Inside the Campaign Cocoon

Welcome to Red Rocks. Since 1906, when magazine publisher John Brisben Walker produced the first concert here, it’s been a mecca for musicians. When Bruce Springsteen plays Red Rocks, though, the road to the amphitheater is not lined with protesters. Nor do three buses filled with members of the national press corps, accompanied by police escort, show up to watch. And chances are there aren’t snipers in the stones, either, hiding in tiny caves a hundred feet in the air, training their rifles on the crowd below.

But then, even the Boss is not the president of the United States. One day last week, George W. Bush–with his daughter Jenna, former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks, Denver Broncos coach Mike Shanahan, and a host of statewide pols and press and demonstrators in tow–brought his own traveling road show to Red Rocks. The president’s band played to a captivated audience: In all, over 10,000 supporters showed up. Many of them arrived hours early, and some stayed for hours afterward. And based on the results of a thoroughly unscientific poll conducted during the rally’s closing minutes, combined with the rapturous screams heard during the president’s remarks, the visit was an unqualified success.

It was the third stop on a campaign swing that began on October 11 in the isolated oil town of Hobbs, New Mexico, and ended–for me anyway–two days later in the city of Tempe, Arizona. There was a reassuring regularity to all the stops in between. At each rally, Bush was met by a throng of enthusiastic supporters, almost all of them white, young, married, and with small children. Sometimes the families I met had two kids; sometimes three; sometimes more. The children squirmed and made faces while the president spoke, but squealed and clapped hands whenever the audience burst into applause.

At each rally, as the audience waited patiently for the president’s armored motorcade to arrive, they listened to the same country music, they said the same prayers, and they waved the same signs: BUSH CHENEY ’04 or THIS IS BUSH COUNTRY or WE LOVE W. At each rally the national press watched attentively before scurrying back to the filing center, where they phoned and emailed their editors in New York and Washington. And at each rally, once he arrived, the president delivered the same stump speech, with the same inflections, the same gestures, and the same facial expressions, over and over and over again.

And audiences loved it. At Red Rocks, the Broncos’ Shanahan introduced Gen. Franks, who introduced the president. Franks, looking oddly out of character in a dark suit and bright blue tie, explained why Bush should be reelected. “I have seen this president, this commander in chief, when the nights were long and the mornings were early and the decisions to be made were hard,” Franks said slowly, his Texas drawl stretching out each word. “And you know what I saw? I saw character, I saw courage, and I saw consistency.”

The crowd whooped and cheered.

“I saw the character that is necessary,” Franks went on. “I saw the character in his eyes that is necessary not to tie, but to win against the terrorists.”

More whoops and cheers.

The president took the podium. “I’ve come back to this beautiful part of our country,” he said. Then he paused.

“To ask for the vote,” he continued, by way of introduction. He paused again. Since the introductions were over, he leaned over the podium, and began what he was really there for.

He was there to hammer his opponent.

THE PRESIDENT’S PHYSICALITY on the stump cannot be overstated. Sometimes his whole body tilts on its axis as he lunges forward, his right index finger pointing, jabbing at the air, punctuating each word. Sometimes he grabs both sides of the podium as he talks, gazes at the audience, winks at random people, then turns serious, and makes a fist, and pounds it against the podium. And sometimes he leans back and shrugs, eyes twinkling, his mouth curved into a wide smile, as he tells a joke.

Like this one, from Red Rocks: “I said [to coach Shanahan], you got any suggestions? He said, ‘Yeah. Stay on the offense.'”

It was clear Bush had taken Shanahan’s advice. About half his stump speech is an attack on Kerry’s record, portraying the senator as a big-government liberal who is soft on defense. But that’s not Bush’s main problem with Kerry. The main problem, Bush says in his stump speech, is that Kerry is disingenuous. “Much as he’s strived to obscure it,” Bush said at Red Rocks, “on issue after issue, my opponent has shown why he has earned his ranking as the most liberal member of the United States Senate.” And: “Several statements he made the other night simply didn’t pass the credibility test.” And: “With another straight face, he tried to tell Americans that when it comes to his health care plan, ‘The government has nothing to do with it.'”

