DOWN TO THE WIRE

Karl Rove cultivated an air of mystery, rarely appearing on TV talk shows or giving on-the-record interviews. He wasn't all that elusive--he sent e-mails by the score from his ubiquitous BlackBerry. But he enjoyed taunting reporters. After Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times wrote that the "normally elusive" Rove was out spinning reporters after the first debate, Rove declared to a press gaggle, "I must go. I must be elusive." Rove was amused by the Internet rumor mill's suggestion that the mysterious bulge on Bush's back at the first debate was actually a secret transmitter. Spotting some reporters at a Bush speech, he went into a pantomime of Rove the Machiavellian Puppet Master, cupping his hand over his mouth and pretending to dictate the president's speech through a hidden microphone.

Jolly Karl. Actually, he was feeling a good deal of "emotional stress," as he somewhat stiffly put it to a NEWSWEEK reporter. He was two weeks away from finding out whether his get-out-the-vote machine, so carefully and laboriously constructed during the past four years, was the crowning glory of King Karl--or a house of cards. Rove had been caught by surprise in 2000 when a seemingly solid win--a "landslide," Rove had predicted to the then Gov. George W. Bush two days before the election--turned into a popular-vote loss and the messy drama of hanging chad in Florida. In 2000 some 4 million Christian evangelicals--Rove's true believers--had stayed home on Election Day, put off by last-minute publicity over an old DUI conviction of George Bush and a general distaste for politics. Just as galling, the Democrats' get-out-the-vote operation had been arguably more effective than Rove's. The Democrats were really pouring it on this time around, using more than $100 million generated by 527s and Big Labor to register hundreds of thousands of new voters. Somewhat ominously, the Democrats were also creating a vast network of lawyers to file legal challenges on election night.

Rove was determined to fight back, even to strike pre-emptively. "They hired 10,000 lawyers. So we hired 10,000 lawyers," he said. Rove had already ordered up legal challenges to allegedly fraudulent Democratic voter-registration efforts in states from Ohio to Nevada. ("We found Freddy Krueger [from the movie "Nightmare on Elm Street"] registered 10 times in Nevada," said an aide to Rove.) The Democrats hired poll watchers and drivers to get their people to the polling place. Traditionally, the Democrats could count on labor unions to organize the most effective get-out-the-vote operations. The Republicans, by custom, relied largely on volunteers, housewives and grandmothers, small businessmen and retirees, who worked for nothing more than an "attawaytogo" message from Rove's BlackBerry and the satisfaction of playing a small part in his vast crusade to re-elect the president.

Volunteers or no (and lately, Rove had been hiring some get-out-the-vote professionals, as well as squadrons of lawyers), he wanted to maintain absolute control. He was obsessed with "metrics," with precise measurements of how the Bush-Cheney campaign was doing at any given moment. "Give me a date," Rove demanded of a NEWSWEEK reporter in mid-October. "Sept. 30?" He tapped into his computer to examine one of his "metric mileposts." "In Ohio we were supposed to register 1,119 voters that day. We registered 3,604!" he declared triumphantly.

Rove was feeling a little cranky about press reports that the Democrats were registering vastly more voters in swing states like Ohio and Florida. He blamed shoddy reporting by The New York Times (Rove considered the Times to be Pravda for liberals; he had just personally chewed out the Times's executive editor Bill Keller and Washington bureau chief Phil Taubman). The Times had measured only recent registration numbers, overlooking the fact, Rove protested, that the GOP had been working away at voter registration since the 2000 election. "Nationally, it's a wash," claimed Rove. Besides, the key to victory was not registration, but turnout--actually getting people to the polls. Rove scorned a story in that morning's Washington Post reporting that Rove had given up a more ambitious effort to reach out to swing voters in order to concentrate on mobilizing the Republican base. "Ridiculous," he said. "We need 51 percent, and the base is only the high 30s." Rove, who studies population-migration tracts the way baseball fans study box scores, said he was particularly focused on finding and securing the "exurban vote," city dwellers and suburbanites who had just arrived in new towns and had been too busy getting settled to register to vote. These were the real "persuadables," the key to the election. ("Carver County, Minn. Fifty percent population increase. We got 62 percent there last time," said Rove, spouting factoids while he thumbed his BlackBerry.)

Even greater torrents of statistics flowed rom the mouth of Ken Mehlman, the BC04 campaign manager who oversaw the Republicans' ground game. President Bush had paid Mehlman his highest compliment one afternoon after the 2002 elections, as the president and his top political advisers sat around at Camp David watching football on TV. "He's a good general," President Bush said, nodding at Mehlman. "He's about to have a huge army." Mehlman was a familiar type in campaigns, only more so. In "The Making of the President 1960," Theodore H. White described the "overdeveloped organizational sense" of certain Republican moneymen in the Nixon campaign. Mehlman loved organizing; his aides suspected that he made lists from lists. His aides once tortured him by taking away his BlackBerry in a restaurant. Sweating (so the story goes), Mehlman ended up ordering his assistant to read him his text messages out loud.

