Dole was just talking; he didn’t kick in to the McCain treasury, and after Mrs. Dole quit, she endorsed Bush.

When Bush began campaigning that June, you could measure his standing with a look at his opposition. They wanted him to debate them right away. Bob Dole growled on behalf of his wife that Republicans weren’t going to stand still for a coronation. The Democratic Party sent out what politicians call a truth squad to track him and dispute him. Their opposition press releases flowed into the Bush pressrooms, crowded with reporters and TV cameras, an entourage more typical for a general election candidate than for the first outing of a man running for the Republican nomination to be awarded nearly fourteen months later. “I’m pleased that the Democrats are paying attention to me,” Bush remarked. “They must be worried.”

By any reasonable standard, it was early in the game. But not by the calendar that had become the unreasoning, unrelenting standard in presidential campaigns, in which the next one started almost as soon as the last one was over. “You’re first in the nation and I’m the last candidate here,” Bush said in Manchester, New Hampshire. “I know I’m a late arriver. I’m taking my front porch campaign to every front porch in this state.” He’d come with a crowd—three busloads of reporters and TV crews trailed him on that first New Hampshire foray. We didn’t learn much. He kept it general, preaching his “compassionate conservative” theme and saying that detailed proposals could wait.

We did learn that he would sidestep questions about whatever he did in his admittedly reckless youth. “There is a game in Washington, it is called gotcha,” he complained. “It’s the game where they float a rumor and make the candidate prove a negative, and I’m not playing the game.” The questions would persist but the tactic sufficed. Bush admitted that he drank to excess and made unspecified mistakes in his youth, which seemed to have lasted longer for him than for most of us. “I made some mistakes years ago,” Bush confessed vaguely. “But I learned from my mistakes.” He said he’d quit drinking on his fortieth birthday, July 6, 1986. “All this stuff about George’s totally irresponsible past, we never saw it,” his father said. There were rumors that he had used illegal drugs, cocaine perhaps, but no evidence ever surfaced. He encountered the drug question in his first campaign for governor in 1994 and replied then much as he did when running for president, that he wasn’t going to let people float rumors and get him to reply to them. He did say in 1999 that he hadn’t used drugs in at least twenty-five years. Democrats Gore and Bradley both had acknowledged marijuana use in the early 1970s. All the Republican candidates except Bush said they never had used illegal drugs. He fended off the questions and the topic subsided with no penalty in the polls. It was a distraction at the time but I thought it was a break for Bush because the same back-and-forth a year later, after he’d been nominated, would have been far more troublesome. By then it was part of the background, sometimes a sentence in the stories but not the lead. A drug denial covering twenty-five years wouldn’t have sufficed for a senior government appointee being vetted for a security clearance, but Bush got by with it.

The youthful mistakes business came back as more than a rumor just before the 2000 election. He’d been arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol in 1976, when he was twenty-eight, near the family summer home in Maine. A Democratic activist got that story disclosed and published four days before the presidential election. “Dirty politics, last-minute politics,” Bush claimed, trying to make an issue of the source rather than the arrest. He said, lamely I thought, that he had kept the episode quiet all those years because he hadn’t wanted his daughters to know about it. “It’s become clear to America over the course of this campaign that I’ve made mistakes in my life,” Bush repeated, in the line he always used when such personal history matters came up. And, again, “I’m proud to tell you, I’ve learned from those mistakes.” Not enough, I thought, because an old arrest record is a trap waiting to snap on a politician who doesn’t disarm it by disclosing it on his own terms and timing. The DUI disclosure certainly cost Bush votes, and while it was impossible to say how many, any ballot lost was a vital one in the dead heat state counts of 2000.

In the summer of ’99, the Bush phenomenon was not all about the crowds and the polls; it also was about money. Bush’s fund-raising rewrote all the records for a presidential candidate: $100 million-plus in contributions before he got the Republican nomination. By the end of June, the Bush campaign reported raising $36.3 million. Incredibly that was nine times as much as McCain had raised. The political parlor game that summer was to guess whether Bush, with all that money, would skip the federal matching funds candidates had been getting since 1976 to campaign for presidential nominations because of the restrictions that go with the subsidies. It was a silly game. Of course he was going to decline the money, which would have limited him to spending less than he was raising. And of course his opponents would try to make an issue of it. The only other candidates who had said no to the federal money were running on their personal fortunes, as Steve Forbes did in 1996 and again in 2000. For Bush, accepting government funds would have been a liability, especially with Forbes’s ability to spend at will and his track record of doing so on hostile TV campaigns that scarred Republican rivals in 1996.

McCain, who was making campaign reform his trademark issue, said that for Bush to skip the government funding in order to avoid the spending limits breached the intent of the campaign finance law. But no one could argue that Bush was not complying with the law, which set a $1,000 limit on an individual donation to a candidate. His campaign had allies rounding up those individual donors to keep the money coming—“bundling” it was called—but the law didn’t restrict that practice. What Bush was raising was called “hard money” in Beltway jargon. McCain and his fellow campaign finance reformers were trying to have Congress limit “soft money,” a system under which political parties could raise unlimited funds without disclosing its sources. They were supposed to spend it only for party purposes, not for individual candidates, although the restriction had become transparent fiction. The Democratic fund-raising abuses of 1996, still hanging over Gore in 2000, involved soft money.

No candidate until Bush had built such a bankroll on hard money; his campaign reported that 350,000 people made contributions. There were complaints in rival Republican camps that Bush was trying to buy the nomination and that donors were trying to buy him. Bush denied both and said anybody who thought that a $1,000 contribution was going to buy influence should forget it and vote for somebody else. Bush’s unprecedented bankroll drove some of his rivals out of the campaign because there simply wasn’t enough Republican money to go around. But campaign cash wasn’t enough to carry Bush on a straight line to the nomination, not without stumbles and upsets on the way.

At times the Bush people had more money than common sense. When nine of the Republican candidates competed for a straw vote in Ames, Iowa, in August 1999—a silly exercise validated by all the attention we reporters gave it—the Bush campaign paid $43,500 to rent a site to pitch its tent right outside the hall, the better to attract supporters inside for food and drink, entertainment, and political persuasion. It was a sucker bid in a blind auction. Forbes got the next best tent site for $8,000. A ticket to the Iowa Republican Party dinner cost $25 and included the right to vote in the straw poll. So the candidates bought votes by buying tickets for their supporters. The Bush and Forbes campaigns rented scores of buses to bring in backers. Bush won after spending about $825,000 to get 7,418 votes, at about $111 apiece. Forbes spent at least twice that to come in second. Lamar Alexander was a sorry sixth and quit, saying he didn’t have the money to keep running. It gave him one first in more than five years of trying—first presidential candidate forced to concede by a straw vote. John McCain stayed out, saying that before the primary voting began the whole straw show would be forgotten, as it was. Easy for him to say; he was a challenger, not a front-runner.