There’s more. Bush uses Kerry’s legislative record and public statements to show that the Massachusetts senator is a Roman god–specifically, the two-faced Janus. In the media, this line of attack is often caricatured as the “flip-flop” charge, but it is more (dare one say it?) nuanced than that. Bush isn’t saying Kerry shouldn’t be president because he changes positions. He’s saying Kerry shouldn’t be president because he cannot choose a position in the first place: “His plan to raise taxes in the top two income brackets would raise about $600 billion,” Bush said at Red Rocks, before drawing a deep breath. “But his spending plan will cost almost four times as much, more than $2.2 trillion.” He shook his head, leaned forward again, and then, relishing each syllable, said slowly and loudly: “You cannot have it both ways.”

The president is all about choosing. He, not John Kerry, is “the real deal.” He, not John Kerry, is a leader. Americans may not always agree with him, the president said in his acceptance speech at Madison Square Garden on September 2, but at least they know where he stands. Indeed, it is hard not to know where Bush stands. His stump speech is littered with the first-person singular. He begins almost every sentence this way: “I believe” or “I’m proud” or “I want” or “I’ve led.” Even when the president uses the pronoun “we,” it’s the royal we: “We’re not going to let him tax you,” he told his audiences last week. “We’re going to win in November!”

Yet such use of the first person doesn’t strike one as egotistical. Nor is it meant to. It is meant to show the president as comfortable in his own skin, as decisive and strong and authentic, as confident in his ability to lead. It works. If you go to a “Victory 2004” rally, you’ll see that the president’s vision of himself resonates deeply with his supporters.

But Bush is more than decisive. He is, in his own mind, in his own way, revolutionary. In his stump speech, you hear that while the president embraces new ideas, John Kerry is beholden to worn-out politics, old answers, and outdated modes of thought. In his convention speech, Bush said, “Many of our most fundamental systems–the tax code, health coverage, pension plans, worker training–were created for the world of yesterday, not tomorrow.” He said, “This changed world can be a time of great opportunity for all Americans to earn a better living.” But, he added, Kerry is averse to change: “His policies of tax and spend–of expanding government rather than expanding opportunity–are the politics of the past.”

Bush’s are the policies of the future. He is a transformative president. Just listen to him talk. “Transform” is one of his favorite words. “We’re transforming our military,” he told the audience at Red Rocks. And later: “I believe in the transformational power of liberty.” And later still: “My predecessor”–he was talking about Harry Truman–“and other citizens held to that belief that liberty could transform nations.” Liberty transforms people abroad, but it can also transform things at home. “I saw a problem in Medicare,” he said. “Medicine was modernizing but Medicare wasn’t. . . . So we called people together and modernized Medicare.”

The crowds burst into applause. One woman with curly blond hair shrieked so loudly you would have thought she was an extra in a Godzilla movie.

Bush smiled. “We’re not going to go back to the old days,” he yelled.

It is a curious trope for a Republican president to use, to be sure, particularly for one who says he is a conservative. But it played well among the crowd gathered at Red Rocks last week, just as it played well among the crowd gathered in the World Arena and Ice Hall in Colorado Springs the next morning. The only major difference between the two rallies was that Jenna Bush introduced her father in Colorado Springs. She brought to the job all the, um, rhetorical skill she deployed at the Republican National Convention.

“There’s so much energy in this state to reelect my dad,” she said. And you should vote for “my dad” for a couple of reasons, mainly because he “made my favorite peanut butter and jelly sandwiches” and “told me I actually looked cute in braces.” Also, “My dad is a great president.”

Jenna’s peroration delighted the men and women in the crowd. Some waved American flags, and others waved four fingers in the air, calling for four more years, but looking oddly like commodities traders at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. For his part, once he took the stage, the president expanded on his theme that he, not John Kerry, is better equipped to lead the country in the future.

