The Making of the President, 2004

IN THE SUMMER OF 2003, Teresa Heinz Kerry was perturbed. Her husband, John Kerry, once the frontrunner for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, was slipping in the polls, steadily losing ground to former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Heinz Kerry intended to fight back–and she knew exactly how to do it. So she telephoned her husband’s campaign manager and told him: “I want you to issue a challenge for me to debate Howard Dean.”

As campaign anecdotes go, this one is a treasure. Yet it wasn’t told until after Election Day, in the November 15, 2004, issue of Newsweek. And even then, it was only one story among hundreds in a 45,000-word article reported by seven different people and written by Evan Thomas–which has now been supplemented and published in book form as Election 2004: How Bush Won and What You Can Expect in the Future.

The result is quite a piece of reportage. There are gossipy set-pieces (James Carville broke down in tears during a September meeting with top Kerry brass), there are tidbits of insider information (Laura Bush’s Secret Service codename was “Tempo”), and there are quirky character notes (Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager, once fell asleep standing up and “hit the floor with such force that he cracked a rib”). But the book is also a little bewildering. It contains so much detail, so many factoids, that a reader’s first reaction must be: How on earth did they get this stuff?

Here’s how. For over a year a team of Newsweek reporters had exclusive access to the presidential campaigns’ upper echelons. They attended meetings, listened in on strategy sessions, befriended flacks and operatives, transcribed conversations–all on the condition that nothing they learned would be published until after November 2. This approach isn’t new, of course. Newsweek has been making the same deals, assigning (in some cases) the same reporters, and writing the same long, long postelection stories every four years since 1984.

Twenty years is a long time, however, and a lot changed in those years. Cable news cycles began to spin faster and faster. Newspaper budgets shrank. Bloggers emerged to feed on headlines with a voracity that would raise eyebrows in a school of piranha. The market for long-form political journalism died off, and so did most of its practitioners. By now, it seems as though Newsweek is the only publication left with the organization, the resources, the clout, and the contacts to undertake big-picture projects such as Election 2004.

AND THAT PROJECT IS . . . well, what, exactly? After all, the campaign had only just ended when the report appeared. To paraphrase John Kerry, memories of it are still seared–seared–in voters’ minds. It is not quite time for a refresher course. But, still, one has the feeling that Thomas wanted to do something more than write a sketchy narrative containing some pithy anecdotes.

Indeed, Thomas says the report was intended as “the first draft of history,” and as such it is largely successful. Thomas and his reporting team, through sheer accumulation of detail, present clear portraits of the two candidates and their organizations, with scene after scene, conversation after conversation. And all that reporting ends up explaining why Bush won and Kerry lost–for Election 2004‘s portrait of John Kerry is not a flattering one.

Take for instance that moment on February 4, 2004, when Kerry was on his way to have his picture taken for Time magazine. He had won a series of primaries the day before, which established him as the Democratic frontrunner. So Time wanted some photographs, one of which would end up on the magazine’s cover. On the van ride over, Kerry asked his valet, Marvin Nicholson, for the senatorial hairbrush. Nicholson, like the senator, is an outdoorsman. Not long ago, he had met Kerry in a surf shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was employed at the time. Soon after that, Nicholson became the senator’s assistant.

But he had forgotten Kerry’s hairbrush.

“Sir, I don’t have it,” Nicholson told Kerry, according to Election 2004.

“Marvin, f–!” Kerry replied.

When Kerry’s press secretary, David Wade, suggested the senator borrow his hairbrush, Kerry snapped, “I’m not using Wade’s brush.” Then he turned back on his assistant. “Marvin, f–,” he repeated, “it’s my Time photo shoot.”

The story opens a perfect little window into John Kerry’s character, the strange tics and tremors underneath his public persona. And there are dozens of other such stories as well. In August 2004 Kerry summoned his aides for a meeting. His second (and final) campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, was there. So were senior advisers Bob Shrum and Tad Devine. According to Election 2004, Devine urged Kerry to break federal spending caps. Devine’s concern was that if Kerry did not do so, his campaign, like Al Gore’s, would not have the resources to be competitive against Bush. “We were there with Al Gore in 2000 when he had to make the awful choice between Ohio and Florida,” said Devine. “We’d hate to see you have to make that decision this time, Senator.”

