Word: campaign
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...started running before he could walk and seemed willing to sacrifice anyone to win and hold onto the White House? And how better to reach out to voters who think the system is rotten but are too detached even to be disgusted anymore? Bush's wife Laura has the campaign slogan for the Age of Indifference: "You know, it doesn't matter," she told TIME. "If he wins, it'll be great. If he doesn't, we still have a life...
...everywhere, your opponents freeze to death in your shadow and, best of all, you cruise straight past the primaries and into the general election as "a uniter, not a divider," with none of the debts and scars and promises that slow candidates down just at the point when the campaign becomes a sprint. The Republican faithful would forgo their normal feedings of litmus tests and put up with this soggy message of "compassionate conservatism" because Bush has a message for them too. Three words: I can win. Now he just has to prove it will work...
...because it was an old man's game, who had watched the Democrats anoint the baby boomers in 1992 while the G.O.P. grayheads fumbled. As Bush told a fund raiser in the fall of 1997, "If I do something, I'd like to have my friends who have some campaign experience around me. It's not going to look backward. I don't want people who are cynical and scarred from my father's time...
Bush matched this effort by appearing as a guest star at carefully chosen fund raisers in key states. It was an old-fashioned way to do favors--and broaden his financial network. He and his father campaigned for Jim Gilmore in Virginia in 1997; the $500,000 take stunned even Gilmore's aides. There was a growing curiosity about this popular Governor with the big halo; organizers and activists and consultants wanted to see for themselves whether he had the right moves. In May 1998 he went to Ohio fund raisers for gubernatorial candidate Bob Taft and helped raise...
Nowhere did the zeal for a winner work to Bush's advantage as in California, a state where the G.O.P. has factions inside factions. In April 1998, Bush went West to campaign for gubernatorial hopeful Dan Lungren in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Silicon Valley. At one event, about a dozen of Lungren's biggest backers practically cornered Bush during a private conversation and pressed him to run. Bush demurred, in deference to Governor Pete Wilson, who was still considering another run at the nomination. But he winked. "I want to be your second choice," Bush told them, tipping...