Inside The War Rooms

WINGMAN: Senator John McCain with the Bush family

BROOKS KRAFT / CORBIS FOR TIME

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Kerry: "He Says Saddam? You Say Osama"
The snickering started when the Washington politocracy got a look at those 32 pages of debate rules. The candidates were going to have their time limits policed by lights and buzzers, like a couple of Jeopardy! contestants. What a trap the Bushies had laid for a windbag like Kerry. At 30 seconds left, a green light would come on; at 15, a yellow one; and with five seconds left, a red one. If a candidate repeatedly went over his allotted time, the moderator could start using the buzzer—and everyone knew which of the two was more likely to make that happen.

As for Kerry, he was none too keen when his handlers took him off the road for four precious days so that he could go to "debate camp" in Wisconsin. Hadn't he been training off and on all summer? Hadn't he memorized all those briefing books they kept sending to the plane? Hadn't he spent two whole days in Nantucket, Mass., in August, practicing, practicing, practicing, especially the foreign policy answers? When Kerry got to the House on the Rock resort outside Madison, he found his advance staff had transformed an old machine shed into a near perfect replica of the first debate site, figuring in everything from the lectern specs to the camera angles, even the color of the carpet and the walls.

The first day was a disaster, with Kerry struggling to keep his answers within the time limits. "He was awful," says one of the few advisers allowed into the shed. Aides Shrum and Ron Klain, who were running the practices, imposed what they called "zero tolerance," and by the time Kerry had drilled a few days, he had figured out how to make those lights his friends. The green one, for instance, would be his cue to pivot from attacking Bush to talking about his own proposals, so that every answer would end on an upbeat note.

But Kerry had to do more than avoid tripping a buzzer if those debates were to put him back in the race. The first debate—the one on foreign policy—would be the crucial one. Kerry was going to have to make two big, risky points: The war in Iraq was not the war on terrorism, and Saddam Hussein was not Osama bin Laden. Again and again, Klain coached Kerry: "He says Saddam? You say Osama." By the time Kerry boarded his plane for Miami, he had gone through four full 90-minute dress rehearsals and more hours than anyone could count refining the back-and-forth on every conceivable question. But before they left that shed for the last time, Kerry took Klain aside. "You know, when we came here, I wasn't sure what I'd get out of it," Kerry told him. "But this has been really, really useful."

Bush: "We Were Watching Our Lead Disappear"
"This could be a problem," said Hughes, watching the first debate from a black-curtained boiler room backstage. It was hardly the knockout punch the Bush team had hoped for. Instead, as the debate unfolded, Bush looked more and more ... well, undone. With each smirk and scowl and shake of his head, the President ratified every charge John Kerry had made about his stubbornness and inability to admit mistakes. He not only looked cranky but he sounded it, shearing off his answers, forgetting the more expansive and compelling explanations he routinely gave on the stump. As the squalls continued, Hughes stood huddled in the corner with communications director Bartlett to discuss the setback in the making. Chief strategist Matthew Dowd held both hands to his mouth as if in prayer. "We were watching our lead disappear," says a Bush official.

That was the last thing the Bush team had expected. Instead of employing his legendary charm to put the White House out of Kerry's reach, the opposite occurred. Bush was alienating a huge proportion of the audience with his manner. Spinning reporters afterward, Rove insisted that the President had been "thoughtful" and "pensive"—the epitome of revisionism. Hughes went about her work too, feeding a wreath of microphones and tape recorders with argument after argument that Bush had done well. Later Hughes spoke to the President via cell phone about the early story line. "I was not irritated," he said, irritated. "Sir," said Hughes, "you were."

Over the next 24 hours, the damage seemed to have no end. The crucial block of undecided women voters later told pollsters that Bush reminded them of their husbands who wouldn't stop and ask for directions. Americans who may have been willing to stand behind Bush again if he showed a little bend or a little learning heard no evidence of either. Just as important for the Bush campaign, which had so carefully courted its conservative base, the President's performance set off gnashing and moans among the faithful.

The next morning even Bush was angry—with himself and his staff. "You're losing the spin war," he told his aides. Now he wanted the debate preparation streamlined. Too many people had pelted him with too much advice for him to keep it all straight, he said. So Rove told aides to leave the President alone. "Don't take that to him now," Rove was heard to say, "he's got campaigning to do."

For days the question lingered, Why had Bush bombed? The President had prepared carefully, listening to audiotapes of Kerry's most pointed attacks on the Administration. Everyone—Rove, Hughes, even Laura Bush—had a pet theory. Was Bush tired from visiting hurricane victims? Had he been so blinded by Kerry's claims that he'd forgotten the warnings that his facial reactions as Kerry spoke would be seen by tens of millions? "I still don't know where that person went who showed up to those last practice sessions," said an aide, looking back. The best guess was also the simplest: Bush is incapable of hiding what's on his face when he's angry. And it had been a very long time since anyone had gone into the Oval Office and criticized him so directly and relentlessly.