Why? Because of Kerry’s record in the past. “We’re living in changing times, and that can be unsettling,” Bush said. But

Bush talked a lot about Kerry’s record in Colorado Springs, but not nearly as much as he’d talked about it a week earlier, in a speech he gave in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on October 6. Stung by his poor performance in the first presidential debate, Bush went on the attack, rolling out a laundry list of positions taken and votes cast by Senator Kerry that, when considered as a whole, reveal

I remembered the president’s Wilkes-Barre speech as I stood on the floor of the arena in Colorado Springs, and watched him grab the podium and narrow his eyes, and heard him say John Kerry’s worldview “is dangerous, a dangerous way of thinking in the world in which we live,” and I thought: George Bush is not running on his record. He’s running on his opponent’s.

And then I thought: Oh, no. I’m thinking like a member of the White House press corps.

THEY ARE A CYNICAL CROWD. Here’s one reason why: The president rarely answers questions from the press. He’s held fewer solo press conferences than any president in the last 50 years. When reporters accompany the president to events, they are restricted to an area at least 50 feet from him at all times. During my four-day tour with the White House press corps, only one reporter asked Bush a question. It was on October 12, the eve of the third presidential debate, and the president and first lady were leaving Richardson’s, a Tex-Mex joint in Phoenix, where they had just had dinner with John and Cindy McCain. A White House pool reporter asked Bush how he felt.

“Full,” Bush replied.

The White House senior communications staff are similarly reticent. Earlier on October 12, for example, as Air Force One made its way from Denver to Colorado Springs, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, held his morning gaggle with reporters. Here is a typical excerpt:

And that was that.

So the media are isolated. They are also bored. The events they cover are canned, repetitive, insular. Naturally, they grow bitter, and they end up focusing on slight, irrelevant changes in Bush’s language from speech to speech. Sometimes, for example, the president says John Kerry “can run, but he cannot hide.” Other times the president says Kerry “can run, but cannot hide from his record.” And still other times it sounds like the president says Kerry “can run, but can’t ride.” In Colorado Springs, one magazine writer leapt with excitement when the president mentioned that the tax code, besides being “a complicated mess,” is also “a million pages long.” “He hasn’t used that line in a few days,” the writer told me. (The tax code, incidentally, is 17,000 pages long.)

Not even the audience is allowed to ask the president questions. Over the last few weeks, the president’s public appearances have focused mainly on his stump speech. He has not held an “Ask President Bush” rally, in which supporters–you guessed it–ask him questions, since October 4. And even then, the questions weren’t interesting, so the White House press corps still had nothing to report. The Washington Post‘s Mike Allen best captured the mood of such events: “During a campaign forum in the Cleveland suburbs last month,” he wrote in October, “President Bush was asked whether he likes broccoli, to disclose his ‘most important legacy to the American people’ and to reveal what supporters can do ‘to make sure that you win Ohio and get reelected.'”

The campaign’s insistence on this sort of insularity is self-defeating. You see, during events like the ones at Red Rocks and in Colorado Springs, where the audience consists entirely of loyal supporters, the crowd’s energy gets Bush fired up. Excited. He raises his voice. He hits the podium. At times it seems like he’s on uppers.

The problem is that this is all the candidate learns how to do. When he enters a new situation, this is how he’s trained to respond. And it hurt Bush in his initial debates with John Kerry. If you watch the first presidential debate, and then see Bush on the stump, you realize that the president treated the Coral Gables match as if it were a Victory 2004 rally. He was loud and impassioned–emotional states that play well in front of an audience of 10,000 die-hard supporters, but not so well on television. The first 30 minutes of the second presidential debate were no different. Recall, for instance, the following exchange, in which the president went on the attack . . . against the moderator:

“We’re going to build alliances,” Kerry said. “We’re not going to go unilaterally. We’re not going to go alone like this president did.” Then Kerry paused, and went back to his seat, a satisfied look on his face.

Whereupon the moderator, ABC News’s Charles Gibson, said, “Mr. President, let’s extend for a minute . . .”

But Bush was already out of his seat. He was steamed. “Let me just–I’ve got to answer this,” he said. He was loud, angry.

Gibson remained calm. “Exactly. And with Reservists being held on duty–”

Bush jumped in again.