Bush couldn’t pick targets. Bypass a high-profile contest, even a flaky one, and he’d suffer at the hands, or mouths, of the talking heads and columnists. And what if it was only a straw poll—Jimmy Carter used one just like it, in the same Iowa town, to make his first mark in the 1976 Democratic campaign. So Bush stamped his leader’s ticket with a win in the only game in town. He was thriving in the public opinion polls. It was starting to look easy, but I’d seen enough leaders go lame to doubt that it would be. The field was dwindling with Alexander out, Quayle out, then Elizabeth Dole, who said “the bottom line is money” and that she couldn’t get enough of it. More Republican candidates quit before the primaries than after the voting began.

Among politicians and political reporters, the nearly permanent presidential campaign is a given. Among other people, it is a yawn. “For most people, the election is not going on,” Clinton observed from the sidelines. In a poll just after Labor Day 1999, nearly 40 percent couldn’t remember the name of a single Republican presidential candidate and half didn’t know who was running for the Democrats.

Al Gore was getting increasingly nervous that fall. The brush-off strategy he’d tried to use to quash Bill Bradley’s challenge wasn’t working. Gore had acted as though a vice president didn’t have to bother with a pretender, but Bradley was gaining on him in surveys in the early primary election states. More important, he was proving that Democrats would give him ample funds to campaign against Gore. Gore’s campaign headquarters, two blocks from the White House, looked like another branch of the bureaucracy, overstaffed and top-heavy with bosses and underbosses jealous of one another’s turf. You got the impression that it had more officers than campaign soldiers. Bradley’s base was a cluttered, low-rent shop in West Orange, New Jersey, where the receptionist sometimes called over the loudspeaker that somebody had a telephone call, which would have been unthinkably informal at Gore headquarters. The Bradley lore was growing—the lanky, casual outsider, jacket draped over his shoulder, against the buttoned-down vice president who still couldn’t shake the image that he was a stiff. When I sat down to talk with them, before and after they became presidential rivals, I didn’t see that much difference in style. Bradley might be casual, but he also was as cautious a politician as Gore.

With Bradley coming on, Gore suddenly reinvented his campaign for the Democratic nomination, cutting the payroll and moving his headquarters to Nashville, “out of the Beltway.” If the tactics of the challenger worked, he’d try them. “I’m going to campaign like the underdog,” Gore said. He challenged Bradley to debate him right away, weekly, even twice a week. Bradley said he obviously was making progress, since Gore had been trying to ignore him for ten months. Now there was going to be a new Gore, liberated, the vice president said, not wooden. “You know, Janis Joplin sang ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,’ ” Gore recited as he opened the new campaign shop in Nashville. A strange song for a politician who had everything to lose.

To me, the new Gore looked like the old one in cowboy boots and tan sports shirts. Sounded like him, too. But when he and Bradley got around to debating, in Hanover, New Hampshire, the vice presidential remodeling was on display. In a lull before the television cameras went on, Gore took the role of moderator, inviting questions to pass the time, a ploy that recalled, but did not nearly match, the 1980 debate performance in which Reagan snapped that he was entitled to the microphone because he’d paid for it. After the debate, Bradley shook some hands and left. Gore offered to answer more questions as long as anybody wanted to ask them and did, for an hour and a half, loosening his tie and perching on the edge of the stage. It had the flavor of a campus bull session. It wasn’t all that casual a performance; Gore had three members of President Clinton’s Cabinet at Dartmouth College that night to praise his debate performance to reporters. “I think people saw the real Al Gore,” said Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. I wondered what took him so long. Gore had been through five winning campaigns for the House and Senate in Tennessee, and two for vice president. He’d had twenty-five years to get real, yet there were still more makeovers coming.

The Democratic debating got testier when Gore and Bradley met on Meet the Press in December. Gore sighed aloud and laughed sardonically when Bradley pushed his proposals. They sat side by side, in blue suits and red patterned ties, arguing in the NBC studio in Washington. Gore challenged Bradley to cancel all broadcast advertising in their campaign and debate him twice a week instead. Gore stuck out his hand to shake on it. “I like that hand,” Bradley said, looking at it as though it was a dead fish. “But the answer is no.” He said it was a ridiculous ploy by the better-known candidate. A Democratic campaign without TV ads would have been fine for Gore, undermining Bradley’s effort to gain name recognition. But the challenge made good TV, and the gimmick gave Gore an opportunity to sound like a reformer.

The Republican field was debating, too, but without the main man. Bush exercised the presumed prerogative of the front-runner and said he wouldn’t debate his rivals until January 2000 because people wouldn’t be paying attention before the election year began. Wrong. Bush’s polls in the first primary state began hinting at trouble: McCain was gaining on him. Suddenly the strategy changed, and Bush found time to debate, pretending it wasn’t because of the polls, although none of us believed that. So Bush faced his five remaining rivals in a television studio in Manchester, New Hampshire, on December 2. Nothing dramatic, but the important campaign message from Bush was just being there. There was some sniping but no direct hits, not when Alan Keyes, a black candidate with a fiery, eloquent speech style, accused him of acting like “Massah Bush,” nor when Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah got really tough and went to the point of criticizing the Bush campaign Web site. “Yours is not user friendly,” Hatch charged. Take that, W.

McCain was the candidate coming on, and the Bush camp underestimated the challenge. Bush wanted a massive tax cut that McCain opposed as too costly, while flat-tax Forbes was firing at the proposal from the other direction. Bush said he was going one up on his father’s 1992 read-my-lips promise against tax increases. “This is not only no new taxes, this is tax cuts, so help me God,” he vowed. McCain was scoring with his call for campaign reform. The Bush campaign seemed oblivious. They had their front-running game plan and they were sticking to it. When McCain came under hostile questioning in one of the campaign debates, Bush volunteered, twice, that the Arizona senator was a good man. “I don’t know what compelled me to say that about you, Senator,” he added, smiling. The genial nice guy vanished after McCain beat him in the first primary. McCain was a full-time campaigner in New Hampshire for the better part of a year, bypassing Iowa, where Bush won the first voting of 2000. McCain wasn’t going to squander his campaigning on precinct caucuses that had not foretold a contested New Hampshire outcome since Carter won both in 1976. Good strategy—the pollsters reported him drawing even or ahead of Bush in New Hampshire.