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.

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.

Osama bin Laden had given the Kerry campaign a good scare on Friday night. The tape of the Qaeda leader, creepily invoking polemical filmmaker Michael Moore, was played in the war room at Kerry headquarters in Washington. Pollster Mark Mellman noticed the quiet in the room and the color draining from people's faces. Was this the October Surprise? Was bin Laden going to get Bush re-elected by showing his fright mask on election eve?

Mellman saw a slight wobble in Kerry's polls overnight. He walked 45 minutes from his Georgetown home to headquarters downtown (he doesn't drive on the Sabbath) to present the potentially ominous results, but by Sunday Kerry had recovered. Perhaps voters had been numbed by the years of scratchy tapes smuggled out of Pakistan and the elevated threat levels. "Saturday Night Live" took out some of the sting by parodying the tape. In any case, by Sunday night the Kerry campaign was allowing itself to feel optimistic.

Kerry's last job on the last day of the campaign was basically to show up. There were no more strategic decisions to be made, no more staff squabbles to referee, no cell-phone calls to his ever-widening circle of advisers to make doubly sure he was making the right decision. And yet somehow Kerry was 45 minutes late to his first rally, scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m. in Orlando. Kerry and Bush have opposite rhythms. Bush loves the mornings and feeds off crowds but tires noticeably as the day drags on. For Kerry, morning is not his best time, and he rarely seems to get a lift from the crowd--but he has a kind of dogged stamina. On this morning, the last of the campaign, President Bush had begun with a rally in Ohio at 7:30. Air Force One was taking off from Milwaukee airport (Bush's third event) just as Kerry was arriving there for his first major event of the day. The press corps just assumed that Kerry was late because he was on the phone, but they wondered: Whom did he really have to talk to at this point? What was there left to say?

And yet, when Kerry did take the stage, he was compelling. He was crisp and sharp, all the things he had never managed to be in the campaign. Later that night at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, Kerry brought out an old line to get back at Bush. Citing Bush's "You can run but you can't hide" line, Kerry reminded the audience of Muhammad Ali's taunt to George Foreman: "George, is that all you got?" The crowd loved it.

At 9 p.m. in Cleveland, Kerry was introduced by Bruce Springsteen (referred to at an earlier rally by Kerry as "a sort of minstrel poet, if you will"). Teresa was at last reunited with her husband. Shielding her eyes from the klieg lights she hated, she spoke softly into the mike, but she, too, rose to the occasion with brief, gracious remarks. By this time Kerry was basking and beaming.

Kerry's sharpness did not come as a complete surprise to Alex. She thought that her father was addicted to focus. She didn't think he suffered from adult attention-deficit disorder, but she knew that he was better off free from distractions. She remembered that during a run-through before the second debate--his weakest performance--he had behaved like a little boy who refused to do his homework, teasingly throwing things at his daughter as his aides vainly tried to give him comments. Tonight Kerry had nothing left to do but show up and smile for the cameras.

The mood on Air Force One on the last weekend was upbeat--by decree. Karen Hughes was determined to show the president as cheerful, happy, joking, no matter what. Aides told reporters that the president was cracking jokes and wearing a funny shirt that said bowling for bush. Hughes herself reported that the president had told her, "Do you think Kerry's having this much fun?" His aides made a show of clowning around. Rove somewhere found a sign that said free kittens, and hung it in the conference room of Air Force One. On Halloween, top advisers dressed up in camouflage jackets--to mock Kerry, who had worn camo to stage a duck-hunting photo op in Ohio. The president was reportedly playing a happy-go-lucky game of gin rummy, complete with a referee (deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin) to wave a yellow flag in case anyone got out of hand.

But when the president showed up to vote at 7:30 on election morning at the Crawford, Texas, firehouse, his eyes seemed puffy and he looked worn. The final rally the night before at Southern Methodist University had been lackluster and hurried. Bush's cockiness was gone. "We'll see how it goes tonight," Bush told reporters. "I've given it my all... I've enjoyed it." He thanked his old nemesis, the White House press corps, for its coverage. Laura Bush's smile was plastered on her face. She took her husband's hand and intensely kneaded it with her thumb.

The tracking polls overnight in Florida showed the race looking tight. But as they flew back to Washington, Bush told his top advisers that he had spoken to brother Jeb, the governor of the all-important swing state. Jeb was a straight talker, said the president, and Jeb felt good about his state. Bush seemed confident enough, thought McKinnon.

But McKinnon's own mood darkened when he arrived at the Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters in Arlington shortly after 5 p.m. In Pit Row, strategy boss Dowd was in his office with the door shut. McKinnon tucked his head in. Dowd looked serious, even a little exasperated. His phone was ringing constantly and e-mails were stacking up on his computer screen. Dowd was puzzled by the network exit polls. They were grim: Bush was getting crushed in Pennsylvania and losing in Ohio and Florida. But something was odd. The polls were based on a turnout of 59 percent women and 41 percent men. Maybe that was the actual turnout, but Dowd doubted it. Also, Bush seemed to be doing surprisingly well with Hispanics, winning 42 percent of their votes. But if that number was true, then Bush should be cleaning up overall. The numbers didn't seem to make sense.

