In My Time (45 page)

As I began to get my campaign legs back, I realized that the 2000 campaign was actually pretty similar to the Ford campaign twenty-four years earlier. The rallies, the speeches, the whistle-stop train tour were the same kind of events we’d been doing in 1976.

Our granddaughters, Kate and Elizabeth, joining us on the campaign trail in California, October 2000. (Photo by AP)

Obviously, the technology had improved exponentially, and the news cycle was now twenty-four hours. But it wasn’t rocket science, and as I got into the swing of it, it was a lot of fun. We had great events, and I enjoyed the bands and confetti and cheering crowds. Who wouldn’t? Still, there were some stories in the press that said I didn’t like campaigning. Maybe they were based on the fact that I’m not a traditional, backslapping, glad-handing politician. But nobody ever bothered to ask me—nor, I noticed, did they ever point out that my approach worked. I had actually won every campaign I’d conducted in which my name was on the ballot—six statewide races in Wyoming at that point.

The best part of the campaign was that it was a family effort. Lynne and Mary were on the campaign trail with me nearly every step of the way, and Liz was there most of the time with my three granddaughters in tow. We’d introduce the kids at rallies and then usher them offstage before they stole the whole show. Afterward, we’d gather to recap the highlights—and the lowlights. All these years later, I realize that the disasters often made for the best stories—and the most laughs.

After the convention I knew that my performance at one event in particular, the vice presidential debate, would likely matter more than all the other campaigning I did. The debate was scheduled for October 5, 2000, in Danville, Kentucky. I had spent some time during the Democratic convention that summer watching tapes of Lieberman’s debates against Lowell Weicker, the liberal three-term incumbent Republican senator whom Joe had upset in 1988, in no small part because of his superior performance in their televised debates.

Presidential and vice presidential debates are events like no other. First of all, the stakes are unbelievably high, and a single gaffe can derail a candidacy. A mistake can cost an election. And although being able to answer the questions competently is crucial, it isn’t nearly enough. A candidate has to have a sense of the most important messages he or she wants to leave with voters and the presence of mind to return to those messages again and again—and then again. It also helps a lot if you can come up with some memorable one-liners. After all is said and done, after all the studying and planning and strategizing, it is likely to be the one-liners that stay with people and determine who wins and who loses a debate. Knowing that I had my work cut out for me, I asked Liz to organize a process for formal debate preparation.

Governor Bush had already participated in numerous debates during the primary campaign, so work had been under way for many months preparing briefing materials and possible questions and answers for him. Gary Edson, who would later become deputy national security and economic advisor to the president, had been in charge of the Bush briefing materials. He came out on the road with us right after the convention, bringing about fifty pounds of briefing books with him. We went through them, and Liz began to prepare briefing books for me, adapting the governor’s format and background materials. We also added questions that I was likely to get, about Halliburton, for example, that the governor might not. Gus Puryear, a Nashville lawyer who’d worked with my son-in-law, Phil Perry, on Senate campaign finance hearings, came on board to help with the research and drafting.

I studied the briefing books between campaign stops, and then in early September started having practice sessions with either Phil or Stuart
Stevens, a communications consultant with the campaign, playing the role of moderator. They would pepper me with questions, and my job was to hit all the main points we wanted to get across on each key issue within the allotted time for each answer. When I got pretty comfortable with this format, I asked Rob Portman, then a congressman from Ohio, to join our sessions. He played Joe Lieberman, and did a tremendous job. He had spent countless hours listening to tapes of Lieberman’s speeches and knew not only the substance of the responses the senator was likely to give, but even the way he was likely to deliver them.

I invited several people I trusted—including Steve Hadley, Paul Wolfowitz, Dave Gribbin, and Scooter Libby—to watch these sessions and give me feedback. At first we stopped after every answer for comments, but this turned out to be pretty frustrating. Everyone had an opinion about how the question should be answered, and I didn’t find it particularly helpful to watch my advisors debate each other over the answer I had just given. And I worried we were in danger of missing the big picture—the overall impact of what I was saying. So after a few sessions, I asked everyone to hold their comments to the end.

In late September we moved the debate prep out to Wyoming and instituted a pretty rigorous schedule. Each morning we’d spend three hours going over questions on a particular subject. Each night, at precisely the time the debate would be taking place in Kentucky, we would hold a mock debate. We filmed these prep sessions, and when each session was done, Liz worked with my assembled advisors to summarize their comments on my performance. With their assessments in hand, Liz, Lynne, Rob Portman, and I would review the video and work to improve and hone my responses.

By this time we knew that Lieberman and I would be seated at a round table on the debate stage, and we looked around for some place in Jackson where we could replicate this setup. We settled on the Jackson Hole Playhouse, which not only offered a table and a stage, but came with red velvet curtains and a saloon out front. Photos from one of our practice sessions show a backdrop of branches and vines from the
previous evening’s performance, and Phil and Rob Portman clowning around in top hats they’d found backstage.

