What It Takes (163 page)

Dole thought
he
might have a problem with taxes. Jack Kemp had spent the last year—for a while, he put ads on TV—painting both Dole and Bush as closet tax men. So Dole was going to cut his own tax ad. First night after Iowa—a GOP dinner in Nashua—Dole was going to tuck a line into his speech, how he’d veto any new tax bill from the Democrats. Kim Wells wrote the line—went so far as to
type it
on a half-sheet of paper. Rudman’s guys got the film crew into the dinner ... they were all set up. But this being the Dole campaign, they didn’t have a TelePrompTer—and, of course, no one could make Dole rehearse. So when Dole tried to unload the line, he had to pull out the paper, and he scowled at the sentence (couldn’t read a thing without his glasses) ... he stumbled in the middle and it sounded like something someone told him to say. The upshot was, the tax stuff looked lousy. So they made an ad with different film—Dole talking Gorbachev, U.S. strength, and peace.

Maybe they’d have another chance—Dole already said, a million times, he’d veto any bill that raised the income tax
rates
. ... Anyway, Wirthlin said the tax issue wasn’t cutting with voters. And Kemp was not the problem—just Bush: What was he doing?

Not much.

Four days before the vote, Dole’s smart guys checked around and announced, to the delight of all, that Bush wasn’t doing
anything
! He had no new ads scheduled—hadn’t bought any
airtime
for the weekend—save for one half-hour roadblock, all channels, for one of Ailes’s specials, “Ask George Bush.”

That was Friday—that wonderful snow day—and Dole with the only news on TV. (Al
Hayyyg
—great American! ...)

Late afternoon, in his hotel room, Dole was closeted with Wirthlin and Rudman, who were telling Bob things were going ... great. (“Bob, I know New Hampshire and, believe me, Bob ...”)

Dole’s new ad ran before the local TV news: it was Dole talking off the cuff about national security. “So we haveta be strong!... Not for war—Bob Dole doesn’t want war. Bob Dole wants
peace
!” The camera went to freeze-frame on Dole’s face.

“I love it!” Wirthlin said.

Dole was squinting at the screen. “I don’t get it,” he said.

Walt Riker poked his head in. “Agh! C’mon
innn
,” Dole said. “What’s cookin’?”

“Senator, you’re ahead! These’re from CBS—I just got ’em ...” He read off the numbers:

Dole 32 ... Bush 29.

“They gonna use ’em?”

“Think so.”

“Pretty
goood
!”

It was better than good. It sent Rudman into orbit: Believe me, Bob, the people of New Hampshire, Bob—remember, I told you, Bob?—Bob? ... Meanwhile, Riker was conducting, channel to channel, a Dole TV rondo. After seven years as Press Secretary, Riker was a cable-ready maestro: he hit four networks, three Boston news shows, PBS, New Hampshire’s Channel Nine, Headline News
twice
... and Dole was never off the screen for more than a minute. Dole, Haig-and-Dole, Haig, Dole, Haig-and-Dole Dole Dole. ... Wirthlin had his black book out, he was on the phone to
Time
and
Newsweek
. Strictly off the record, understand: he was promoting Dole for the cover. “You guys’re gonna want it. Dole’s going to win this thing!”

Dole couldn’t pay attention, as he wanted, to the TV (Gagghh! Haig was live with Dan Rather—
killing
Bush—should’ve made an ad with Haig!) ... or the phone calls (“No,
this
week is the cover!”) ... or the “Bob-Bob-Bob.” ... He had to think—this thing was
moving fast
. He lifted his eyebrows, murmured to Riker, who told the others, “Senator’s gotta get a little rest.”

Dole couldn’t feel it—that rush of certainty, when it all comes together—and he thought there had to be
something
more. There had to be some way to lock people on, something to say, something about him ... something he had to do. It couldn’t happen like this—sitting in a hotel and Bush’s numbers melting away.
Didn’t
happen like this—how could it? ... Unless Bush was going to sit on his hands—play dead all week. Why would he?

What was he
doing
?

G
EORGE BUSH WAS HAVING
a snowball fight with the press in a parking lot outside the Clarion. He spotted a guy trying to unstick his car—he ran over, offered to help. (The man refused.) Bush ran the other way to shake another voter’s hand, pat his dog. Everywhere Bush ran, the Service ran. Sununu puffed behind. The press tried to run along, but the Service kept them away ... and there really wasn’t anything to ask.

