Bush's well-mapped road to victory: how Rove et al. pulled it off

National Review, Nov 29, 2004 by Richard Lowry

It was obvious that the media would beat on Bush as much as possible. "The ferocity of the assault was not anything anyone had ever seen before," says a Bush campaigner. "It was clear that we couldn't make any mistakes, we had to be incredibly disciplined, and we couldn't get down." The campaign also had to bypass the national media. "It was extremely critical to be able to communicate through non-traditional media, through the campaign website, through talk radio, through regional media, through blogs, and through the conservative press," says a Bush campaign official. The campaign's e-mail list reached millions--dwarfing the audience of some mainstream outlets. "It was important to remember that if something was on CNN in the middle of the afternoon," says the official, "it was being seen by only a couple hundred thousand people." Campaign officials and surrogates were booked on regional media. The campaign constantly talked to talk-radio producers and aggressively booked talk-radio shows. "The national media believe they are the focus of a presidential campaign's communications effort," says the official. "In certain ways, they were the least important part."

The campaign weathered the spring. "We wanted to focus on the principles, the big picture," says Gillespie. "They wanted to kill us with a thousand cuts. If we could survive each one, we'd be okay." From the beginning, the Bush team conceived of the campaign as falling into four rough categories: 1) describing the challenges the country had been through (which the campaign did in its initial advertising that included images from 9/11); 2) defining John Kerry (which would happen in the spring, right after the Democratic primaries); 3) telling voters who George Bush is and what he's for (roughly the period through August and the GOP convention); and 4) comparing Bush and Kerry, giving voters the choice (the debates and the stretch run).

"We wanted to define Kerry as soon as we could," Mehlman explains, "because we wanted to be arguing with someone who was at the same level as us. His favorable/unfavorable rating changed dramatically. He went from plus 25 or 30 down to plus 8 or 9. Most of the campaign, the president's fav-unfav was better." The campaign always knew that it would have to attack Kerry as both a liberal and a flip-flopper. "Those two charges were close cousins of each other," says a Bush campaign official. Kerry wanted to get back to the center after the Democratic primary. The flip-flop charge exacted a price for doing so. "The first imperative was not to let him erase the left-leaning rhetoric from the primaries. We wanted to keep him pinned down where he left the primary campaign," says the official. The charge worked beautifully, with help from Kerry. "What Kerry did himself to reinforce that charge was more important than anything else," says Matthew Dowd.

"When he said, 'I voted for it before I voted against it'--that was incredible!" says Mehlman. Kerry still had an opening at his convention, when he would have the attention of millions of Americans: "I was worried going into their convention that they would do what we ended up doing, which was to lay out a bold agenda. They didn't. It was all about the past." The convention's focus on Vietnam set Kerry up perfectly for the independent attack by the Swift-boat veterans. Says Gillespie, "The second ad, about his 1971 testimony, was brutal. That was news to a lot of people 45 years old and younger. Kerry had been talking about being a Vietnam veteran proud of his service. Then you have this ad. 'He said what?' It was completely new information and it was completely at odds with his portrayal of how proud he was of his service. Then, there was the soft 'g' in Genghis Khan. Alot of people probably said, 'Oh, yeah, on top of all that--he's a Boston Brahmin.'"