How Bush Plans To Win

By John F. Dickerson and Matthew Cooper

The balloons hadn't even settled in Boston's Fleet Center after John Kerry's acceptance speech when George W. Bush's campaign set about popping them. The President's top aides had been BlackBerrying little darts to one another all through the address, and now they were on a conference call, comparing notes across a virtual war room. Bush confidante Karen Hughes in Texas said Kerry had come across as "lecturing," pointing his finger like a schoolmaster. In his Washington living room, Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, said Kerry's position on Iraq was a "puzzlement," a contradiction of his own votes. From suburban Maryland, White House communications director Dan Bartlett read an email an apolitical friend had sent him during the speech, saying he found Kerry's approach to terrorism unconvincing. From Boston, where Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie had set up a real war room to feed reporters responses to the Democrats all week, operatives added their barbs. Kerry included only 70 words about his 19-year Senate career. His biographical movie never mentioned that he worked with Michael Dukakis. Gillespie went in and out of the conversation between television interviews, his underlined copy of Kerry's speech in his hand. "He just stole the 'Help is on the way' line," he said, referring to a slogan Dick Cheney used during the 2000 G.O.P. Convention. "I mean, they just stole it!" Near Gillespie, three dozen staff members tapped away on their computers, truth-squading Kerry's claims amid enlarged photographs of the Massachusetts Senator in a goofy space suit he had been photographed in during a visit to Cape Canaveral in Florida. Some from Bush's inner sanctum did admit that Kerry had given a forceful speech. And high praise went to earlier performances by Kerry's daughters Vanessa and Alexandra. "They are terrific," Hughes emailed Bartlett during their appearances. "The most compelling thing from [the Democrats]." Still, all the President's men saw openings in Kerry's address. For months they had lampooned him as a liberal and waffler. "He painted a big target on himself," Rove said later. "'Judge me by my record,' he said. O.K., we will."

As eager as the Bush team may have been to point out Kerry's faults, they may have to be satisfied doing more of their dissing in private. According to the Bush playbook, the phone call marked the end of an era in the re-election campaign and what they hope is the beginning of a new one. In the spring and earlier this summer, most of the ads and energy of Bush's aides had been devoted to defining Kerry negatively. Those attacks will continue, Bush sources say, but they will take a backseat to a new, more positive message. "You have to pick your moments," says a senior Administration official. "You don't want to give a positive speech and then come out of the gate lashing out."

The President plans to spend much of the four weeks before his convention, starting Aug. 30, offering a new stump speech, a fresh set of upbeat advertisements and proposals to help people balance work and family, retrain after job loss, prepare for retirement and gain greater control over their financial fortune. The new agenda is aimed squarely at the minority of undecided voters who may determine the election. Swing voters don't look backward, contends Matthew Dowd, Bush's chief strategist. "They want to know what you are going to do with a next term." What's more, the risk for Bush in continuing to assail Kerry is that undecided voters might pay less attention to the substance of the attacks than the simple fact of them and resent the President for dividing a country that may be longing to heal and fight as one.

When it comes to making a new line of argument, Bush can take comfort that the moment is ripe. The 9/11 commission report is a blueprint to overhaul the U.S.'s intelligence agencies and plug holes in homeland security. Any swift executive action on those fronts lets Bush remind voters that he is a war President and that the danger is still real. Moving now is particularly important for Bush, since his once unassailable advantage on fighting terrorism has shrunk to just 8 percentage points in the polls. Kerry pounced on the findings of the 9/11 commission last week, using them as a bludgeon, charging that Bush was derelict for not aggressively embracing its recommendations. Very soon--perhaps as early as this week, aides say--the President will appropriate some of those ideas and offer up a few of his own.

The Administration's rush to comply has rankled some of Bush's people. "They seem to be hell-bent to do something to give the false impression of progress, whether they've got a plan or not," said a senior Administration official involved in the war on terrorism. "They're desperate to announce something so they can't be accused of not doing something." But the President's political advisers were hoping not to repeat the fight over creating a new office of Homeland Security. The White House endured months of criticism for opposing the plan, only to embrace it eventually. "We always drag our feet," said a Bush campaign adviser, referring to the Administration's initial opposition to creating the commission and to giving it access to presidential intelligence briefings and testimony by Condoleezza Rice. In each case the Administration ultimately relented. "Why not agree now to what we're going to be for later?"

A senior White House official suggested last week that the Administration would take its time with the commission's grandest demand, a new national director of intelligence. The biggest question was not whether to create such a post--Bush seems destined to endorse the notion--but how to do it. Should the duties of the CIA director be expanded or a new entity created? The commission recommended putting the new intelligence uberboss in the Cabinet, but Bush aides say they fear that doing so would subject the post's holder to political pressure--a position ironic to Democrats who believe the Administration has politicized intelligence. Administration officials hinted at a politically neutralizing move for the President: he could take measures to protect civil liberties--thus confounding Kerry and the Democrats who have accused Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft of trampling rights in the name of the war on terrorism.

