2004 Election: Inside The War Rooms

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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?