The Outside Players

Wednesday, Nov. 03, 2004 By RICHARD LACAYO AND JOEL STEIN

Michael Moore, lefty gadfly; Ann Coulter, Jeanne D'Arc of the right

GREGORY HEISLER FOR TIME; SHONNA VALESKA FOR TIME

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The '04 campaign will be remembered as the one in which the parties didn't run the whole party. There were many weeks this year when the traditional G.O.P. and Democratic campaign operations—for that matter, even the candidates themselves—seemed less important than the swarming field of outside players who gave this election season its unusual intensity. Bloggers, "527s," get-out-the-vote teams—these are the people who made the campaign a free-for-all, in the best and the worst senses of the phrase. The candidates churned out position papers that not many people read. But Michael Moore made a movie that a lot of people saw. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth made an ad campaign—a lot of people saw that too. Al Franken pulled up to the microphone. Ann Coulter took up near permanent residence in front of the TV cameras. Now George W. Bush gets four more years. Do the rest of them get four more as well? The people on these pages had a significant impact on campaign '04. We asked them to tell us how, and to talk about how they plan to party on.

WINNER | ANN COULTER
The Mouth That Roared
Ann Coulter has made her name by speaking her mind. Loudly, brashly and always from the right. Her opining sometimes gets her in trouble. A column on the Democratic Convention—which she described as attended by "corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons they call 'women'"—caused USA Today to drop her from its pages. But it's precisely that kind of tart talk that has turned Coulter's books, including her most recent, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), into best sellers and made her a popular pundit on the political-talk-show circuit. Her mission, she says, was "to energize the liberal base because every time one of them opens their mouth, George W. Bush is even more popular with the American people."

She's delighted that his popularity—and her advocacy—has been reconfirmed with four more years in the White House. "A [John] Kerry presidency would have been better for business," Coulter, 42, admits. But Bush is going to "increase the number of books I can write by reducing my chances of being killed by Islamic terrorists."

LOSER | MICHAEL MOORE
The Wrong End of the Lens
The October surprise came in June. Has there ever been a campaign development quite like Fahrenheit 9/11? Everyone had heard of campaign books, but suddenly we all woke up to the election-season power of a shrewdly timed ... documentary. Michael Moore's bumper car of a movie crashed into Bush from all angles while attracting the kind of box-office gross (U.S. numbers: $119 million) that usually goes to Adam Sandler pictures.

Shortly after his film opened, Moore took his father to get coffee at a doughnut store in Flint, Mich. "We're going through the drive-through window," he recalls, "and a girl, about 23, said, 'I just saw your film. I voted for Bush in the last election, but I just can't do it this time because he didn't turn out to be who he said he was.'" As it turns out, there weren't enough of those doughnut girls to elect Kerry. But Moore, 50, has other projects in the works. His next film is a documentary about the U.S. health-care system. Tentative title: Sicko.

WINNER | JOHN O'NEILL
Mission Accomplished
If the Vietnam War seemed, at times, to have almost as large a presence in the campaign as the war in Iraq, it may be, at least in part, because of John O'Neill, a Houston lawyer and former swift-boat commander whose feud with Kerry dates back more than 30 years. The first time O'Neill's anger at Kerry surfaced was 1971, when the fellow Navy officers debated the Vietnam War on The Dick Cavett Show, with Kerry speaking out against the war and O'Neill defending it. This time out, O'Neill, 58, and the group he helped organize, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, ran TV ads to accuse Kerry of embellishing his war record, receiving undeserved medals and besmirching Vietnam vets. When the charges went unanswered for too long by the Kerry campaign and a book, Unfit for Command, co-authored by O'Neill, became a best seller, Kerry's poll numbers dropped visibly.

Having helped defeat his longtime rival, O'Neill says he'll go back to private life. His share of the profits from Unfit for Command will be used to aid veterans and military families in need. But beyond that, O'Neill says, "I look forward to again being the Rip Van Winkle of politics."

LOSER | GEORGE SOROS
Lacking the Midas Touch
George Soros is what people mean by the phrase "money man." The Hungarian-born investor has a fortune estimated at $7.2 billion. He has been among the world's largest philanthropists, giving away some $4 billion over the decades. But after 9/11 he turned his attention—and his checkbook—to U.S. politics. Soros, 74, says he was unnerved by such Bush Administration rhetoric as Attorney General John Ashcroft's claim that people who raised concerns that the Patriot Act was a threat to liberty were aiding terrorists. Before campaign '04 was over, Soros had become one of the largest political contributors in U.S. history, spending about $27 million, most of it channeled to the independent partisan groups called 527s—all of it aimed against Bush. As it turned out, all was for naught. So, what does Soros do now? "I think I go into a monastery," he jokes. "I need to regroup." Then he adds pointedly, "But one doesn't want to stay in a monastery forever."

WINNER | DAVID SMITH
Sidestepping the Static
Campaign '04 was waged not only in the media, but at times, it seemed, by the media. One skirmish flared up when news leaked that Sinclair Broadcast—a suburban company based in Baltimore, Md., that owns or provides programming to stations in nearly 40 markets around the U.S.—planned to run Stolen Honor, a documentary critical of John Kerry's anti-Vietnam War activism, on all its 62 stations, many of them in swing states. Kerry supporters quickly demanded equal airtime—and pointed out that Sinclair CEO David Smith, 54, and his brothers had been big contributors to the Bush campaign. In the end, a conservative media group bought airtime for the film on the Pax network, and Sinclair ran an hour-long news special that focused on the controversy and showed snippets of both Stolen Honor and a pro-Kerry doc, Going Upriver. The ratings weren't good. But the Bush win may ease that disappointment, especially since it means friendly faces at the Federal Communications Commission at a time when Sinclair has become the poster child for those who argue that media consolidation means narrowing the diversity of voices in the media.

LOSER | STEVE ROSENTHAL
Stumbling on the Ground
This was the year of the old-fashioned ground-war political campaign, the kind fought door to door. And the most important battalion on the Democratic side was America Coming Together (ACT). A massive get-out-the-vote project focused on 17 battleground states, ACT was the co-creation of Steve Rosenthal, a former head of the AFL-CIO political operation, who founded it last year with, among others, Harold Ickes, Bill Clinton's former deputy chief of staff, and Ellen Malcolm, head of the pro-choice advocacy group Emily's List. At $120 million, the money they raised was six times greater than the Democratic Party has traditionally taken in for turnout efforts. Even so, it wasn't enough. But Rosenthal, 51, is still bullish about the future of one-household-at-a time activism. "The day of the 30-second ad isn't over," he says. "But there's a real recognition of the value of voter-to-voter contact."