Word: mckinnons
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...background check administered to prospective employees. The standard questionnaire asks applicants if they have used illegal drugs in the previous seven years. Bush hemmed and hawed, giving Attlesey a non-answer, before slipping away to his hotel suite. But the Governor stewed about the question. A little later, Mark McKinnon, Bush's media director, called Attlesey in the hotel lobby and asked if he could take a copy of the FBI background check to the Governor. Attlesey agreed. Thirty minutes later, Bush called. Yes, the Governor said, he could clear the background check...
...that he'd just started sliding down the slippery slope. The next morning's Dallas Morning News headline--BUSH DENIES USING DRUGS IN PAST 7 YEARS--sent the press into a frenzy at a time when Karen Hughes, Bush's longtime spokeswoman, had dropped off the road. (This left McKinnon in charge. "It was like jumping out of a plane without a parachute," he later recalled. Hughes would rarely leave Bush's side again for the rest of the campaign.) It would take 48 hours of revisions before Bush and his team would give their final answer: that he could...
Down in Austin, Rove and polling analyst Matthew Dowd were in their adjacent offices, glued to their computers and telephones. "They were like mad scientists with those calculators," says media strategist Mark McKinnon. "They were punching them so hard and so fast, it sounded like a machine gun." At various points one of them would shout that they were a thousand votes down or a thousand votes up. "We lived and died a thousand times tonight," said McKinnon. Spectators hovered outside Rove's office, looking in through a glass window. "We were all standing around like expectant fathers," says...
...vote cushion. Bush staff members knew Dade and Broward counties still hadn't reported, but their models told them they had a lead that was insurmountable. The margin would shrink, but then "it was just a matter of hanging on to the cliff by our fingers," remembers McKinnon. The problem is "each finger kept getting stepped on." He and Ferguson nipped out for a little tequila to calm their nerves. Rove, who was wearing his phone headset all evening, was calling a statistics professor in Texas for his analysis of how the numbers were running, and then yelling...
...networks gift-wrapped Florida once more and this time handed it to Bush. "Everyone went insane, screaming and crying," McKinnon says. Virtually the entire staff in the headquarters left the building, forming a dance line up Congress Avenue along the eight blocks to the celebration site. The colored lights were flashing on the capitol; it's a miracle no one was electrocuted in the sweeping rain. At the rally, the television screens switched to a video of Bush on the trail, at home and on the ranch, all to the tune of Signed, Sealed, Delivered...