But Bush's biggest vulnerability is on the domestic front, where voters believe the Democratic ticket would do a better job on everything from health care (Kerry and running mate John Edwards lead Bush and Cheney by 16 percentage points) to the economy (8 percentage points) to understanding working-class needs (8 percentage points). With Kerry and Edwards aiming so much of their rhetorical fire at the middle-class squeeze, Bush will offer a counterattack that he hopes will prove "he understands the challenges that people face every day," in the words of Bartlett. One of Bush's signature lines in his new stump speech is "This world of ours is changing," and his new proposals are meant to show that his government could help families adapt.

But even if the world is changing, many of the ideas Bush is touting have been on the shelf for years. The President is proposing incentives for employers to offer flex-time arrangements that would allow workers to work longer hours so they could accrue comp time and use it at their discretion. He is also preparing to unveil a successor to the No Child Left Behind Act that would try to make high schools more accountable--the first bill was directed more at younger kids--and a proposal that would make community colleges more accessible through increased financial aid. Other proposals will stress greater personal control over health insurance and personal initiative rather than government programs to promote home ownership and retirement savings. One plan he may talk more about is the Newt Gingrich--led idea to lower health-care costs by computerizing the nation's vast medical records.

"Finally this is the boogie to the middle," says a longtime Republican strategist, who along with others has been worried that Bush's efforts to galvanize his socially conservative base by pushing, say, the gay-marriage ban, would permanently alienate moderate voters. In the run-up to the G.O.P. Convention, Bush will spend so much time with his former bitter primary rival John McCain, the party's moderate icon, that it may very well look as if Bush is running with the wrong white-haired, balding guy. McCain is scheduled to stump by himself for Bush in Florida next week and then be joined by the candidate for a few days. Before the convention, the two are to spend still more time together.

The Bush team will seek to portray the new agenda as visionary, but even some Bush allies refer to it as small ball, a derisive phrase the President uses for the picayune. Bush will pitch his new programs under the guise of giving people more control of their lives, but it is an open question whether voters, already beset with mind-numbing choices about their retirement and health care, are going to warm to plans that require more decision making. Even Bush partisans aren't sure about the agenda's appeal. "I'm not spinning you," insists a Bush adviser after pitching the plan. "Much." Indeed, Kerry's frontal assault on Social Security privatization in his acceptance speech signaled that the Democrats think the smart money is on dismissing Bush's vision of an "ownership society" as a Darwinian world in which seniors and the middle class can lose everything to the vagaries of the market.

And can the boogie to the middle work at this stage? "It's going to be damn hard to change the impressions of independent voters, who already know him, when he has 45% negatives" with them, concedes a Republican strategist. Democratic pollster Mark Penn argues, "Bush has been pursuing a suicidal strategy for the Republican base since the State of the Union, and he's dropping like a stone the entire time. He looks like he's beginning to reorient his campaign towards the center, but it is awful late to begin that."

For all its repositioning, the Bush team was not going to abandon one of its best weapons--hitting Kerry from on high. On Air Force One the day after Kerry spoke in Boston, aides described for the President, who hadn't watched the address, the Democrat's line of attack, including his claim that he would always fund U.S. troops. Afterward, Bush asked to pump up the portion of his stump speech that lampooned Kerry's explanation of his vote against the $87 billion to fund the U.S. occupation of Iraq. "There is nothing complicated about supporting our troops in combat," Bush said at stops in Missouri and Michigan. It was a double barb, attacking Kerry for his vote but also undercutting the assertion in his speech that what Republicans portray as a lack of constancy in him is really a more sophisticated view of the world.

That the Bush campaign had to act quickly to thwart Kerry's attacks on the President's record on fighting terrorism is a sign of just how hard the slog has become. Dowd prophesied months ago that the campaign would be behind in the summer and down by its largest margin after the Democratic Convention. But even Dowd's downer memos--a mix of prescient analysis, spin and innate caution (aides joke his screensaver should say THE END IS NEAR)--didn't foresee that Bush would lose so much of his advantage over Kerry on fighting terrorism. Even top staff members who went through the low points of the 2000 Bush campaign have had bouts of worry. "Some days I wake up and think that we're going to win big, and some days I think we're going to lose big," said a top Bush official during the darkest days a month ago. Says a Bush family intimate: "You'd have to be on Mars not to be worried." But now that Bush is launching his new offensive, the team is feeling brighter. "It's the happiest I've been in 18 months," gushed a top adviser seeing Bush on the stage last week. "Boy does he look like the happy warrior there." To win though, Bush will have to show that he's an effective warrior and John Kerry isn't. --With reporting by Eric Roston with Bush and Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by Eric Roston with Bush and Elaine Shannon/Washington