In My Time (46 page)

The night before my debate, I made sure I got a good night’s rest by sleeping in my own bed. We got up early on October 5 and flew to Lexington, Kentucky, then drove to Danville, where our first stop was the official walk-through of the debate site at Centre College. The walk-through was meant to give me a feel for the stage, the auditorium, the table where we would sit, and the “hold room” where I would be just prior to going onstage.

Two of my granddaughters, Kate and Elizabeth, joined us, and having them around certainly helped cut through some of the high anxiety of that day. Elizabeth, three at the time, climbed up into Joe Lieberman’s seat at the debate table. While I was listening to a staff briefing about the lights that would time our answers, Elizabeth acquired a pen and set about diligently drawing a dinosaur on Joe’s place card. True, dinosaurs were one of the few items in her repertoire at the time, but we all laughed at how well it fit into our campaign theme that the Democratic ticket represented the policies of the past.

While we were doing the walk-through, news was arriving about escalating protests in Serbia. The parliament building in Belgrade was
burning, and it looked as if the brutal and murderous president, Slobodan Milošević, was going to have to yield to the will of his people and leave office. I told Liz to get a summary of what was happening from our foreign policy team—Hadley, Wolfowitz, and Libby—and to assign one of them to give me a five-minute briefing on the latest developments. Then I went in to take a nap.

I’d been prepared for Joe Lieberman to be tough and aggressive, and I understood later that he had expected the same from me. But our debate that night at Centre College turned out to be a civil and informed exchange that to this day people cite as an example of thoughtful political discussion. I think it came about because of the respect that Joe Lieberman and I have for one another and because of Bernie Shaw’s good questions. We discussed everything from military readiness and the prospect for Middle East peace, to how to fix Social Security and reform education. We didn’t agree on much, but our disagreements were informative. We debated policy and substance and we never descended into personal attacks.

About two-thirds of the way into the debate, Bernie brought up the matter of the partisan bickering in Washington. “How would you elevate the political discourse and purpose?” he asked. I talked about George Bush’s record of bipartisanship in Texas, and Joe talked about Al Gore’s record of bipartisanship in Washington. And then we had one of those unplanned, unscripted, and totally memorable moments that can happen in high-stakes debating. In response to my charge that the Clinton-Gore team hadn’t done anything, bipartisan or otherwise, to fix Medicare or Social Security or to improve the nation’s schools, Joe laid out all the ways in which the country was better off than it had been eight years earlier. Then he turned to me and said, referring to the extensive news coverage of my most recent financial disclosure forms, “And I’m pleased to see, Dick, from the newspapers, that you’re better off than you were eight years ago, too.” It was a good line greeted by laughter from the audience. And it gave me the chance to respond by saying, “And I can tell you, Joe, that the government had absolutely nothing to do with it,” which drew even more applause and laughter.

If the exchange had ended there it probably would have been pretty much a draw, with each of us scoring a good-natured shot at the other guy’s expense. But then, as Bernie got ready to ask his next question, Joe pointed to his wife, Hadassah, in the audience and said, “I can see my wife, and I think she’s thinking, ‘Gee, I wish he would go out into the private sector.’” It was an opening I couldn’t pass up. “Well, I’m going to try to help you do that, Joe.” It was completely spontaneous, and it caught Joe off guard. He was experienced enough to know he’d blown it by giving me such a great opening.

Bernie’s questions that night covered the political waterfront, including the issue of sexual orientation. He asked, “Should a male who loves a male and a female who loves a female have all the constitutional rights enjoyed by every American citizen?” I had given the issue a lot of thought and answered it from the heart:

The fact of the matter is, we live in a free society and freedom means freedom for everybody. We don’t get to choose, and shouldn’t be able to choose, and say, you get to live free but you don’t. That means that people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It’s really no one’s business in terms of trying to regulate or prohibit behavior in that regard. The next step, then, of course, is the question you ask of whether or not there ought to be some kind of official sanction, if you will, of the relationship, or if these relationships should be treated the same way a conventional marriage is. That’s a tougher problem. That’s not a slam dunk. I think the fact of the matter, of course, is that matter is regulated by the states. I think the different states are likely to come to different conclusions and that’s appropriate. I don’t think there should necessarily be federal policy in this area.