The Bush show wasn’t a novelty any longer; it was the same old story. McCain was the new act on stage, different, engaging, creating a contest, which we political reporters always prefer to the predictable. McCain was a hero, a Vietnam POW with a remarkable biography. He had just told his story in a best-selling book, Faith of My Fathers, co-written, actually, and you had to like a man who gave credit and royalties to the aide who did the writing. Having survived the Hanoi Hilton and a brush with scandal in a Senate ethics investigation, he made an art form of candor. Sometimes I thought he went looking for things to confess. Adultery? Did it, long ago. Drunken sprees against the rules of Annapolis when he was an underachieving midshipman there? Did that, too. Had his judgment as a senator been affected by campaign donations? Sure, all politicians are corrupted by the campaign finance system, and that’s why it has to be reformed. He’d learned what politicians seldom do: that a problem disclosed tends to go away while one concealed is likely to come back and bite. When there was controversy over letters McCain had written to federal agencies on behalf of campaign donors—he said they were entitled to the treatment as constituents—he preempted the issue by releasing stacks of his Senate correspondence, a mountain of paper to bury a problem issue.

Bush had made gentleman’s C’s at Yale and the New Yorker did a piece about it, questioning whether he was smart enough to be president. McCain was fifth from the bottom of his class at Annapolis, almost got expelled for misconduct, and it was written off as youthful exuberance.

Bush’s people got testy about McCain’s fancy treatment by the political press, and they had a point because feature writers and TV producers were delivering gee-whiz pieces about his style. It looked as though political reporters were so hungry for a candidate who seemed to like their company that they would canonize a guy for riding in a bus with them and answering questions nonstop. McCain played it all like a maestro. He had been among the most accessible of senators and seen it pay PR dividends. Now he was the most accessible of candidates. He was cordial, usually open, unless it was something he did not choose to talk about. “Kill ’em with access,” McCain had said. He did, in his rolling interviews aboard his campaign bus, emblazoned with his traveling trademark: “The Straight Talk Express.” He’d sit in his swivel captain’s chair, sipping coffee, a dozen or so reporters huddled around him. There wasn’t room for everyone; reporters had to take turns riding the McCain bus. But McCain had a temper and held a grudge. Reporters from his hometown paper, the Arizona Republic, were consigned to the backup bus because McCain had been feuding with the newspaper for years, since the publication of a hostile cartoon about his wife, Cindy, who once had been addicted to prescription painkillers. In a 1999 editorial, the Republic said McCain’s temper was volcanic and questioned whether he had the temperament to be president. When the temper business came up in campaign debates, he deflected it by joking at the questions. “Now that really makes me mad,” he would say, and laugh.

He could afford to laugh. The reform message was working, the crowds were growing, his polling trends were up, and Bush was vulnerable. It was a two-man race despite the free-spending Forbes and the minor entries. Bauer went to a pancake flipping contest in Manchester, flipped one, backed up to catch it in the pan, and flipped himself off the stage. He fell behind a blue curtain but bounced up like a Kewpie doll, unhurt. Forbes was spending more money than even he had in the bank; he sold some of his shares in Forbes Magazine to keep running. Bush was still campaigning for his tax cut, his speech and his tactics set despite the changing challenge. His syntax was still erratic. The reporters who traveled with him regularly had T-shirts emblazoned with the word “They.” One night in Iowa he’d given one speech too many and delivered a tongue-bent assessment of the era after the Cold War: “When I was coming up we knew exactly who the they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who the them was. Today we’re not so sure who the they are but we know they’re there.”

Tormented sentences like that became fodder for critics and commentators who questioned whether Bush was ready to be president. It made an easy column on a dull day. Just add up the slips: He once confused Slovakia with Slovenia (I might have, too), and when a showboating Boston TV reporter asked him on camera to name the leaders of Pakistan, India, Taiwan, and Chechnya, he managed only one. It was a cheap shot question; none of us reporters and probably none of the other candidates could have answered it off the cuff. Bush did make some misstatements about foreign policy, and he did say things like, “Is our children learning?” That gave rise to pieces questioning whether Dubya, which was supposed to be Texan for W, was smart enough for the White House. But the taunting commentary didn’t stick and never added up to the kind of image problem that had saddled and undone Dan Quayle. “I’ve said about a million words and ten of them didn’t come out right,” Bush said late in his campaign. He’d said more words than that and flubbed more lines, but so what. It didn’t bother many voters. Not even when Jay Leno asked him on the Tonight show to talk about his most embarrassing incident as a child, and he talked about his brother instead. “Marvin urinated in the steam iron,” Bush announced.

Back in New Hampshire, at the end of January, just before the primary, the Bush campaign put on a family show. The former president and Barbara Bush flew in to appear with the candidate at an indoor tennis center in Milford. It was tucked away in the fields on a one-lane road, but nearly two thousand people got through the rural traffic jam for the rally. “This boy, this son of ours, is not going to let you down,” the former president said in remarks I timed at nineteen seconds. New Hampshire strategists shuddered; “this boy” was not the image they wanted for their candidate. George W. said the family outing had inspired him “to keep charging in New Hampshire.” He chose a strange way to do so—he looked out at the biggest crowd of his primary campaign and spoke for all of seventeen seconds. The people who had come for an afternoon of politicking and country music got only the latter. I thought it was a metaphor for the problem that was dogging Bush. The message seemed to be that there was no message. Name, image, and family fame but not much substance. Just the impression his opponents were trying to promote. By primary day the Bush people knew what was coming: McCain. But they didn’t expect the landslide they got: McCain 49 percent, Bush 31 percent. Bush retooled. No more nice guy. People liked reform, so he’d be a reformer. A reformer with results, he said. Not like McCain who, according to the new Bush, talked reform but played footsie with special interest lobbyists. They were tough TV ads, tough talk, attack tactics on both sides as Bush and McCain campaigned for the South Carolina primary, each blaming the other for going negative. Their differences were about details—how big a tax cut, for example—not basic direction, which made the arguments more personal. “This is probably the nastiest campaign that people have seen in a long time,” McCain said and went on, curiously, “but look, I’m enjoying it, this is a great and exhilarating experience.” For his campaign, the exhilaration was back in New Hampshire. South Carolina’s was a strictly Republican primary. The independents who had boosted his New Hampshire count couldn’t vote. He’d win again in Michigan, where Democrats could vote in the Republican primary, and at home in Arizona, but that was it. Bush had the bankroll, the organization, and the Republican establishment on his side, and on March 9 McCain conceded.

From that date, Bush was effectively unopposed, with no major rival for the nomination. Forbes had quit a month before, out another $30 million of his publishing fortune in another hopeless campaign. “We were nosed out by a landslide,” he lamented. He was better at withdrawing than at campaigning. I’d spent the last day of his campaign covering him in Delaware, where he came bearing bad news for two generations. He began by telling high school students that they would never see a dime of the Social Security, for which some of them already were paying taxes on their part-time earnings. Then he went to an old folks’ home and talked about his tax plan. No inheritance tax, he said, and they applauded. You ought to be able to leave this earth unmolested by the Internal Revenue Service. There was less applause. Some of them were in wheelchairs and looked as though they would be leaving soon with or without the IRS. Then a standard Forbes line: “No taxation without respiration.” No applause. Too close for comfort, I thought.

