DOWN TO THE WIRE

To enforce the strict, top-down command structure on the volunteer army in the field, Mehlman's top two deputies, political director Terry Nelson and field director Coddy Johnson, held a 10-hour teleconference with state and local operatives every Saturday. Working from a sheet of metrics, Johnson and Nelson would demand to know: How many calls were made, how many doorbells rung? Were the voter contacts personal or pamphlet drops? Johnson read books like "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" and "The Tipping Point." He played good cop: "All right, you guys are doing it! We're gonna make it! We're only 30 percent but we're gonna get there!" Nelson, also known as the Hammer, played bad cop. Johnson liked to imitate Nelson's growling at the state coordinators in a flat Iowa baritone: "I'm very concerned that you all stink. And have not made any progress."

The get-out-the-vote operation was all very organized and disciplined, but would it work on Election Day? In his Houston law office, Pat Oxford, 62, coordinator of a roughly 1,500-member GOP volunteer organization grandly known as the Mighty Texas Strike Force, just laughed. "They think you can send out lightning bolts from Washington, D.C.," said Oxford, whose 10-man teams could be parachuted into swing states to help fill gaps as campaign workers. "Young people think that you can plug it into a computer and it all comes out the same way." He described every Election Day as chaotic, or, as he put it in cattleman's lingo, "a calf scramble." ("This is not my first rodeo," said Oxford, who has worked in Bush campaigns since George H.W. Bush ran for the U.S. Senate in 1970.) Volunteers didn't always show up. A group of Strike Force volunteers from Dallas dispatched to the Midwest had just announced they had to go home two days before the election in order to trick or treat with their kids on Halloween. Oxford's teams ("We move to the sound of the guns") were originally coordinated by a young woman at RNC headquarters in Washington. "Wonderful young girl," said Oxford. One day a few weeks before Election Day, she stopped returning phone calls. Oxford imagined her overwhelmed by the pressure, "under her desk," he said, chuckling, "in a fetal position, sucking her thumb."

No wonder Karl Rove believed that he had to be hands-on, that he had to meet face to face with local organizers at campaign stops as he traveled with the president. As Election Day drew nearer, he was not in Washington planning grand strategy but in small Midwestern towns discussing canvassing operations in minute detail with his eager but untested volunteers. On these trips, he could pretend to be the merry prankster, throwing snowballs at reporters in Wisconsin, but he missed home. For all his playacting as master of the political universe, Rove is a family man often seen at his son's school events. He dislikes overnight travel. "It's a good thing," he said, "that 80 percent of the persuadables live east of the Mississippi." He was speaking metrically. In other words, he could take day trips and still make it home some nights to see his family.

In Reno, Nev., as the campaign entered the final week, John Kerry was given a hero's welcome. A crowd of nearly 20,000 packed into an arena at the University of Nevada and rose to their feet as one at the mention of Kerry's name. They did not sit back down again. When the applause finally subsided, Kerry launched into a long and rambling speech, one of his most soporific in weeks. A simple line in his prepared text on the need to fix Social Security became a five-minute explanation of how the system got broken. He gave the same prolix treatment to health care, with a strange overreaching assertion that the Bush health-care plan was "killing millions of Americans." A 25-minute speech went on for close to an hour.

Kerry knew that he had regressed. Walking off the stage, he turned to his daughter Vanessa and said, "I went too long, didn't I?" Vanessa just nodded. She was trying not to criticize too much. Sometimes she would say, "Love ya, dude, but that was too long." Her sister, Alex, the film director, would tell her father, "You have your audience for 20 minutes, and once you hit the climax of that speech you're never going to be able to go that high again. You've got to come down because you need to leave them wanting more." Her father would improve, for a little while.

Vanessa would force herself to laugh at the old jokes and cheer heartily as she stood onstage with her father. Alex made less of an effort. Since June she had been making a film about her experiences on the trail and whenever her father started droning on too long she would unceremoniously exit the stage, claiming that she "had to go shoot." Teresa was no longer onstage. She had always said that she did not wish to be the candidate's wife, staring up adoringly at her man. After her trying time on the Sea to Shining Sea tour, the handlers decided she was better off campaigning alone. It was up to the girls to play the humanizing presence at their father's side.