I concluded by saying, “I think we ought to do everything we can to tolerate and accommodate whatever kind of relationships people want to enter into.” Of course, I had my daughter Mary and her partner, Heather Poe, in my mind, but I was also thinking about what’s right for all of us as Americans if we truly believe in freedom.

After Joe and I gave our closing statements, we received a sustained ovation from the audience. I think the applause was for all three of us at the table, an expression of appreciation for the caliber of our discussion and the tone of our debate. As soon as Bernie wrapped the show, Joe leaned over to me and said he was surprised at how quickly the evening had gone. I was, too, and pulled up my sleeve to show him that I hadn’t worn a watch. It had been a conscious decision, because I didn’t want to be tempted to glance at it.

Lynne, Liz and Phil, Mary, granddaughter Kate, and my sister, Susan, all came up onstage as soon as the debate was done. Al and Ann Simpson were also there, along with our dear friends Dan and Gayle Cook from Dallas, John and Mary Kay Turner, and Dick and Maggie Scarlett from Jackson, and many others. There were lots of hugs all around. After a stop at a very enthusiastic victory rally where I was able to thank everyone who’d worked so hard on all the debate arrangements, we spent the rest of the evening eating takeout pizza, watching reruns of the debate, and enjoying the postdebate analysis—much of which suggested I’d won.

In the next three weeks, we hit most battleground states numerous times and even made it out to California for a bus tour the last weekend of the campaign. I campaigned with an Elvis impersonator in Reno, acquired a purple inflatable space alien in Roswell, New Mexico, and completely lost my train of thought in Green Bay, Wisconsin, when I looked out into the audience and saw Mary standing in the staff section wearing a large foam-rubber cheese head. I grew used to life on a campaign plane, though it did have its trials, and the ride hadn’t been without some bumps. Our campaign plane had oozed blue gunk from the latrines all over the luggage hold, been grounded in Maine when Austin forgot to pay the monthly lease, and been the site of more than a few apple and orange bowling contests as well as at least one competition that involved staff members sliding down the aisles on food trays during takeoff.

One characteristic of life aboard a chartered campaign plane is that no one pays much attention to the rules about buckling seat belts and
stowing carry-on luggage. Lynne particularly appreciated this since her own campaign-issued cell phone was usually missing. Whenever we came in for a landing cell phones would slip out of purses and bags and it wasn’t unusual for one or two to wind up at our feet at the front of the plane. Lynne got used to picking up whichever phone was there and using it for the day. It worked for her, but caused real confusion among campaign staff, who thought they were calling the press secretary or the luggage advance guy and instead got Lynne on the phone.

In the final days of the campaign, with the race uncomfortably close, time became our most precious commodity, and all our attention was concentrated on blanketing the battleground states. We no longer had the luxury of driving from an airport to an event, and by late October nearly every event was a massive airport rally. These were great theater, directed and staged to achieve the maximum impact with each audience. The plane would land and taxi in slowly to a stop right in front of the hangar. Sometimes the advance team would have it timed so the hangar doors would open on cue, and we would walk from the plane into the hangar with the theme from
Rocky
or something equally triumphant blasting over the huge speakers. We did a lot of these events in a lot of different places. In order to avoid the obvious disaster, a staff member was assigned to tape a piece of paper just inside the airplane door, so as I disembarked I would see “Portland, Oregon” or “Everett, Washington” or “Las Vegas, Nevada” and know for sure where we had landed and where I could say I was so glad to be.

Even though the polls were still neck and neck, as the campaign entered the final stretch, I was feeling good about things. I sensed that we had the momentum. Then on Thursday, November 2, five days before the election, we were at a rally in Chicago when we learned a story was breaking that in Maine in 1976, Bush had been cited for driving under the influence. I didn’t like the timing of this at all. It looked like the classic “October surprise”—a negative story timed for release at the last minute, when it can do the most damage possible.