Bush had the air of a kid trapped inside on a rainy day. He walked through the snow, with Doro and her husband, Bill LeBlond, to some horrid housing project—condos, or townhouses—the nearest evidence of civilization (or at least Reagan-era lending policies). Bush was hunting voters, but the condo-stalag was new and unpeopled. So, with son-in-law Bill, who was a budding builder in Maine, he earnestly talked construction.

Bush wondered what Dole and the others were doing in the snow. He was pretty sure Dole wasn’t taking the afternoon to walk with
his
daughter. Dole always struck Bush as a lonely man—didn’t have the same, well ... blessings as the Bush clan. Or values: “family” and “values” were words in near equation to Bush. He couldn’t figure how it was for Dole. ... That
look
he’d seen on Dole’s face when Dole came at him, in the Senate, waving that Wittgraf press release ... “My wife!” ... Dole was upset, sure—but it wasn’t like he wanted explanation. Didn’t want to talk—you do that in private ... decent guys do. Bush called it “that stunt Dole pulled”—like it was bad taste ...
bad form! ...
Dole was acting like a bully.

Friday night, Bush went over a new speech with Peggy Noonan. The speech attacked Dole ... the language made Bush edgy, so he fiddled with it, made it ungainly—but he made it something he could say.

“I don’t want to say he’s a bad guy,” he told Peggy. Bush’s voice held no protest—more like explanation—he was searching: not a
bad
man ... just not the
right
man.

That night, Junior called again about the ad:

“Yeah, I was watching TV,” Bush said. “A lot of the others are more negative. I mean, if you put it in context ...”

Saturday morning, before Bush left for the north of the state, Atwater and Ailes were in urgent conference in the hotel hallway. (Ailes had come out from under editing “Ask George Bush.”)... “Look,” Ailes said. “I can tell him he needs this ad. But me supporting it, just sounds like I made the damn thing ...”

“Goddam, Ah ’
gree
with you!” Atwater said. “We gotta, uh, kick ’em in the
nuts
!”

They went together into the VP suite. This time Teeter said they were behind—maybe
five points
...

“Shit,” Bush said to the floor. “I thought ...”

“There’s been slippage,” Teeter said. “There’s enough undecideds to go either way, but if you look at ...”

“Mr. Vahz Pres’ent, you may not wanna hear this from me, but Ah can’t go out of this room without ...”

“Look,” Sununu said, “if it’s a problem of being negative ...”

Bush was slumped in a chair. The problem was how it was going to
look
. “The press is gonna say we’re desperate. Have we checked those facts?”

Ailes was going to wade in again: the ad was no more than a statement that ...

But ... that’s when they got the word. Actually, Ailes never caught the word—from Bush.

Bush was saying, “... this is your business, not mine ...”

As Ailes would recall: “Atwater just ran out of that room like a scalded goddam dog.”

Ailes and Sununu caught up with Lee in the hallway.

“Can we get it on?”

Traffic departments at the TV stations were closed for the weekend. By Monday, of course, it would be too late.

“I got a friend at one station in Boston,” Ailes said. “Twenty years I know the guy ...”

“Lemme see,” Sununu said, “what I can do with Channel Nine.” That was the only station in New Hampshire. Sununu wore his accustomed smirk of control. “I think I may be able to help.”

In fact, Sununu knew he could get the ad on Channel Nine. One month before, the station had asked for an interview with the Vice President. Sununu brought Bush down from Maine on a Sunday. They taped the interview, and another segment for that night’s news. Then they hung around for another hour while the Veep posed for pictures with every staffer at the station. He posed with their children. In Washington, he wrote personal notes for every photo.

Now,
that
... was see-me-touch-me-feel-me.

The Straddle Ad would go on the air that same afternoon.

On the long ride over the mountains to Wolfeboro, Peggy Noonan sat next to Bush in the limo. Teeter faced Bush on a jump seat. Bush was silent. Peggy read the papers—the stories about Haig backing Dole. She got to a quote, something Haig said to Dole (someone overheard them on stage, after all) ... “Well,” Haig had said, “I did as much damage as I could.”

“Mr. Vice President,” Peggy said. “Have you seen this?”

Bush looked at the quote. Then he looked at Teeter, at Peggy, then he stared out the window.

“That’s
sick
,” he said.

Doing
damage
... to his life, his reputation. Didn’t that just show?

Lee Atwater was, at that moment, buying eighteen-hundred points of air-time for the Straddle Ad. That meant hundreds of thousands of dollars. More important, it meant the average New Hampshireman with a TV would see Bob Dole made a two-faced liar eighteen times over the next sixty hours.

