How Bush Found His Voice

By James Carney

If George W. Bush wins the G.O.P. nomination, he may remember the afternoon he spent in the backwoods of upstate South Carolina as the moment he turned his campaign around. It was Thursday, Feb. 10, and before the weekend began the Bush team desperately wanted to respond to an ad John McCain was airing in which McCain accused Bush of "twisting the truth like Clinton." The ad gave Bush an opportunity, a chance to take McCain's biggest selling point--his image as an outsider who was above politics as usual--and use it against him.

The Governor was speaking that afternoon at the Catawba Fish Camp restaurant in Fort Lawn, a place about as out of the way as you can find in the Palmetto State. Mark McKinnon, Bush's media adviser, flew to Charlotte, N.C., from Austin and then raced to Fort Lawn at 90 m.p.h. to catch up with Bush and take him to a location about eight miles into the woods for the filming. Bush didn't need any coaching. With trees in the background, he just looked into the camera and delivered his lines. "Politics is tough," Bush said in a steely voice, "but when John McCain compared me to Bill Clinton and said I was untrustworthy, that's over the line. Disagree with me, fine, but do not challenge my integrity." Says McKinnon: "His sincerity was so obvious. He was angry, and he conveyed that."

Getting angry was only part of what made Bush a better candidate in South Carolina. His loss in New Hampshire forced him to step out of his regal motorcade and away from his podium. Despite their calm public faces, everyone on the Bush team, starting with the Governor, knew that a loss in South Carolina would probably mean the end of the campaign. As an aide said, "We had to take some risks."

The biggest risk was holding what seemed an endless series of "one-on-one" sessions between Bush and voters at venues like the Catawba Fish Camp or Newberry College. Where Bush had usually been protected by the safety of set speeches and surrogates who could speak for him, he was now flying solo. At Newberry, when a black student asked why Bush wouldn't take a position on the Confederate flag controversy, some white students booed. It was an awkward moment, but Bush didn't panic. He quieted the crowd and insisted that the student had a right to ask his question (although he continued to give his nonanswer). At the same session, a young mother pressed him on the need to teach the Bible in public schools--another invitation for Bush to say the wrong thing. "If you're suggesting that the public school systems take on what the churches ought to be doing," Bush said, "I don't agree with that."

Bush was clearly more comfortable answering questions from voters than he has ever been giving speeches, and the format energized him. He would stand in front of the microphone, his body slightly hunched and his arms bent as if he were a boxer waiting to slap down his opponent's best shot. He was able to show off his expertise on education policy and say things like "I've been a tort-reformin' Governor and I'll be a tort-reformin' President!" and hear applause in response. "I like this," he told an adviser. "And I'm not bad at it either."

He was right, although sometimes the exposure backfired, as it did at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Florence when a woman asked what he could do to help her chronically ill son. Bush danced around the question for a while, talking about the virtues of medical savings accounts, before acknowledging that he couldn't help her. He shrugged in a way that suggested he didn't know why he was supposed to solve everyone's problems. "I'm sorry," he said. "I wish I could wave a wand." It was an honest answer, but it lacked the empathy Americans have come to expect from their President. At other times, Bush would shout so loudly that he seemed to have studied at the Al Gore school of campaign makeovers, where volume is considered a substitute for passion.

But what was clear by Saturday was that Bush had just survived the toughest three weeks of his political life, and it had changed him. Not long after he was given the first exit polls showing he would win, Bush emerged from his hotel suite in Columbia in his running shorts and a sweat jacket. His eyes were bloodshot from exhaustion and from the nap he had just taken. Asked how he felt to have won, he barely smiled. "It's good," he said soberly. "But there's still a long way to go."