TRENCH WARFARE

It takes a certain breed of sleepless media junkie with a jugular instinct to run a good war room. The director of rapid response for the Bush-Cheney campaign, Steve Schmidt, fit the part. Chunky, with a shiny bald head, he looked like an artillery shell. When he talked, his small blue eyes darted around the room at the flickering TV sets. As he spouted rapid-fire talking points, sometimes a hint of a crooked smile would creep across his lips, as if he pitied anyone on the receiving end of such a high-velocity, hard-hammering spin machine. Schmidt liked to refer to himself as Patton. His staff called him the General or the Colonel. He was known to stalk through the halls of the headquarters declaring, "Kill, kill, kill!" It was not clear how much he was kidding.

Smart campaigns, even ones with more than $100 million to spend on destroying an opponent, do not just use brute force. Clever operatives know how to practice jujitsu, to use their opponent's strength against him. Kerry was a deliberate and thoughtful man, but his need to constantly explain himself was a weakness, and not just because it bored people. Kerry was reactive. Properly baited, he could be led into a trap that was partly of his own creation.

The Bush-Cheney campaign knew about Kerry's vulnerability from the outset. "If the rabbit runs, he'll chase it," said campaign manager Ken Mehlman. Possibly, Mehlman thought, Kerry had overlearned the lesson of the 1988 campaign, when Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis was sluggish about responding to the barbs and provocations of the Republican dirty trick-sters. But Mehlman and the others didn't realize, at first, just how self-defeating Kerry's rational process could be. As a matter of routine, the Bush operatives tried to goad Kerry. And when he reacted, they were ready.

In the third week of March, the BC04 team learned, Kerry was headed to West Virginia to talk about national security. The Mountain State was a critical swing state, full of veterans who could go either way. (By summer Bush was spending so much time there, his advisers were joking that their unofficial slogan was "If it's Sunday, it's West Virginia!") On Monday, March 15, McKinnon repaired to his ad shop, Maverick Media, to crank out a spot that would air on the West Virginia airwaves just in time to greet Kerry. In the ad, a grave baritone voice intones, "Mr. Kerry?" calling on the senator to cast his vote for or against more funding for the troops in Iraq. Kerry appears to vote no again and again (in fact, it was a single vote). At 7 the next morning the ad was digitally whisked to West Virginia, where it began playing on local TV.

That noon, when Kerry addressed a veterans group in West Virginia, a heckler kept demanding to know why he had voted against more funding for the troops. In his considered but long-winded fashion, Kerry tried to explain that he had wanted to vote for the funding, but only if the Senate passed an amendment that would whittle down President Bush's earlier tax cut for the rich. Kerry voted for the amendment, but when it failed, he voted against the funding. The heckler pressed, and Kerry, losing patience, fell into senatorial procedural shorthand. "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it," he said.

At Bush-Cheney headquarters, Joe Kildae, a 25-year-old campaign intern who monitored the war room (and never seemed to sleep), was watching. In his cubicle he kept three televisions and a battery of TiVos and VCRs. As soon as he saw Kerry make his remark on Fox News, he stood up in his cubicle and caught the eye of his boss, Steve Schmidt. Schmidt had seen the clip, too. The two men nodded at each other. Kildae thought to himself: "We're going to be seeing this a lot." He immediately hit pause on his digital recorder, wound the clip back and copied it to tape. Using a program called TVEyes, he pulled up an instant rough transcript. He e-mailed the transcript of Kerry's "flip-flopping" to an "alert list" of top aides, who could then click on a link to see the video.