Spoken from the Heart (28 page)

There were some things that I insisted upon during the campaign. I insisted upon leaving the trail to move the girls into their new schools.

When she was a sophomore in high school, Jenna had asked me to reserve a space for her at the Hardin House, a private dorm at the University of Texas in Austin. Even when I was heading to college, Miss Hardin's, as it was then known, was the place for young UT coeds to live. Jenna would live with two other girls in one room--they had all made their reservations together. We arrived and promptly went out to buy bed risers so that we could slide the storage boxes packed with Jenna's clothes underneath her bed frame--the other girls were doing the same. I thought of my own move-in day at SMU, when Mother and Daddy had dropped me off, remembering our spacious rooms with their tiny closets and my own wardrobe, which barely took up half of the space. My suitcase and a couple of boxes had fit neatly in the car trunk. I could still picture my parents' bemused faces as a girl from Corpus Christi arrived with an entire trailer of her things hitched up to the back of a large Cadillac.

I left Jenna with her friends and headed up to New Haven for Barbara.

Barbara had already spent a week camping in the wilderness as part of Yale's outdoor orientation program, which she adored. She arrived for move-in desperate for a shower, but first we had to get her things up the narrow, Gothic-style stairways of Yale's centuries-old dorm. We spent what seemed like hours navigating the turns and dark stairwells, and then came the negotiations with her new roommate over who would get the bottom bunk. A half hour of my negotiating prowess resulted in Barbara's sleeping on the top bunk all year.

With the girls in school, I was gone from my empty nest as well, back out on the campaign trail full-time.

The first presidential debate was to be held in Boston on October 3, at the University of Massachusetts. When we arrived at the airport, Al Gore's Air Force Two was already parked on the runway, looking large and imposing. I've always found presidential debates to be particularly nerve-racking. When Gampy was running in 1988, George and his youngest brother, Marvin, who lived outside Washington, D.C., were so nervous during the first debate that they couldn't bear to watch it. They went to the movies instead. Then every few minutes, they walked out to the theater lobby to call home from the pay phone and check on how things were going. After about an hour of that, they gave up and drove back to our house. I spent one of Gampy's presidential debates in bed with the covers pulled up to my eyes. I always politely turned down any invites to debate parties, with their uncorked wine bottles and platters of mini quiches and hot hors d'oeuvres. And now I had to sit, composed and almost expressionless, while George debated Al Gore. After what had happened to Gampy in 1992, when he had looked at his watch once during a debate with Bill Clinton, I was afraid even to check the time. Afterward, I walked up onto the stage to greet everyone. Bar had reminded me to be sure to walk over and shake hands with the opposing candidate and his wife.

George had gone into the evening trailing in the polls, but his focused answers, combined with Al Gore's grimaces and audible sighs, changed the dynamic of the race. George is quick-witted--during the primaries, when he had been asked about his biggest mistake, he said trading the baseball legend Sammy Sosa. I recall another primary debate question in Des Moines; the moderator asked, What political philosopher do you identify with most? I could almost see the other candidates' mental wheels turning--Do I say, John Locke, or Teddy Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan?--and then George answered, "Christ, because he changed my heart." Some of the media and pundits were shocked, but to be in that room was to feel everyone else groping to follow George's lead.

By the time the third debate was over, George was ten points ahead in the polls. Now, as the days ticked down, we were trying to cover as many states and as much of the country as possible before the election. The attacks grew nastier, the tone sharper.

On October 23, I was flying to Wisconsin with Bar, Lynne Cheney, and Cindy McCain, when suddenly the oxygen masks dropped down. The pilot told us it was just a precaution because we were experiencing cabin pressure problems. The masks and the warning were enough for most of us to feel light-headed, whether or not we were in any danger of running out of air. The plane ended up making an emergency landing in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That flight was an apt metaphor for this last leg of the campaign. Neither side wanted to run out of air before November 7.

Five days before the election, the story broke that George had been arrested for a DUI, driving under the influence, in Maine before we were married. He had never discussed it publicly, although George had told me about it before we wed, and he had alluded to it once when he ran for governor. Actually, in some ways, what he said about those years was worse. He uttered the line "When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible," which always made people think that he had been wilder than he ever really was. George's dad had been in politics since before George entered Yale. He knew the stakes; he knew he should never do anything illegal, never do anything that might disgrace his father. His whole family knew it. And what's more, none of them ever wanted to. But now, in an election where character was a key issue, the last four days were being devoted to questions about George's character. I called the girls at school before they heard the news from someone else. The polls showed that George's three-to-five-point lead had collapsed into nearly a dead heat.

Election night for a candidate's wife is largely about supporting your spouse. There are no speeches to give, no questions to answer. It is a mime performance of waves and gestures, and on your face, the look of radiant relief at victory or brave composure at defeat. I had chosen a royal blue suit to carry me through from dinner to the returns and whatever lay beyond.

In the final thirty-six hours, we had barnstormed from Florida through Texas, finally touching down in Austin so we could go back home to the governor's residence and get up the next morning to vote. Election night, we were slated to eat dinner at one of Ronnie and Peggy Weiss's restaurants, the Shoreline Grill. The tables were set, appetizers were ready, but before 7:00 p.m., we got the news that Florida was being called for Gore, along with Michigan. George and I got up from the table and left for the Governor's Mansion. Jeb came back shortly afterward and began furiously working the phones. When the first election call was made, the polls had not even closed in the Florida panhandle, which is in a separate time zone, one hour earlier than the rest of the state. Voter News Service had made their prediction based on the morning's and afternoon's exit polls.