During the practice for the second debate, Bush aides showed the President tapes of his performance to punctuate the power of his peevishness. They also worked on parrying Kerry's thrusts. "You can't respond to each attack or you'd look defensive, so we worked on picking one, refuting it and then quickly turning to offense," said Hughes. A coming speech on medical liability was shoved aside so that Bush could explain the choices in the race on the economy and terrorism in a way he hadn't in the debate. He would also try to account for his own behavior, hoping a little self-deprecation would even the score. "If you hear all that," he said in the speech, alluding to his opponent's litany of charges during the debate, "you can understand why somebody would make a face."

Kerry: Last Round? Stay on Attack
When it came to his closing argument, John Kerry wasn't about to trust anyone's instincts but his own. Ten days before the election, Lockhart and pollster Stan Greenberg started circulating a battle plan among Kerry's top advisers that called for an abrupt pivot in tone and message for the final stretch. He should talk more about domestic issues, the memo said, adopt a "positive and hopeful tone" and offer optimism instead of fear. "We want to elevate the choice by elevating the moment and the consequences—of four more years of Bush, with all the partiality and bleakness, or a fresh start for America with Kerry, with sense [of] the possibility and hope," wrote Lockhart and Greenberg.

All of which sounded nice—except that Kerry didn't buy any of it. When he saw the gauzy stump speech his staff had produced from the memo, Kerry told the advisers aboard his plane—Shrum, Sasso, Cutter and McCurry—that the last thing he could afford now was to start sounding like Oprah. Not while Americans were hearing of hostage beheadings and car bombs every night on the news; not while Bush and Cheney were stoking the voters' fears with ads about wolves in the forest and hints of a postelection nuclear holocaust. A warm and fuzzy message now, Kerry said, would be a bigger mistake than it was in August, and then it had almost killed him.

Kerry sent the speech back to be overhauled. He wanted a guided missile, not a softball. On Oct. 25, Lockhart and Greenberg described the final march in a memo titled "THE FINAL PHASE Take Three." Kerry would keep making the campaign about Bush's failings —how he had made "catastrophic misjudgments" in Iraq, how he was letting down the middle class on everything from jobs to college costs to health care. And how, as long as Bush kept saying everything was fine, "the country dare not hope for something better."

Reality, Kerry decided, would be his final weapon. He would keep riding the headlines, right up until Election Day. And as it happened, the lead story of that day's New York Times offered a promising start: huge cache of explosives vanished from site in iraq. While the following days' headlines would offer a variety of theories and evidence about when and how the explosives were removed, the issue brought the spotlight back to the Bush Administration's competence in running a war.

Bush and Kerry: How Do We Play The Videotape?
Four days before the election, on his way to a campaign stop in Manchester, N.H., Bush learned in his regular sunrise briefing that Osama bin Laden had delivered another video to al-Jazeera. It looked like the opportunity to ride the storyline the White House loved best—right through the final days. Whenever voters were reminded of terrorism, they had never failed to turn to the President. Kerry had been using the ghost of bin Laden for months, arguing that Bush had let him go. But now that the real thing was back on their TV screens, voters would focus less on what had happened in the past and more on which man could take care of the threat now. It wouldÊ"bring the security moms back home," said a Bush adviser, describing the campaign's view of the political benefit.

Still, the President would have to tread carefully. Word went out from Air Force One that no one in the campaign or at G.O.P. headquarters was to make a political calculation within earshot of a reporter. While Bush spoke in Toledo in the late afternoon, his political aides discussed setting a trap for Kerry. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice briefed Bush throughout the day on the details of the tape, and Chase Untermeyer, the U.S. ambassador to Qatar, tried to persuade al-Jazeera not to run it. Once aides were sure the video was being aired, however, Bush wrote down some remarks that included Senator Kerry. "We knew that Kerry couldn't resist responding more than he should on these issues," said a senior White House aide at the time. "He has to show that he knows better." So the President lured Kerry in a brief statement on the tarmac in Ohio: "Americans will not be intimidated or influenced by an enemy of our country. I'm sure Senator Kerry agrees with this."

Translation of the tape came to Kerry's campaign during the afternoon by way of BlackBerry while the Senator was giving interviews by satellite in West Palm Beach, Fla. Shrum, who cannot type, dictated a brief statement to Josh Gottheimer, one of the campaign's young speechwriters, which they showed to the candidate in the limo on the way to the airport. Kerry deleted only one sentence, the first one, which referred to how bin Laden had castigated both him and the President.

"In response to this tape from Osama bin Laden, let me make it clear, crystal clear," Kerry said when he delivered the statement at the airport. "As Americans, we are absolutely united in our determination to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. They are barbarians."

But would Kerry keep to the high ground? The Bush campaign was betting that he wouldn't, and it didn't take long to find what they needed to put their indignation on speed dial. The Bush campaign's rapid-response team discovered remarks Kerry had made to a local Wisconsin TV station during those interviews by satellite, reiterating the criticism he had been making for months that Bush had let bin Laden slip away at Tora Bora. The Bushies cried foul and had Bush do so in his last speech of the day. "It's the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking," said Bush. "It is especially shameful in the light of a new tape from America's enemy." But did Americans agree, or was the tape a reminder of Bush's failure to catch the murderer he had once vowed to bring in dead or alive? Some polls showed a mild boost for the President when voters were asked if the video had pushed them toward a candidate, and who knows? Perhaps bin Laden did help give the President another four years.

—With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr. and James Carney/Washington