No matter how hard they work and how far they travel and how much they want it, when judgment day dawns, the candidates usually stand still at last. They go to the polls and cast their votes. Then they take a deep breath and just hold it for the rest of the day. Bush woke up Tuesday morning at 6 a.m., made coffee for his wife, fed his cats, read his Bible and called his folks to reassure them that he would, indeed, become the nation's 43rd President of the U.S. His chief strategist, Karl Rove, had been assuring him that victory was his - 5 points in the popular vote, 330 electoral votes. How was he feeling? "Calm," he told the assembled reporters. "Let me see if you got this by now. I trust the people. I trust their will. I trust their wisdom."
The other man - bleary-eyed, wired, hoarse, drained of everything but spirit after campaigning for 30 hours straight - had never even made it to bed, and he was not about to stop. Gore began Monday at dawn in the rain outside the John Deere factory in, of all places, Waterloo, Iowa, then on to Missouri, Michigan and Florida, where as the sun came up, he delivered Cuban pastries from a local bakery to hundreds of cheering volunteers. The reporters trailing him by this time had propped their tape recorders up on the tables and curled up underneath them.
Throughout the day Tuesday, the campaigns knew that turnout was huge in the battleground states - lines stretched around the block in Cleveland, voters waited for hours in Nashville, and some precincts in Florida were reporting that 80% of registered voters were at the polls. In New Mexico, snowplows were used to deliver ballots in a storm; some precincts had no electricity, but the voting machines had backup batteries.
Election Day began badly for Donna Brazile, Gore's chief turnout strategist. Her suitcase had vanished. It contained her life she said, including her Bible and, most irreplaceable, her "grounding stones," which her grandmother had given her and which are sort of her good-luck charm. She was in no mood to be out of luck at that particular moment. The first alarms went off at Gore headquarters at 6 a.m.: workers there started hearing that voters in heavily Democratic Palm Beach County were confused by the ballots. "The ballots do not line up in the machine with the correct candidates," said Joan Joseph of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party. "People who think they are voting for Gore could be voting for Pat Buchanan, because the word Democrat is lined up with Buchanan."
As soon as they realized the problem, all hell broke loose. Party officials were frantically calling Democratic Party state headquarters and Gore's command center in Tallahassee. In the meantime, the Democrats frantically printed flyers to warn voters about the problem and tried to get party activists to the polling places to sound the alarm. But they had already missed the important prework hours.
Midafternoon, when the first exit polls came in, the first hints of history in the making began to flicker through the nation's e-mail system. They confirmed what some Bush aides had feared, that they had lost momentum in the closing days. Last guys don't finish nice, and Gore had hit Bush hard on not being ready to lead, not even knowing that Social Security was a federal program. The ticket that promised to restore honor and dignity to the White House turned out to have four arrests between them; the news of Bush's drunk-driving record was hurting, said a senior Bush adviser. "That's the only thing that changed in the last days of the campaign." Voters who had made up their mind in the closing days were breaking to Gore.
All afternoon, Gore was at the Loews Hotel in Nashville, sitting in his hotel room in his blue suit and tie, on the radio, giving interviews at five-minute intervals one after another. So were Joe Lieberman, Karenna, Tipper.Everyone was on the phone, on the air. Gore consulted with staff members about his speech for that evening, how he wanted to frame a victory and how he would handle a defeat. He asked for a section about his father, how he had lost Tennessee but never stopped loving it and calling it home, and how sometimes it was better to lose because you stood up for what you believed in.
Shortly before 8 p.m. the networks announced that Gore had taken Florida. The battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania soon fell as well, and every anchor became a math teacher, showing how it was increasingly difficult for Bush to find the 270 electoral votes he would need to win. All the networks were reading the data from the Voter News Service consortium and grinding it through their own analysis to try to be the first to declare a winner. Little things can make a difference when every minute counts, and what they didn't know was that vns had a bad sample in Tampa, some faulty data in Jacksonville. Plus there were voters in Palm Beach who told the exit pollers they had voted for Gore, when in fact their vote had been registered for Buchanan.
Bush had hoped to have a special dinner with his wife and parents and brother Jeb, cherishing the knowledge that the exit polls were telling them everything they wanted to hear. But Bush was already tense when he got to the Shoreline Grill early that evening. As the family members made their way under dim lights to the restaurant, Bush's shoulders were more hunched than usual, his father looked as if he was suffering from an ulcer, and Barbara wore a smile tight as a fist. By then they knew the race was much closer than Rove had promised it would be. But it wasn't until the news that Gore had captured Florida appeared on a TV screen in the restaurant that the mood turned from grim to black.
Jeb Bush, Florida's Governor, reportedly succumbed to the pressure that has been on him ever since his brother announced for the presidency. With tears in his eyes, Jeb apologized to his brother for letting him down. Poppy and Barbara were distraught. The family business - politics - was now tearing at the fabric of the family itself. The media reports had been hard to take: reports that Jeb hadn't worked hard enough for George, that he resented George's relatively greater success and was worried that a George in the White House would almost certainly mean there would never be a Jeb in the White House. Now those notions and rumors could harden into truths passed on from one stranger to another: Jeb had failed. He had sabotaged his brother's campaign. He couldn't deliver.
Jeb left the restaurant. And instead of staying at the Four Seasons suite to savor the moment with friends and staff, Bush decided he just wanted to go home. He summoned the motorcade to take him and Laura and Mom and Dad back to the Governor's mansion to watch and wait and wonder. Jeb would later turn up there too. If George really came unglued at the prospect of losing, he would allow only his family to see it.
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