The family gathered in our tiny upstairs rooms at the Governor's Mansion. The night was dark and rainy. Bar Bush was sitting on the sofa with a needlepoint canvas and a pair of earphones, listening to a Sandra Brown novel. She stitched and listened, stitched and listened as the minutes dragged by. I went into the kitchen to make coffee and unload and reload the dishwasher as mugs and glasses were filled and refilled. Then, a little after 9:00 p.m. Texas time, the networks retracted their calls.

At a little after 1:00 a.m., Florida was re-called for George. George stepped into the hallway to review his acceptance speech; the cars were waiting to take us over to the rain-soaked Capitol, and our supporters began leaving their hotels to line the grounds. Many of our best friends from around the country had flown in for the night. Thousands more people were already waiting for the man they thought would be the president-elect to arrive.

Then, at about 1:30 in the morning, 2:30 on the East Coast, Al Gore phoned to congratulate George and concede. The election was truly over. George hugged me, hugged his parents and his brother. My mother was on the verge of tears.

Our celebration lasted about twenty minutes. One by one the networks announced that Florida was again too close to call. An hour after his first phone call, Al Gore called George back to retract his concession. There was not to be an election night after all.

I looked around our small living room. Everyone was exhausted. After years of being on the road almost every night of every week, of working so incredibly hard, there was to be no resolution this night. I walked over to George, wrapped my arm around him, and said, "Bushie, would you rather win or go to bed?" He looked at me, laughed, and said, "Go to bed." Sometime after 3:00 a.m., after Don Evans, George's campaign chair, had gone out to speak to the press and our supporters in Austin, to tell them that he believed "when it's all said and done, we will prevail," I finally sent everyone off to their hotel rooms or their homes for what little sleep they could get. We assumed things would look different in the morning. We had no way of knowing that our election night would not end for another thirty-five days.

I look back on that recount period as endless and simultaneously brief. I ate, I walked, I read, but where and what I'm no longer entirely sure. George would grill chicken or steaks in the little barbecue pit at the back of the clapboard house on our ranch; I fixed tuna salad for lunch, including for Walter Isaacson, then of
Time
magazine, when he flew down with his wife to interview George. Most of the details, though, long ago eroded away, so that all that my mind retains are the barest outlines. Almost the entire time, we stayed at either the governor's residence or the ranch, detached and consumed, almost as one is with an ICU patient, looking for signs in the green-tinged monitors and their endless data streams, waiting for that decisive turn. The final Florida vote totals from election night had George leading Al Gore by over one thousand votes. Then the recounts began. I also had the Texas Book Festival to oversee the very next weekend.

When we'd picked the festival date, no one thought that we would be stuck in a strange kind of limbo, not knowing whether we would be staying in Austin or moving to Washington. I hastily redid my speech with the Texas writer Steve Harrigan to include some jokes about the unfinished election; I hosted the festival and the black-tie events, and like the tick-tock of a metronome, the counting continued. George and I left for the ranch, where at least we could look up at the sky and breathe. As with everything else that November, our new house, which was supposed to be finished by Christmas, was behind schedule. I watched the workmen, hoping I could will them to finish. The giant TV trucks followed us. Their satellite antennas pivoted like science-fiction creatures as they beamed footage of the coarse, sapped fall grasses and our neighbor's barn and hay pile. Back in Austin, correspondents did their stand-ups within full view of the Governor's Mansion, their klieg lights blazing on the sidewalks.

When we returned to Austin, there were protesters on the streets, but most of them were backing George. We saw the golfer Ben Crenshaw and his wife, Julie, pushing their little baby in a stroller and holding up signs of support. Many of our closest friends were walking around the Governor's Mansion with signs too. In Washington, Doro, George's sister, joined the protesters outside the vice president's residence.

But we also knew the vice president's house from George's dad, and I could imagine the Gores being cooped up in there, high on the hill, waiting, just as we were.

There was nothing to do but wait. On November 7, we already thought we had won. In the weeks that followed, George was still winning every recount. Al Gore did have the lead in the popular vote, but that is not how our presidential system works. Presidents are elected based on winning state electoral votes. If the popular vote decided who won, then each side and each candidate would have employed a very different strategy. We, for example, would have tried to turn out as many votes as possible among the 12 million registered voters in Texas. Four years later, when George won reelection by more than 3 million votes nationwide, John Kerry's campaign briefly considered a postelection legal challenge in Ohio, to try to win its electoral votes.

But for this election, it was now up to the lawyers and the courts. The ultimate decision was out of our hands. Like a baseball batter in the ninth inning of game seven of the World Series, we had learned to tune out all the extraneous noise. We did not hear the cheers or the taunts; there was only us, and the whoosh of the ball and the crack of the wood. Then, on December 12, election 2000 finally came to an end. The Supreme Court issued two decisions. The first was a 7-2 ruling that the manual Florida vote recount had violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution because not all ballots were treated alike in all Florida counties. Some counties recorded unperforated punch ballots as votes while others designated them as nonvotes. There was no uniform standard. On what the appropriate remedy to recount should be, the ruling was much closer. By a 5-4 decision, the justices ruled that there was no fair way to recount all the votes yet again and allow Florida to participate in the Electoral College. The current vote count would stand. George was declared the winner. Months later, when most of the major media outlets conducted their own series of recounts, he still won.

The next night, Al Gore addressed the nation, and then George did the same from the Texas Capitol. George was now president-elect. We had survived the previous weeks by living in what we called "our Zen mode." Now, although George and his staff had been working on a possible presidential transition since before the election--as had Al Gore--I personally had less than five weeks, half the usual time, to prepare for an inauguration and the start of George's four-year presidential term.