I was sure that the news of the governor’s DUI would bring up stories of my own DUIs from nearly forty years earlier, but that didn’t
happen because they had already been written about. They were old news. But this Bush story, even though it was twenty-four years old, was now completely new. The late revelation hurt us. Karl Rove has pointed out that before the story broke we led Gore 40–35 in Maine. One night later Gore was ahead of us 44–40. We ended up losing Maine by 5 percent.

ALTHOUGH THIS OCTOBER SURPRISE was unpleasant, I didn’t think it would do us in, and we were in good spirits as we landed at home in Jackson Hole late on the evening of Monday, November 6. We walked through the frigid cold into an airport hangar full of the warmth of friends and family for a final rally. Then we headed home where, too exhausted to sleep, Lynne and I popped popcorn with our granddaughters.

Election Day dawned crisp, clear, and cold. It was one of those late fall mountain mornings I love. We drove the short distance from our house to the Wilson Fire Station to cast our votes. The traveling press corps was there, as was our friend David Kennerly, President Ford’s photographer. David always managed to appear at historic moments in our lives, and this certainly was one.

At the fire station Lynne and I stood in line to vote, and I held my granddaughter Kate’s hand as the election worker handed me my paper ballot and directed me to the voting booth nearest one of the exits to cast my vote. Photographers and cameramen had been allowed to crowd into the exit doorway, and I could hear the whirring and clicking of their cameras as I marked the space for George Bush and Dick Cheney on my ballot.

We went directly from the fire station to the airport. Just before boarding the campaign plane for what—one way or the other—was going to be the last time, we took lots of pictures of family and staff on the tarmac. The photos show happy, exhausted folks in front of the plane emblazoned with the big blue Bush-Cheney letters on the side, and in the background the most beautiful mountains in the world, the Grand Tetons.

To help occupy the time on the flight to Austin, some of the staff organized a pool for people to guess what our total number of electoral votes would be. Two hundred and seventy are needed to win and everyone laughed when Liz’s sister-in-law, Kristienne Perry, took the decidedly lowball number of 280. Liz and Mary teased her, telling her that she clearly didn’t know much about politics if she thought we were going to get only 280 electoral votes.

While we were still in the air, we started to get the first exit poll results. Kathleen Shanahan brought them up to Lynne and me in the front of the plane. They were bad. We were up in Iowa, Missouri, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, but we were down by 3 percent in Florida and 4 percent in Michigan. And the list of states where we were tied was too long for comfort. “It’s going to be a long night,” Kathleen said. We couldn’t have guessed just how long.

As soon as we arrived in Austin, we went to Karl Rove’s office at the campaign headquarters. It had a large wall of glass overlooking the hallway, and as we had our meeting, staffers stared in as they walked by, no doubt trying to assess our mood, anxious for any clue as to whether this was going to be a night to celebrate. In fact, we didn’t know much more than they did.

Based on the way things seemed to be breaking, Karl said it looked likely to be a long night, but he sketched out the path he saw that could move us to the neighborhood of three hundred electoral votes. Needless to say, Kristienne won the pool and was closer to right than most of the experts.

Lynne and I had invited friends and family to join us at the Four Seasons Hotel to watch the early election returns, before we all headed to the big celebration that had been planned at the state capitol, about a mile away. At six o’clock, when the first results started coming in from the east, it became clear just how close the vote was going to be. Lynne and I left our suite and went downstairs to the big party in the hotel ballroom. Despite the evening’s uncertainty, we were buoyed by the love and warmth of our friends.

When we got back upstairs about an hour later, we told Mary,
Heather, Phil, and Liz that they really needed to go down to the party. They said they weren’t in a party mood. The networks had already called Florida for Gore, a surprising and irresponsible decision, given that the polling places in the heavily Republican western panhandle of the state hadn’t even closed yet. But we exercised our parental prerogative and strongly encouraged the kids to go downstairs. There was nothing they could do except sit in the suite, and all the friends in the ballroom would be so happy to see them. They took our advice, headed downstairs, and were surrounded by hundreds of cheering friends and family a short while later, when the large-screen TVs in the ballroom flashed the news that the networks had reversed the Florida call and returned the Sunshine State to the toss-up column.