The assembled crowd sat in silence, waiting for the candidate’s reply:

Such moments irked Kerry’s senior aides, one assumes. But a lot else irked them, too. Jim Jordan, who was fired in November 2003 and replaced by Cahill, told Newsweek that Kerry was “hand-wringing and dithering.”

One “top aide” told the reporters behind Election 2004 that Kerry would “whine constantly.” Then the aide mimicked Kerry: “‘I’m not getting enough exercise, I’m overscheduled, I didn’t get the speech on time'”–“On and on,” the aide continued, “ad nauseam.”

OFTEN KERRY was in a state of disbelief. In April, he muttered to aides: “I can’t believe I’m losing to this idiot.” Later, faced with criticism over his “I actually voted for the $87 billion [for reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq] before I voted against it” remark, Kerry said: “I can’t believe I’m getting killed over a stupid thing I said, and this guy has totally screwed up the war–and he’s not paying a price for it.” And later still, on the day of the final debate, Kerry saw a newspaper headline which read: “Time to Break the Tie.” “I don’t understand this,” Kerry said to no one in particular. “I’ve beaten the guy twice now–and somehow it’s a tie. Why is this a must-win for me? When is it going to be a must-win for him?”

This idiot, he, the guy, him: Apparently Kerry never referred to President Bush by name. This might seem a small point, but the pronouns are in fact evidence of great condescension, which, in turn, point to even greater insecurity. It is no trifle that Kerry’s constant companion on the road was his cell phone. Aides told the Newsweek reporters that Kerry was always calling acquaintances and asking for advice and criticism. It didn’t matter whether it was from his brother or Richard Holbrooke or Bob Shrum or his nephew José; the candidate needed to hear what he was doing wrong, what he was missing. When John Sasso, who helped run Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential bid, came on board the Kerry campaign late in the game, his first decision was to get rid of Kerry’s cell phone. Which he did. Until Kerry took it back.

In retrospect, it is surprising that Kerry did as well as he did. He won 48 percent of the popular vote to the president’s 51 percent. He was only a little over 100,000 votes short of a victory in Ohio and thus in the Electoral College. And yet it is hard to understand how such numbers were put up by a candidate who, in Reno, Nevada, just days before the election,

Or a candidate who, according to Thomas, told an audience in Spring Green, Wisconsin, that “he knew how hard it was to find the right financial options because he had two children and three stepchildren.” (Whereupon the crowd, knowing that Kerry is married to a billionaire, “audibly laughed at him.”)

THE PORTRAIT of President Bush in Election 2004 could not be more different. The book doesn’t have a lot about Bush, for one thing. Which is understandable: Bush is the president. He has better things to do than let a reporter from Newsweek follow his every move. The sections on the Bush campaign focus more heavily on the president’s top political advisers. Still, the contrast between Bush and Kerry is clear–if only because Kerry emerges as a complex and flawed individual, while Bush is presented in purely superficial terms, as a pained and, at times, peevish war leader.

You probably already knew that. You probably knew the president “needed a break,” or that he “saw himself as a war president in a war without end,” or that he showed “his true feelings about Kerry” during the first presidential debate, when “his whole body and manner cried out that he was a president with a war to fight who didn’t want to be bothered trading verbal jabs with the kind of supercilious know-it-all he had loathed since Yale days.”

So, too, you’ve probably already read about how, after the election, stung by press criticism, the president chased down a reporter to show him a letter from a . . . oh, wait. That wasn’t Bush. It was Kerry, on November 11, nine days after he lost his chance to become the president of the United States. This is how Thomas tells the story:

If John Kerry reads Evan Thomas’s account of the 2004 election, the answer might suggest itself.

Matthew Continetti is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.