The contest between Gore and Bradley turned nasty and personal. Gore said Bradley was too left of center to win the presidency, although the truth was that their basic philosophies weren’t diametrically different. Bradley said Gore was too tainted by fund-raising scandals to be elected. He said the vice president was the candidate of special interests, “a thousand promises and a thousand attacks.” But Bradley never did as well at the primary polls as he’d done in the 1999 public opinion polls. Gore swamped him in the Iowa caucuses and beat him, narrowly, in the New Hampshire primary. Gore’s margin there was only 6,395 votes, and independents who opted to cast Republican ballots for McCain could have been the difference. Or maybe it was waitresses, who certainly outnumbered that margin of defeat in a tourist state. Ron Fournier and I were at the bar of our hotel in Manchester shortly before the primary when Bradley’s face appeared on the TV. The blonde bartender looked up and frowned. “That dick,” she said. We wondered whether we’d heard right, asked, and she repeated it. Bradley, she said, had stayed at the hotel periodically, called for room service and demanded that his food be at his door almost instantly. When it wasn’t, he’d call and snarl at the help. I asked her what kind of tip he’d added to the bill. No tip, the waitress said. He’d just sign the tab with the standard room service fee on it, nothing added. Bradley’s reputation as a poor tipper apparently had spread; the Manchester Union Leader ran a gossip column piece about it the next day.

After losing eighteen states against Gore, Bradley quit the campaign on the same day McCain got out. Bradley said he would support Gore, but he didn’t sound enthusiastic, complaining one last time about the “distortions and negativity” the vice president had used against him. “I hope that he’ll run a better campaign in the general election.”

So the major-party presidential nominees were set, unchallenged, eight months before the presidential election. Bush didn’t even have to cope with Buchanan, who had nagged Republicans from the belligerent right in two campaigns, because he bolted the party. Buchanan said he wasn’t going to accept an “assigned walk-on role” in 2000 and would run as a Reform Party candidate instead. His ideas were alien to that party’s positions but he brushed it off, because the Reform nomination was a ticket to campaign all the way to the election, which he’d never get from the Republicans. Even more enticing, the nominee would be entitled to $12.6 million in federal campaign funds, based on Perot’s share of the 1996 vote. Buchanan got the nomination, which divided the third party, and he got the money, in September 2000. In the election, he drew less than one-half of 1 percent of the vote, far short of the 5 percent required to qualify the Reform Party nominee for future federal funds.

Once Gore’s challenger was out of his path and the Democratic nomination was clinched, the vice president didn’t seem to know what he wanted to do next. He admitted later there was no real plan for a spring offensive against Bush, who still was favored in the national polls. When Gore urged a campaign finance overhaul, the issue called up echoes of his own 1996 fund-raising excesses. He conceded that he was an “imperfect messenger” for reform and “I’ve got the scars to prove it.” The Republicans had the videotape to prove it: Gore amid the nuns at the Democratic fund-raiser at the Buddhist temple; Gore trying to defend himself at a news conference by saying repeatedly that “no controlling legal authority” barred the telephone calls he’d made to donors from his office and the White House. At the same time, Gore had to raise more money now that he was the 2000 candidate.

He said jokingly at a fancy Washington dinner that his campaign strategy was to claim credit for the thriving economy while assigning the blame for what went wrong to the departing Clinton. But the balancing routine was not a joke, it was real. Gore was trying to run with and away from Clinton at the same time. That’s always a tough act for a vice president trying to take over the top job. The vice president is running to succeed the administration in which he’s been the junior partner, and without insulting the boss, he has to convince people that he can do the job better.

Gore certainly could change the worst of the Clinton record—the personal scandal, the lies, and the impeachment. There wasn’t going to be any more messing around with White House interns. While Gore had been fulsome to fawning in his post-impeachment praise of Clinton’s achievements, he drew the line against the boss’s personal conduct. “I understand the disappointment and anger you feel toward President Clinton,” Gore replied to the first questioner in his first Democratic campaign debate, although that’s not what he was asked. “I felt it myself.” Unloading that baggage was a campaign-long mission. When Gore formally announced his candidacy in June 1999, he said that the president’s conduct was inexcusable and that too much time had been diverted from real business because of the scandal and impeachment. That line annoyed Clinton, who always seemed to be in something close to denial; he later said that Gore should not suffer politically over “bogus scandals.” They were real enough. Gore’s choice of his own running mate was part of his antidote. Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut was the first Senate Democrat to publicly denounce Clinton’s conduct in the Monica Lewinsky affair, calling it disgraceful and deceitful.

Gore’s plus-minus strategy on the Clinton connection reflected the public opinion polls. To the end of the term they indicated majority approval of Clinton’s job performance and majority disapproval of him personally. The cliché catch phrase was “Clinton fatigue.” When you asked Gore about it, he’d tell you that people were fatigued with all the talk about Clinton fatigue. But it was there, and I suspected the vice president had contracted it himself. He was getting more blame for the downside of the Clinton years than credit for the achievements.

A certain weariness is inevitable near the end of a two-term presidency, a mood deepened in 1999 and 2000 not only by scandal and impeachment but also by the unrelenting glare of twenty-four-hour television news and talk. Watch one White House cast perform for eight years and you’re ready to see some different characters. Gore had his questionable fund-raising ventures of 1996 to defend; Bush allies in Congress demanded that a Ken Starr-style sleuthing prosecutor be put on the case, but that wasn’t going to happen in a Democratic administration. Add it up, and the issues of trust and ethics were prime targets for Bush and the Republicans.

Gore couldn’t find his campaign footing in the spring of 2000. First he said he wanted a campaign of ideas, not insults. Then he called Bush arrogant, smug, inexperienced, irresponsible, and reckless, before another change in tactics, in which he stopped talking about his rival by name. Later, he changed campaign chairmen for a third time. The ship was drifting, and somebody had to steer.

“I don’t know how many times you’re able to reinvent yourself in the course of a campaign,” Bush wondered pointedly, although he’d done it himself. The amiable leader had become a hard-line attack candidate, more conservative than compassionate after losing the first primary. Once the nomination was settled, Bush remodeled again, moving back to the center with a catalogue of proposals edging into usually Democratic turf on housing, health care for the poor, education and the environment. In the Bush campaign, though, the management never changed. Bush was a throwback to the era when friends and longtime loyalists ran presidential campaigns. His high command of Texans had been with him from the Austin statehouse and would stay with him to the White House.