That was different ... that was just a comparative ad.

Anyway, after the smoke cleared, Sununu said the ad wasn’t really crucial—just one more positive statement of Bush’s tax principles. Sununu said that often. Sununu was a guy who showed judgment, Bush thought. The Veep mentioned, amid the family, that Sununu would make a good Chief of Staff. Meanwhile, Sununu was increasingly in evidence at Bush, Inc. By the spring, he would become a Campaign Cochairman, a de facto seventh on the Gee-Six.

By that time, Bush, too, would decide that New Hampshire turned, in the end, because of all the friends he’d made. All those contacts Sununu talked about. See-me-feely ... whatever that was. Bush said: “We didn’t win because of that ad.”

That was the only fight he ever had with Ailes. It got pretty hot: “Let’s don’t rewrite
history
,” Ailes said.

“I didn’t win because of that ad.”

Ailes had to drop it. “Well,” he said, “let’s just say it didn’t hurt.”

T
HAT WEEKEND, DOLE FELT
it slipping away. Before he ever saw the Straddle Ad ... before network numbers showed his curve topping out and Bush on the way up again ... even with Wirthlin still telling him, “You’re going to win—three or four points, at least ... maybe big—ten or better.”

“No, I’m not,” Dole said. “I’m going to lose by five or six.” What Dole felt was the heat slipping from his own events. What disappeared was that feeling of history pushing with him. He could still go out and say (as he did) that momentum was his: five days ago, Bush had led in New Hampshire by twenty points—now Bush’s lead was
nothing
... but the reason for that momentum was back in Iowa—there was nothing new bringing voters to Dole.

What Dole saw on TV were pictures of Bush—Bush touring with Ted Williams, Bush throwing snowballs, Bush at McDonald’s ... on a forklift ... driving a plow. The guy was showing he wasn’t going to curl up and die. There was news tape of busloads of college volunteers for Bush, arriving in state, met by Atwater. Each kid got a map and a kit and an area to cover. They were organized—twenty colleges! (Dole was lucky to have people who’d been to college.) The Bush operation put out tens of thousands of fliers and made twenty thousand calls, reminding voters to watch “Ask George Bush.” It was an obvious phony, a “town meeting” of Ailes-town ... but by the time the Bushies had thumped the tub so hard, the TV ran snips of the thing like it was news!

Dole did his events—schools, old-age homes, town halls—remembering to say, at almost every stop, that Bob Dole was not going to raise taxes. He’d look for revenue—anyone facing a deficit had to look everywhere he could—but Dole would not raise the rates in the new income-tax law. The crowds applauded—good crowds—hundreds of people in a little town! But, as Dole muttered in the car, he was “dipping the ocean with a spoon.” At that moment, Bush might be reaching a hundred thousand viewers with the message that Dole could not wait to get at their wallets.

By that weekend, even Rudman’s people were bitching: their plan had been ignored—they were sold out! Where was Dole’s tax ad? Rudman himself came at Dole to complain about Brock. “Even a half-baked Senate campaign can turn an ad around in two days!” Dole just said: “What can I do now?” ... In fact, he
had
an attack ad on Bush—the Footprints Ad: boots crunching through snow while a narrator ran through Bush’s résumé ... the last shot showing the snow—undisturbed. (Bush never left any footprints, despite all those Important Jobs.) The ad was ready before the week began, but Rudman said it was too negative. (They were winning! Bob had to Be Nice!) ... Now it was too late. Dole hadn’t bought airtime.

There was one chance to send a message, statewide: a televised debate at St. Anselm College. Dole spent most of ninety minutes trying to Be Nice ... and angling for a chance to answer Bush on taxes. But all of a sudden, from Dole’s other side, Pete du Pont pulled out a copy of the standard New Hampshire no-tax pledge—and poked it at Dole.

“Sign it,” du Pont said.

Dole wasn’t going to sign anything—couldn’t hold it down to sign it, couldn’t read it without his glasses! (If Dole were the kind to sign whatever they handed him, he could have saved himself a huge headache on the INF treaty—he could have signed on, like Bush, before he’d even seen the thing.)

But now he was squinting at this paper, on stage, on TV—with du Pont and everyone else staring at him ... what was he supposed to do? This kind of stunt was fine for du Pont. But if Dole got to be President, he was going to have to close a gap of $200 billion a year.