Security is a big issue in presidential and vice presidential debates. While we were getting set up at the Jackson Hole Playhouse, we learned that a staffer working for Mark McKinnon in the Bush debate prep sessions had sent a copy of the governor’s briefing book and a tape of one of his practice sessions to a member of Gore’s debate team. The materials were immediately turned over to the FBI, but the incident underlined how important it was to be vigilant. Debate preparation sessions already showed up on my schedule as “communications meetings.” And the briefing book full of issues and potential questions and answers was neutrally labeled “Secretary Cheney Policy Book.” But the Jackson Hole Playhouse, for all its charm, turned out to be a less than secure location. Several reporters, pretending to be tourists who wanted to look around, stopped by the theater one day just before a debate rehearsal began. Fortunately, Liz happened to be in the lobby and was able to send them packing. But after that we decided to relocate and ended up holding most of the practice sessions in our living room, using a rented round table covered with a bedsheet.

The effort that we put into debate preparation was critically important. But if I had to give one piece of advice to future presidential and vice presidential candidates preparing for debates, it would be this: Get some rest. Once you’ve gone over the issues and know what message you want to convey to the voters, you can do yourself a real favor by just taking a nap. You’ve got to be relaxed—or at least look like you are—when the moment comes. I think voters figure out pretty quickly that if you can’t handle the stress of a political debate, you’re not going to be much good in an actual crisis.

Of course, one of my favorite ways to unwind is with a fly rod, and there is no better place to do that than on one of Wyoming’s beautiful rivers.

The most effective way to prepare for a debate - fishing the Snake River in Wyoming.(Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

Thus it was that I was sitting in a drift boat on the Snake River when I got a call asking if I would accept CNN anchor Bernard Shaw as the moderator for our debate. I said yes with no hesitation. I knew Bernie to be an honest, objective, hardworking journalist, who would study
the issues and ask tough questions of us both. He would forever be associated in my mind with the first night of Desert Storm in 1991—a night that turned out to be a tremendous success for the U.S. military. Like so many others around the world, I had watched Bernie broadcasting live from a hotel in downtown Baghdad on January 16 just as the first U.S. air strikes began.

On the final Sunday before my debate, we attended church at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Jackson. As I slid into the pew next to my family, I saw quite a few members of my debate prep team scattered throughout the congregation. I am sure that they, like me, figured a prayer or two couldn’t hurt.

Suzanne Harris was in the pulpit that morning. Her granddaughter was battling leukemia, and we were all moved as Reverend Harris talked about three-year-old Hannah’s strength and courage, beyond what any child should ever have to demonstrate. She talked about what Hannah’s life taught about faith—“Our faith is not that bad things won’t happen,” she said. “Our faith is that when bad things do happen, God can still use that material to make something holy.”

With Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. As I left the meeting the Pope squeezed my hand and whispered, “God Bless America.” (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

She reminded us that life is short. “We do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel the way with us,” she said, “so be swift to love and make haste to be kind.” In the midst of a hard-fought political campaign, her sermon made all of us pause and reflect. Hannah died a few days later, and Suzanne’s words that autumn morning in Jackson are still fresh in my mind as I write this a decade later.

My assignment on October 3 was to travel to a battleground state where the media could cover me watching Governor Bush’s first debate with Al Gore. We chose Ohio and took over a restaurant there for a Bush-Cheney debate-watching party. In the lead-up to this first Bush-Gore debate, Gore, who had already demonstrated a propensity for unnecessary overstatement, had made a few quotable remarks that turned out not to be true. First, in order to dramatize a point about the failings of America’s health-care system, he said that his mother-in-law paid almost three times as much for the same arthritis medicine that the Gores bought for the family dog. Then, speaking at a Teamsters convention,
he claimed that when he was a child, his mother had sung him to sleep with the song “Look for the Union Label.” The Gore campaign had to admit that the medicine costs Gore quoted weren’t personal at all, but rather from a House Democratic study. And the song Gore claimed his mother had sung to him in the cradle hadn’t been written until 1975, when Gore was twenty-seven.

The press, with a little Republican help, of course, sensed a theme, and as we watched from Ohio, Gore locked it in by claiming to have traveled to Texas with Federal Emergency Management Agency Director James Lee Witt when wildfires broke out in Parker County. But as the press discovered, the closest Gore got to the fires was Houston, well over two hundred miles away, and he didn’t get there with James Lee Witt—or even meet with him. To this day I can’t understand how such a seasoned politician continually got so tangled up in trivial untruths, nor have I ever figured out why he huffed and sighed so audibly that night. It certainly didn’t earn him any votes.