Bush’s springtime strategy was to follow the Nixon axiom—play to the conservatives to get nominated, play to the center to try to get elected. A plug from McCain would help, since he’d become the fallen hero of the independents. McCain won a half dozen primaries in states where independents or crossover Democrats could vote on the Republican side. He was their favorite, the reformer, although on almost every other issue he was an orthodox Republican and at least as conservative as Bush. McCain was courteous in conceding, but he was irked at Bush campaign tactics against him, and he did not volunteer an endorsement. After two months, the nominee and the loser finally met for a ninety-minute peace talk in Pittsburgh, after which McCain endorsed Bush. At first he didn’t use what his people had come to call “the E Word.” Asked why he had not offered an outright endorsement, he did, saying, “I endorse Governor Bush” six times over for wry emphasis. He said it was like taking medicine now instead of later. McCain offered the right Republican words at the national convention, saying it was “my time to serve” in order to help Bush win. Joining the Bush campaign on the West Coast in August for a three-day swing, McCain said he would ask his independent supporters to consider Bush but couldn’t tell them how to vote because they didn’t take instructions on that. “Independents are independents because they are independent,” McCain explained.

Then they embarked on the strangest campaign train trip I ever covered—165 miles, an all-day excursion from Salinas up the coast and east toward Sacramento. It was supposed to be a whistle-stop but there was a lot more whistle than stop to it, with rallies at the beginning and the end and a stop at a tiny farm town in between. The Bush campaign explained that they couldn’t stop for speeches in cities like San Jose, where there was a crowd at the station and the candidate waved as the train crept through, because they were on the main track and could not disrupt the regular railway traffic. Nice sightseeing, though, a relaxing day’s ride in the press cars. The senator and the governor strolled through to answer some questions, then retreated to their compartments at the back of the train. We figured they were back there relaxing together, talking about the campaign, or perhaps chatting. They had nearly six hours. But John Weaver, McCain’s top political hand, told me later that they spent little of it together, with each man riding in his own compartment with his own company. Weaver said he thought of it as a sealed train, like the one on which the Germans sent Vladimir Lenin back from exile to Russia to foment revolution in 1917.

Later in the campaign, McCain angered the Bush people by challenging both nominees to voluntarily forgo any use of unregulated political donations in the White House race. Gore accepted. Bush refused, and McCain said that was a mistake. A minor episode, only a ripple in the campaign, but these guys never were going to be best friends. While Bush was circumspect, his campaign aides didn’t conceal their McCain fatigue. The senator was a Republican and a declared ally, but they didn’t like their allies to be meddlesome.

Gore was still trying to manage the Clinton connection. “We’re not going to campaign together because I’m determined to campaign as my own man and present my own vision,” Gore said. But the solo rule did not apply in fund-raising; the vice president teamed with the president to raise nearly $40 million for the Democrats. And Clinton wasn’t the quiet type. Just before the Democratic National Convention, he delivered his most contrite and candid reflection on the Lewinsky affair, “a terrible mistake I made.” He told a convention of clergymen in suburban Chicago that he had learned “the fundamental importance of character and integrity,” delivering a ninety-minute confessional and drawing headlines that were no help to Gore in his effort to get past the White House scandal. Clinton had said it all before, Gore claimed, and it was time to look to the future, not the past. At the convention in Los Angeles, Clinton came on like Rocky, his giant image on TV screens above the convention stage as he walked through underground corridors on the way to the platform. He described Gore as the man to “keep this progress and prosperity going,” the man who was always there for the tough decisions. Clinton already had said that Gore shouldn’t be blamed for his personal mistakes.

After his imperial entrance and farewell address at the Los Angeles convention, Clinton flew to Monroe, Michigan, for a passing of the torch appearance with Gore. He folded the vice president in a bear hug and then left the Democratic stage to Gore. He also left the ethics and trust issues that dogged the Gore campaign. Gore’s convention show began with a long, clutching kiss of his wife, Tipper, which made you wonder whether he was ever going to stop and talk. Later, David Letterman suggested to Gore that The Kiss was meant to send a message that this Democrat was happy at home, not a rover like Clinton. “C’mon, c’mon, boo, give me a break,” the vice president said. It only looked that way.

Gore’s convention address was another declaration of political independence, another attempt to reintroduce himself and shed the wooden image. “I stand here tonight as my own man and I want you to know me for who I truly am,” Gore declared in an unintended summation of his image problem. He then hurried through a fifty-one-minute speech, sometimes talking over the applause to get in all the policy details. “I know that sometimes people say I’m too serious, that I talk too much substance and policy. But the presidency is more than a popularity contest.” True enough, but popularity gets candidates there.

The Clinton hangover persisted. The day after Gore’s nomination, word leaked that the special prosecutor was setting up a new grand jury to hear scandal evidence against Clinton. The White House said the timing “reeks to high heaven.” Clinton’s own timing and comments were less than perfect. Shortly before the election, the campaign wraps opened a bit, and the president went on get-out-the-vote missions aimed at reliably Democratic minority constituencies. A black radio interviewer in California told Clinton he wished the president could have another term. “You can get the next best thing,” Clinton replied, which was not the impression Gore wanted left with voters.

Gore did get a break just after the Democratic convention with word from the Justice Department that there would be no outside investigation of Gore’s fund-raising conduct because there was no evidence of lawbreaking. Bush had a pat answer on the topic: He said it was clear that Gore’s past conduct raised credibility questions, but that Americans “are sick and tired of all these scandals and investigations” and the best way to end them would be to elect him. No point in risking a backlash with an attack, not when he could take advantage of the issue without one. He played it that way all season; at the Republican convention he said it was time for “a responsibility era” and delivered the make-believe oath of office that would be his finale at campaign rallies. “When I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear not only to uphold the laws of our land, I will swear to uphold the honor and dignity of the office to which I have been elected, so help me God.” No mention of the Clinton scandals. None needed. His crowds knew what he was talking about.

The unorthodox selection of Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, for the vice presidential nomination fit Gore’s effort to prove himself an independent operator, not the man a step behind Clinton. The president’s men had not forgiven Lieberman’s denunciation of Clinton’s misconduct in September 1998. That was two months before the Republican House impeached Clinton. In the Senate, Lieberman voted against convicting Clinton and kicking him out of office in 1999, although he wanted the president censured. But his early rebuke of Clinton was what people remembered. His centrist, New Democrat record fit with the campaign position Gore was trying to stake. He joked that he’d campaign 24/6. His orthodox faith would keep him from it on the seventh day, the Sabbath. Lieberman, the first Jew nominated to a major party ticket, said he didn’t want people to vote for him to make history but “to forget the history” and think about the future. He made too much of his religion in his early campaigning, quoting Chronicles, by heart, and offering a prayer of thanks when he first appeared with Gore. He talked about his religion and “the dedication of our nation and ourselves to God,” prompting a rebuke from an unlikely source, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, which said that overdoing the religious theme was “inappropriate and even unsettling.” He toned it down. Bush, a Methodist, hadn’t been reticent about his religion; in a primary campaign debate when the candidates were asked which philosopher or thinker they most admired, Bush replied, “Jesus Christ, because he changed my heart.” That prompted some cynical smirks, but Barbara Bush said she wasn’t surprised at his answer. “I know that’s true,” she said. “I mean, George, we go to him as our religious guru.”

