DOWN TO THE WIRE

The energy was back in the Kerry campaign after the debates, but it wasn't back in the candidate. Vanessa was heartened that the crowds were huge and wildly enthusiastic even if her father did wander on. Maybe something big was starting to happen. But where was Kerry the comeback man? The candidate and his family had the answer: "Comeback Kerry" was a fiction, a myth propagated by the press in need of a good story and promoted by the campaign. The family never talked about it. "I don't really think Dad sees it," said Alex. Still, the candidate was perfectly happy to play along. At the Reno rally, Sen. Harry Reid told the audience that John Sasso had assured him that "John Kerry always fights hardest in the final moments of a campaign." The crowd cheered loudly. Onstage, Kerry smiled and nodded along.

Kerry's daughters were surprised and upset at how nasty and personal the Bushes and Cheneys were willing to get. The girls had no love for the opposition themselves. Though Alex and Vanessa never openly criticized the president, their faces would fill with rage when they heard him discuss the most mundane subjects. Watching Bush debate her father, Alex was struck by what she described as the "strange... surreal darkness that exists" in the president. Alex was having a cheerful breakfast with her father in his Las Vegas hotel room the day after the last debate. As she was eating, she heard some staffers chattering about the burgeoning controversy over Kerry's remark about Mary Cheney. The frenzy seemed absurd to her and, she thought, to her father as well. After breakfast, she flipped on the morning news to see a scowling Lynne Cheney calling Kerry's remarks "a cheap and tawdry political trick" and describing her father as "not a good man." This seemed like a new low to her. She vowed if she ever met "that woman" she would not shake her hand.

Traditionally, campaigns end on an up note. The race may have been a slog through a swamp, but the candidate is supposed to exit on the high road. Told to create a heart-tugging final campaign ad, Fred Davis, the Bush adman based in California, cut a spot entitled "It Is Time," a collage of gauzy images of Bush meeting with soldiers, of firefighters looking resolute amid the devastation of 9/11. But in the end, the race was too close and too brutish for the high-road treatment. Kerry spent most of the last week taking potshots at Bush after a New York Times/CBS investigation reported that 380 tons of high explosives--perfect for terrorist bombs--had mysteriously disappeared from an Iraqi bunker after the invasion. Kerry called the president "incompetent." So the Bush team decided it was necessary to bash Kerry one last time as weak and feckless.

The final swipe was a fitting end to the most negative and most expensive air wars in political history. The candidates and the interest groups spent more than $1 billion (versus $100 million in 1996). By the last week, the two campaigns were burning money at the rate of $10 million a day. For almost a year, BC04 advertising chieftain Mark McKinnon had been looking for a good way to scare the American people, tastefully and subtly, of course. Almost a year earlier, the ad team had put together a spot called "Flame." The image was just a simple burning match, with a voice-over intoning, "There's a fire across the sea. And the flames of this fire have crossed oceans." The ad didn't test very well, and at any rate it was too high-concept for Karl Rove. McKinnon dusted off an old cold-war favorite, made by the Ronald Reagan campaign in the 1980s to scare Americans about the communist threat, called "The Bear in the Woods." Only this time the ad makers substituted wolves. A feathery-voiced woman warned that weakness always invited predators, while on the screen some wolves milled about a clearing, then started walking toward the camera. The feel was slightly reminiscent of "The Blair Witch Project"--unintended, according to McKinnon. But when some complained that the wolves looked more like German shepherds, McKinnon maintained that the Bush team had not wanted the beasts to look too vicious. Rove was persuaded to give the impressionistic ad a try. "OK, very arty, guys," said Rove, "but let's make sure it works."

McKinnon was strung out. He had a cold and joked that he had a persistent ringing in his ears, possibly from his sinuses, possibly from the sheer noise generated by the campaign. The small, tight circle around Bush was hanging on, missing their families, wanting it to be over. Karen Hughes was sad because she couldn't be home with her son, a high-school senior applying early to Stanford. Communications director Dan Bartlett had already sent his wife and young children to be with her parents in Houston; there was no point in keeping them in Washington because he was so rarely home. Matt Dowd, the self-avowed pessimist, had avoided the last debate; he was just too nervous. At a lunch with reporters with a week to go, he pretended, with a notable lack of conviction, to be optimistic about the race and finally explained, "I'm Irish: I worry about everything."

The Bushies' counterparts on the Kerry plane were just as exhausted, but at least one of them was feeling a lot happier than he had been before Labor Day. Reporters listening to Kerry make a speech in Orlando, Fla., on the last weekend noticed something very familiar. They had heard the phrases and cadences before in Kerry's speeches, but also in Al Gore's and Ted Kennedy's. It was classic Bob Shrum: the people versus the powerful. "America deserves a president who will fight for you and not only the people at the top," intoned Kerry. Shrum was back in the center of things, leaning over speechwriter Josh Gottheimer (Shrum can't type) at the word processor. The campaign was putting Shrum out on the Sunday talk shows. When he said he was too tired from his early-morning performance to attend a rally in Tampa on Sunday night, Kerry offered him his bed in the cabin of his campaign jet. Shrum slept for an hour and a half. "You missed a hell of a rally," Kerry told him. What was so great about it? asked Shrum. "I was pretty brief," said Kerry.