Decision Points

“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.”
    I glanced at Laura, Barbara, and Jenna in the front row. I could see the shock on their faces. Karen Hughes later told me she heard audible gasps. There is an unwritten rule in American politics that a candidate’s children are off-limits. For John Kerry to raise my running mate’s daughter’s sexuality in a nationally televised debate was appalling.
    It was not unprecedented. In the vice presidential debate a week earlier, Kerry’s running mate, North Carolina Senator John Edwards , also found a way to bring up the issue. One reference might have been an accident. Two was a plot. Kerry and Edwards were hoping to peel off conservative voters who objected to Dick’s daughter’s orientation. Instead, they came across looking cynical and mean. Lynne Cheney spoke for a lot of us when she called it a “cheap and tawdry political trick.”

    In 2000, our October Surprise had come in the form of the DUI revelation. In 2004, it came from Osama bin Laden . On October 29, the al Qaeda leader released a videotape threatening Americans with “another Manhattan” and mocking my response to 9/11 in the Floridaclassroom. It sounded like he was plagiarizing Michael Moore . “Americans will not be intimidated or influenced by an enemy of our country,” I said. John Kerry made a similar statement of resolve.
    The final election day of my political career, November 2, 2004, began aboard Marine One, on a midnight flight from Dallas to the ranch. We had just finished an emotional rally with eight thousand supporters at Southern Methodist University, Laura’s alma mater—my seventh stop on a daylong, 2,500-mile blitz across the country.
    Laura, Barbara, Jenna, and I were up at dawn the next day. We eagerly cast our ballots at the Crawford firehouse, four solid votes in the Bush-Cheney column. “I trust the judgment of the American people,” I told the assembled reporters. “My hope, of course, is that this election ends tonight.”
    I checked in with brother Jeb. “Florida is looking good, George,” the governor said.
    Then I spoke to Karl. He was a little worried about Ohio, so off we went for my twentieth campaign stop in the Buckeye State. After thanking the volunteers and working a phone bank in Columbus, we loaded up for the flight to D.C.
    As the plane descended toward Andrews Air Force Base, Karl came to the front cabin. The first round of exit polls had arrived.
    “They’re dreadful,” he said.
    I felt like he had just punched me in the stomach. I was down more than twenty points in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. Rock-solid Republican states like Mississippi and South Carolina were too close to call. If the numbers were right, I would suffer a landslide defeat.
    I walked from the airplane to Marine One in a daze. The ten-minute flight to the White House felt like hours. Finally the wheels of the chopper hit the South Lawn. The press corps swarmed to get a good shot for the evening news. Karen Hughes had good advice: “Everybody smile!”

    Exiting Marine One on Election Day 2004. We’d just received exit polls showing I would lose badly.
White House/Paul Morse
    I went upstairs to the residence and moped around the Treaty Room. I just couldn’t believe it. After all the hard work of the past four years, and all the grueling months on the campaign trail, I was going to be voted out of office decisively. I knew life would go on, as it had for Dad. But the rejection was going to sting.
    Before long, Karl called. He had been crunching the numbers and wasconvinced that the methodology was flawed. I felt relieved and angry at the same time. I worried that the bogus numbers would demoralize our supporters and depress turnout in time zones where the polling places were still open. We were thinking the same thing:
Here we go again.

    For the second time in four years, Karl Rove disproved the exit polls. My close friends Don Evans and Brad Freeman look on and Andy works the phones in the State Dining Room.
White House/Eric Draper
    At 8:00 p.m., the polls in Florida closed. As Jeb predicted that morning, the early returns looked promising. The exit poll results in South Carolina and Mississippi were quickly contradicted by solid victories in both states. The rest of the East Coast came in as expected. The