In choosing Dick Cheney as his running mate, Bush went to the heart of the Republican establishment, to a nominee who had been in Congress, the White House and his father’s Cabinet, a Washington veteran with foreign and defense policy credentials the governor lacked. The wisecrack went that Cheney was there to provide adult supervision, although at fifty-nine he was only five years older than the presidential nominee. He looked like a safe, reassuring choice for the ticket. He’d been known in Washington for a soft-spoken but insistent managerial style and for an ability to work with both parties as White House chief of staff and as secretary of defense. The Democrats were on his case as soon as he was nominated, criticizing his hard-line conservative voting record as a Wyoming congressman, then the multimillion-dollar platinum parachute he was getting from the Dallas oil services conglomerate he left to join the ticket. He’d had three heart attacks, the first when he was thirty-seven, and he had a fourth one, after the 2000 election but before it was settled. His doctor called it so mild as to be trivial.

Bush and his father both denied that the former president had pushed his man Cheney onto the ticket, although they did talk about it. “I love my Dad, but I’m going to have my own team,” Bush said. Too much of former President Bush would play into the Democrats’ contention that Governor Bush was a replay candidate for the White House, without the experience for the job. “Nearest I can tell, the message of the Bush campaign is ‘How bad can I be?’ ” Clinton taunted. “ ‘I’ve been governor of Texas, my Daddy was president, I own a baseball team, they like me down there.’ ” That made the elder Bush angry, and he said he might just go public with what he really thought about Clinton’s personal conduct, but he calmed down and stayed off the stage. Bush and his family wanted to quash the dynasty talk, not risk more of it. There were veterans of the first Bush presidency in the campaign and then in the Cabinet of the second, prompting critics to argue that the new President Bush couldn’t find his own crew. The criticism was understandable but so were the carryover appointees. Bush’s inner staff was indeed his own, the Texans, but any new president looks to his party’s last administration for people with the experience and standing to serve at the top of the new one. In Bush’s case, that meant people who had served his father. It wasn’t just the family ties. That’s simply the way the system works.

The fall campaign between Bush and Gore was not one of breakthroughs or turning points. The polls that showed it close also showed why: Most people considered the campaign uninformative and boring. These guys had been around the block for more than a year and they weren’t proposing anything particularly new, let alone inspiring. Bush was for a general income tax cut; a break for the rich according to Gore, who advocated tax reductions at lower income levels to benefit working families. Gore played the populist, saying his programs were aimed at workers and needy Americans. Republicans said he was trying to set class against class. Familiar stuff in familiar rhetoric.

But there were unscripted moments. Bush bumbled by blurting an insult into an open microphone before a rally in Naperville, Illinois, not knowing he’d be heard. “There’s Adam Clymer, major-league asshole from the New York Times,” he told Cheney. “Oh, yeah, big time,” Cheney replied. Clymer is a skilled, seasoned reporter, and suddenly, if briefly, he was a celebrity, a talk show magnet although he declined the TV invitations. As the saying goes, insult away, just get the name right. Adam had been insulted by experts, major-leaguers, before Bush got into the game. In The Boys on the Bus, Tim Crouse called him “a priggish, pear-shaped reporter” who bitched incessantly. Some truth there, then as thirty years later, but who isn’t, and who doesn’t? Clymer had written pieces raising critical questions about Bush’s performance as governor and had sharply questioned Cheney on the benefits he was reaping from his oil company. He said he was disappointed at Bush’s language. Bush apparently was not, at least not to the point of apology. His response: “I regret everybody heard what I said.” The next time I saw Clymer I told him I didn’t think he deserved the major league slur. Triple A at best.

Gore had his flaps, but none to match that one. He had a problem habit of exaggerating his history and overstating his facts. He said the complaints about it were the exaggerations. Okay, so he hadn’t been instrumental in creating the Internet, which dated from 1969, when he was still in college, but he had promoted it after he got to Congress. And maybe he and Tipper weren’t really the role models for Love Story. And he was only joking when he told a labor crowd that he remembered the union label advertising song as a lullabye from his childhood, which was before it was written. To make a point about the high cost of prescription drugs, he said his mother-in-law was paying $108 a month for arthritis medicine he got for his dog at $37.80. It turned out that the numbers on the arthritis drug came from a Democratic study, not from family experience. Gore said that didn’t affect his point, that drug prices were too high.

Gore was still starchy and still trying to break the typecasting. Bush was breezy and promoting the image. Gore was formal but friendly. He knew I planned to retire after the election, and when I asked a question at a campaign news conference, he prefaced his answer by saying he couldn’t believe I’d really do it. I did, at sixty-six, after writing the AP account of Bush’s inauguration. Gore was being nice; I found it rather awkward.

Bush had a campaign rally at a minor-league ballpark near Appleton, Wisconsin, home of the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers of the Midwest League. They passed out team hats: maroon and black with a big W in front. The next campaign stop was an airport rally on a sunny afternoon, so I wore the ball cap. Bush spotted me as I was getting off the plane. “Hey, Walter, love to see ’ya in that W hat,” he said, spreading his fingers into his W gesture. I told him not to forget that I was a W myself. It didn’t register. After the rally, Bush corralled me, threw an arm over my shoulder and called to the photographers to get a shot of me in the hat and him mugging beside me. “Governor, that’s my initial,” I said. “I was a W before you were born.” Made no difference. He was W. I was Walter.

Bush and Gore debated three times to what I thought was a draw. Advantage Bush, because everybody expected Gore to be better at it. Not even a dogged debate watcher who tuned in to all three plus the vice presidential debate could point to a telling turn of phrase, to a breakthrough, or to a significant blunder. It was like a Broadway musical that left the audience without a tune to hum. No show-stoppers, nothing close. Gore accused Bush of favoring big corporate interests and a tax cut for the wealthy. Bush called the vice president a big-spending Democrat who wanted the government to make decisions Americans should be free to make for themselves. That was the daily campaign fare, played in the debates to a national television audience.

Gore didn’t do well on style points; he kept changing his approach, not a plus for a candidate who kept saying he wanted people to see him for who he really was but left them with a sort of multiple choice. First time out, in Boston, he offered exasperated sighs and shrugs while Bush was talking. That didn’t play well on TV, so in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he was sedate, even apologetic. But that wasn’t quite right, either. In the St. Louis finale he was aggressive, stalking across the stage toward Bush, armed with a microphone. He said later that it was like the porridge in “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” first too hot, then too cold, and then “the third one was just right.” The Goldilocks image wasn’t one I would have wanted to call up, but that’s what he said.

Bush played Bush in all three acts. Same guy, same lines, neither compelling nor commanding but okay, nothing eloquent but free of the twisted words and convoluted sentences that tripped him as a campaigner.