Across the Potomac, at Kerry headquarters, Michael Whouley, the mastermind of Kerry's Iowa victory, was doing everything he could to get out the vote. There had been reports of massive turnout--good news for Kerry, who was counting on new voters to put him over the top. Whouley was standing in the middle of something called the Bullseye Room, snapping off decisions large and small. In Cleveland, people who had been waiting in line for hours were complaining about the lack of restrooms. An aide to Whouley dispatched Porta Pottis. More complex complaints were referred to the Breakdown Room. In Philadelphia, there was a report that when a computerized voting machine was switched on that morning, it showed 400 votes already recorded. Lawyers were dispatched; the report turned out to be a rumor. Headquarters was crawling with lawyers, most of them with nothing to do. They were dressed in jeans, not suits. "We're trying to hide," said one.

Shortly before 9 p.m., at the Republican National Committee headquarters up on Capitol Hill, the RNC's top oppo man, Tim Griffin, was feeling reborn. With Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" playing, Griffin was watching four TV sets and realizing that the early-afternoon exit polls had been just plain wrong. "We're up in Michigan!" he exclaimed. "We're gonna win Florida and we're gonna win Ohio! If we win Florida and Ohio, game over!" After a very blue afternoon, he was feeling exultant. "The exit polls stink. I could throw a dart at a map and get a better number." About an hour later, back in Arlington, McKinnon was feeling the same sense of reprieve. "Back from the death swoon," he said. "The projections were completely wrong. It's just unbelievable." McKinnon was watching the electoral map. "It looks like it's all coming down to Ohio," he said. "We're planning to have a ritual burning of the exit polls."

At the White House, Karl Rove had set up quarters in the family dining room. (He had joked to reporters that he would be working in the "bat cave.") National-security adviser Condoleezza Rice wandered in and out and joked that Rove was looking at way too many numbers. Rove was studying comparisons of results in Florida and Ohio with the poll data in the 2000 election. At about 10:30, he called over to the senior staff, nervously hovering around the Roosevelt Room, and told them that the president would win both Florida and Ohio. The cheers were so loud that they could be heard down the hall in the press briefing room. Then ABC News called Florida for Bush; another eruption. Only now did Karen Hughes finally admit that the White House had drafted two speeches--one for a concession. It no longer looked that the second speech would be necessary.

In Copley Square in Boston, the fans had stopped chanting, "We want a party!" The Red Sox Nation euphoria was dissipating along with Senator Kerry's chances. The ballroom of the Fairmont Copley Plaza suddenly felt like a ghost town. All the top Kerry aides, on hand to spin reporters, suddenly vanished. The buffet table was deserted. A few junior aides hung around.

At the White House, the Secret Service was told to prepare a motorcade to go over to the Ronald Reagan Building, where the party faithful were awaiting the president's victory speech. But there was a nagging glitch: the networks were refusing to declare any more states for Bush. His electoral tally, according to NBC and Fox, stood at 269, one shy of the 270 necessary to win. The Kerry campaign put out a defiant statement, refusing to concede anything. Bush was frustrated. He wanted to claim the victory he knew to be his. But Rove counseled caution. They had to wait. A long night was getting longer.

For the Kerry camp, reality began to set in around 9 p.m., when the Democrats realized that Bush would take Florida after all. The news was not entirely a surprise. Despite some giddiness over the exit polls earlier in the day, Kerry's own experts knew the numbers might be misleading. Kerry's polls had turned south overnight on Monday. Still, the Kerryites clung to one last hope, that Ohio might still fall into the Democratic column. When NBC and Fox called Ohio for Bush around 1 a.m., Kerry's advisers eyed a last-ditch strategy--holding out for a late count that would include "provisional votes" that would not be counted for another 10 days.

But the numbers did not add up. The number of provisional votes hovered around Bush's margin of victory in Ohio, and the campaign recognized that only a portion of them came from pro-Kerry counties. Nothing but a miracle could save Kerry, and the candidate and his advisers saw that the long wait and inevitable court fights would paint Kerry as a sore loser. Adviser Ron Klain presented an aggressive legal strategy, but Kerry decided to spare the country.

Just after 11 a.m., Kerry called the president and conceded. The conversation between the two old enemies was gracious. "I hope you are proud of the effort you put in," Bush told Kerry. Both men agreed that the country had grown too divided, that both sides need to reach out.

Shortly after 2 p.m., Kerry took the stage in historic Faneuil Hall in Boston. In a raspy voice, he spoke about "the danger of division and the need, the desperate need, for unity, for common ground, for coming together." Kerry showed an unusual flash of emotion, his voice catching as he thanked his friends and family from his heart. Less than an hour later, President Bush struck the same themes of unity and common purpose at a rally near the White House.

If those two men could forgive each other, maybe Americans separated by the great Red-Blue divide can do the same.