“Let me just answer what he just said, about around the world,” the president said, walking toward Gibson.

You could tell by his furrowed brow that Gibson was confused. “Well, I want to get into the issue of the back-door draft–”

But to no avail. “You tell Tony Blair we’re going alone,” Bush barked. “Tell Tony Blair we’re going alone. Tell Silvio Berlusconi we’re going alone. Tell Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland we’re going alone.” He went back to his seat.

A look of defeat spread across Gibson’s face.

BY THE SECOND HALF of the second debate, however, Bush had stopped yelling at Charlie Gibson. He was more relaxed, particularly when it came to social and domestic issues. The reason for this change was unclear. Whatever the reason, Bush realized that he was at a debate, not a Monster Truck rally. So he let Kerry’s tongue-tied answer on abortion speak for itself, saying only, “I’m still trying to decipher that.” The line elicited polite chuckles from the audience. He gave a thoughtful answer on the question of stem-cell research, saying that “to destroy life to save life is one of the great ethical issues we face.” If Bush had lost the first debate, he was able to stanch the damage by the end of the second.

And by the end of the third, Bush had Kerry on the defensive. In Tempe, the president was calm, comfortable, and smiling. He seemed happy to be debating Kerry, a strong contrast with the first debate. He talked about the senator’s record, but differently than he does on the stump. He used humor, for one thing. “Pay go means you pay–and he goes ahead and spends,” Bush said. A little earlier, he turned to Kerry, and said, “There’s a mainstream in American politics, and you sit on the far left bank.”

Kerry, by contrast, was defensive about his health care plan, about his legislative accomplishments in the Senate, and about Social Security. He was defensive about taxes, about same-sex marriage, about education. As he had at Red Rocks and Colorado Springs, the president said he was the bold visionary, not Kerry. “I think we need to think differently” about Social Security, Bush said. Kerry, on the other hand, came across as the conservative; at one point, talking about the federal budget, he said he wanted to “get back to where we were at the end of the 1990s.”

In other words, at last week’s debate Bush was the progressive.

He was not a culture warrior. Nor is he one on the stump. At Red Rocks and Colorado Springs, at Hobbs, New Mexico, and Phoenix, Arizona, Bush spoke allusively about social issues. He talked about spreading a “culture of life,” but never said the word abortion. He talked about “traditional families,” but never said the phrase same-sex marriage. In fact, when a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage came up at the third debate, Bush spoke at greater length and with more coherence on the topic than he has all year.

Here’s how it happened. The moderator, CBS’s Bob Schieffer, asked Bush whether homosexuality is a choice. Bush said he didn’t know. “I do know that we have a choice to make in America, and that is to treat people with tolerance and respect and dignity,” he said. But “activist judges are actually defining the definition of marriage.” And “the surest way to protect marriage between a man and woman is to amend the Constitution.”

To which Kerry, echoing his running mate John Edwards, replied, “We’re all God’s children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as.”

It was an odd, off-putting, uncomfortable moment. It was also an illustrative one. What exactly does Mary Cheney have to do with the debate over same-sex marriage? And why did John Kerry take it upon himself to speak on her behalf? In a crass example of electoral cynicism, the Democratic candidate for president went out of his way to remind anyone who might be bothered by it that the president’s running mate has a daughter who’s gay. And yet this was only one of several paradoxes that surfaced during the presidential debates, and during this campaign as a whole. A gay-baiting Massachusetts Democrat, when you think about it, is just as odd as a conservative Texas Republican who believes the twenty-first century requires “new ways of thinking” and wants to “transform” societies both foreign and domestic. Isn’t it?

Maybe not. The candidates and their staffs don’t seem to think so, anyway. They don’t have time to consider such paradoxes. At the end of the debate, the president and his opponent, wearing matching suits and ties, clasped hands, hugged their families, and went back to their respective hotels. Bush’s staff scooped up the traveling press corps, and the next morning the whole merry band boarded planes and took off for new cities and new rallies and new venues, flying high above Arizona’s red rocks and deserts, careening on toward this election’s unknown end.

Matthew Continetti is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.