The public opinion polls were getting close, an edge to Bush but not a significant one as the long campaign approached what would be the longest election. It was not that people liked them equally, it was the opposite. There was scant enthusiasm for either candidate except among the partisan cheerleaders on each side. Americans liked Ike long before and long after Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency. They honored the legend of John Kennedy’s Camelot. Even people who opposed Ronald Reagan’s politics came to admire his leadership style. But this was an age without political heroes. For all Clinton’s political arts, the departing president arrived in national politics with his scars and evasions showing, and his White House misconduct, scandal, and impeachment had heightened cynicism about politicians. The consultant-driven messages, the intrusiveness of the media, and the emphasis on dirty secrets in the lives of politicians all were turnoffs. Nonstop exposure, especially on television, narrowed the distance between the led and the leaders, eroding what remained of the mystique of the men who might be president. None of that was new to the new century, but all of it came together in the so-what mood of the voters in 2000, the year of the dead heat.

The long count began with the quick call that got it wrong. In the news business, there is no pressure greater than that of handling a close election. You want the story first but you have to get it right. Early in my career, I’d learned the human price of an error on election night. In a Republican primary election in Vermont in 1958, a county stringer made a mistake in addition, leading to an AP tabulation so close that the loser demanded a recount. He wouldn’t have except for our mistake—he would have conceded because the accurate margin was decisive. He told me afterward that we’d made him look like a poor loser and that he would suffer for it when he tried to make a comeback. That’s what happened, a lesson that always put me on the side of caution.

In 2000, we knew going in that Florida would be a crucial state and potentially the decisive one between Bush and Gore. “When Al Gore and George W. Bush look for an early clue to foretell who will celebrate and who will concede their long-locked struggle for the White House, they will check the count in Florida,” I wrote the day before the election. “Should the vote be as closely divided as the public opinion polls, Florida also could point to a long ballot count to settle what has been billed as the closest contest in forty years.” Given the stakes, and it did not take a genius to see them, I figured that calling Florida for Gore amounted to declaring him president-elect. Without Florida, Bush would have to win an impossible combination of upsets in Democratic states to gain an electoral majority. With it, he finally got 271 electoral votes, only one to spare. But the TV networks and, regrettably, the Associated Press projected a Gore victory in Florida as the polls closed, based on voter interviews outside polling places in selected, key precincts. That was the system, and the system ruled. I always clung to a preference for waiting until enough real ballots had been tabulated to test the projections, but that was old-fashioned, not the way it was done anymore. The Gore victory call stood for about two hours, during which Bush and his people protested it as premature and potentially wrong, while Gore’s camp worried about the same thing. At 10:13 P.M., Voter News Service retracted the call. The experts had it wrong. The TV stars had to confess the blunder. “If we say somebody’s carried a state you can pretty much take it to the bank, book it, that’s true,” Dan Rather had said in opening CBS election night coverage. The check bounced.

For the first time in the era of election projections based on voter polling, the presidential race was incredibly close in state after state, nowhere so close as in Florida. There, the process and the electoral judgments it requires failed not once but twice because the networks compounded the blunder by declaring Bush the winner shortly after 2:00 A.M., prompting Gore to telephone Bush and concede the election. Temporarily. There were premature headlines in some Wednesday morning newspapers declaring Bush president-elect, overtaken later by accurate accounts saying it was too close to call. Standing against the tide and the pressure in those early morning hours, the AP said it was not calling the election for Bush because Florida was too close to declare him the winner. He was ahead, but by an inconclusive fragment of the votes. The networks backed off , wrong again, and retracted again. The off and on, won or not declarations and reversals on national TV compounded the uncertainty of an uncertain outcome as Florida was recounted, contested, and disputed for five weeks, in more than fifty court challenges by one side or the other. Then the Supreme Court, at five to four as closely divided as the election outcome, ended the Florida recounts.

The election night calls and miscalls were based on the projections and unofficial vote counts by Voter News Service. Since the 1994 elections, VNS had conducted exit interviews outside the polls and projected results based on them and on sample precincts selected to reflect a state at large. The projections were delivered to the networks and the AP, which decided whether and when to make their own election calls. Competitive TV pressure drove those calls; when one network declared a winner the others usually followed quickly. At 2:16 A.M. on November 8, Fox News Channel declared that Bush had carried Florida and was president-elect. Within minutes, the three broadcast networks and CNN did, too, flashing the report across the screens of anyone who was still watching TV at that hour.

The AP used VNS but also conducted its own, independent tabulation of the votes. In the count of those real ballots, Bush held a rapidly dwindling lead. At 2:37 A.M., with the networks calling him the winner, the AP reported the state still up for grabs. At 3:11 A.M., an AP advisory reported that the Bush edge was shrinking and might not stand. By 4 A.M., the TV calls all had been rescinded, and Florida was back in the undecided column.

But the chorus of television calls for Bush became a sort of reality show. Because of them, Gore telephoned Bush at about 2:30 A.M. Washington time to congratulate him and concede. The vice president was in his motorcade on the way to deliver a concession speech in the rain in Nashville when his campaign strategist got word to him not to do it, that the Florida count was not settled and there would be an automatic recount under state law. An hour or so after conceding, he called Bush again to say that the situation had changed and Florida was too close to call.

“Let me make sure I understand,” Bush said testily. “You’re calling back to retract that concession?”

“You don’t have to get snippy about this,” Gore snapped back.

Before the contest was settled, a lot of people were snippy about it. There was no census of all the lawyers who had a hand in all the court challenges, but they certainly outnumbered the 537 ballots by which Bush was certified the winner of Florida’s twenty-five electoral votes. The margin had been shaved even finer by partial recounts and court rulings before the Supreme Court told them all to stop. So Bush was president-elect. “It is likely legislative bodies nationwide will examine ways to improve the mechanisms and machinery for voting,” Chief Justice William Rehnquist noted in the ruling. But no voting machinery grinds finely enough for certainty in an election as close at Florida’s.

The election night and morning after TV blunders didn’t count legally, but they had an impact politically. Bush had been winner and president-elect once, Gore had conceded once, and as close he got, within 154 votes under one Florida Supreme Court decision, he never led. That put him on the defensive, casting him as the challenger. Bush was the leader, albeit the shakiest of leaders, and he had to be dislodged. That’s the position any politician wants. Let Gore argue that he was trying to preserve democracy with more recounts; the Republicans said he was trying to steal the election.

Bush and Gore each had his own campaign blunders to rue. Bush invested campaign time and money in California, wasting it in a state where he couldn’t win instead of spending it where he could. In Florida, for example, where his jeopardy was evident even though his brother, Jeb, was governor. Gore lost his own state, Tennessee, where winning would have made him president despite the Florida defeat. Clinton loyalists complained all fall that it was time to take the wraps off the president, put him to work in Democratic territory and at home in Arkansas, where Bush also won. Minor candidates seldom make a major difference. They did in Florida. Ralph Nader drained away votes that likely would have been Gore’s, and more than enough to have made him the winner. Even Buchanan’s otherwise insignificant share was five times the Republican margin. No matter. There had to be a winner and the winner was Bush. And no matter that Gore won the national popular vote by 539,497, because electoral votes choose presidents.

After all the bitter weeks, I thought Gore was a classy loser. He said he strongly disagreed with the Supreme Court ruling but accepted the finality of it and offered his concession “for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy.” The overtime election had proven both. There was anger but no violence. Nixon wrote that a recount of disputed states in his 1960 loss to Kennedy would have taken months, uncertainty he said could have been devastating in America’s foreign relations. There was no such toll in 2000; indeed, while the outcome was in dispute, President Clinton traveled to Vietnam, the first American president to go to there since the Communist victory. On the way, he told me that he wasn’t concerned about lingering partisan bitterness or instability because whoever won, “I think the American people are pretty good about uniting around a president.”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he told Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders at a conference in Brunei.

There wasn’t. Gore accepted his greatest disappointment with grace and humor, charms he never quite managed as a candidate. We heard that some of his campaign people were annoyed by his insistence on a self-effacing exit. They knew the game was up, but they were not convinced that he had lost fairly if at all, and they never would be. But Gore said that when he called Bush to concede, “I promised him that I wouldn’t call him back this time.” His exit line was one he had used from scores of campaign platforms in 1992 against the Republicans, when he prompted the crowds to chant: “It’s time for them to go.”

“And now, my friends, in a phrase I once addressed to others, it’s time for me to go,” Gore said on December 13, 2000, after the election was settled at last.

There had been no struggle like it since 1876, when Republicans maneuvered Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency only two days before he was inaugurated, an outcome forever disputed by the foes who called him “His Fraudulency.” Hayes served one term and said nobody ever left the White House with less regret than he did. But Hayes also demonstrated that even a missing mandate does not render a president powerless. He protected the right to vote for black Americans, declared a canal across Panama to be a national goal, and took the first steps toward eliminating the spoils system of filling federal jobs, defying Republicans who had been his sponsors. “He serves his party best who serves his country best,” Hayes said when he took his contested office, a line that lasted although the admonition was too often ignored.

President-elect at last, Bush addressed the nation from the crowded chamber of the Texas House of Representatives, saying, “After a difficult election . . . our nation must rise above a house divided . . . I was not elected to serve one party but to serve one nation.”

It was only rhetoric and symbolism, from the loser and from the winner, but the ritual was important. In the normal course of election events, the vital transition begins within hours of the poll closings, the transition that makes a campaigning politician into “Mr. President,” a leader accepted even by people who did not want him in the White House. One careful step at a time, new presidents prepare for power between election night and inauguration day with overtures to Congress, courtesy messages to world leaders, gestures to their defeated rivals. Half of the ten weeks usually afforded for that process had been spent settling the 2000 election. Bush was the first man elected president despite losing the popular vote since 1888; he said that was because he spent his campaign time where he had a chance, not trying to increase his losing share of the vote in states like New York that were sure to go Democratic. A presidential election is singular, but it really is fifty-one separate elections to award the electoral votes of each state and the District of Columbia to the candidate who wins there, no matter the margin of victory. As a candidate, Bush had said that when he took his proposals to Congress he would tell them that he came with a message from the American people. Forget that; there was no message. The Senate was split, the House narrowly Republican, the presidency settled in court. There was no mandate. But a president defines his own mandate. Political rancor persisted, but the system worked, proven again under stress that would have sent people to the streets or the barricades in some other world capitals.

As vice president, Gore presided when his defeat was certified before Congress with the recording of the electoral votes. It was a ritual but a striking scene. The last vice president to lose the presidential election and then preside over the reporting of electoral votes was Richard Nixon, forty years before. Hubert Humphrey chose to be otherwise occupied rather than take the chair at the joint session that received the electoral votes by which Nixon beat him in 1968. Nixon had said at the 1960 ceremony that “in our campaigns, no matter how hard fought they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict and support those who win.” Now Gore bore the duty in an even closer election. And he bore up, overruling twenty objections raised by black House members who staged final protests against the Bush victory. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. raised one challenge. “The chair thanks the gentleman from Illinois but, hey,” Gore said, grinning. “We did all we could,” cried Representative Alcee Hastings of Florida. Gore smiled and said thanks. Then he announced the 271 votes for Bush, the majority plus one, and his own count, 267. “May God bless our new president,” Gore said.

I talked with Bush in a spare, dingy airport office in Midland, Texas, his hometown and his last stop on the way to Washington to be inaugurated president. He dismissed as background noise the taunts of his critics that he wasn’t smart enough to run the government without a vice president and senior Cabinet officials seasoned in his father’s administration. “I am comfortable with who I am, and therefore I can smile when people says he’s not smart enough to be the president, and I guess my attitude is that I’m just going to have to show them,” Bush said. It was my last interview as a reporter. As it ended, I thanked Bush for the interview. “Thank you for your career,” he replied. At Andrews Air Force Base that night, the president-elect was greeted by Cheney and a receiving line of official Washington. I was standing under the wing of the Air Force jetliner, reminiscing about all the campaign flights of all the forty years as Bush shook hands with his official greeters. I half heard a voice calling what sounded like my name. A colleague nudged me and said it was Bush. He had stepped away from the welcomers, and he was waving toward me. “Hey, Walter,” he said. “Good luck.” “Good luck to you, sir,” I called back.

I had been writing columns for the AP for twelve years and I had one to go. I interviewed the first President-elect Bush for my first column in 1989 and the second President-elect Bush for my last in 2001. I asked each of them as he began what he would want said of him after his time in the White House.

“I want to give it my best shot,” the elder Bush had said on the eve of his inauguration. “The presidency is still the place from which to lead and from which to effect change, hopefully for the better.”

Same topic, new president. “I hope people will be able to say he was steady under fire, he was wise enough to listen to counsel and decisive enough to make a decision that made a positive difference,” George W. told me.

One final assignment. My last AP byline was on the story of Bush’s inauguration:

“George Walker Bush was inaugurated 43rd president of the United States on Saturday, only the second time in American history a son had followed his father to the White House.

“At a cold, drizzly high noon, Bush raised his right hand and swore the oath of the office to which he promised to bring ‘civility, courage, compassion and character.’ His eyes brimmed with tears at the emotion of the hour. In the pageantry of the transfer of power, George Herbert Walker Bush stood proud witness to his son’s inauguration 12 years after his own.”

With that final story it was time for me to go. I’d had a front row seat on national politics for forty years. It was exhilarating, exhausting, satisfying, tense, frustrating and fun—my ticket to see, hear and write about winners and losers, flaws and failings, in the imperfect American way of nominating and electing presidents.