Word: rovings
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Though Bush claimed to have disdain for "efforts to mold public opinion," his advisers, like Gore's, were obsessed with them. Rove and his team carefully weighed the question of how often to bring their man in front of the cameras. Tuesday and Wednesday they talked about herding the press corps to the ranch to show off Bush's good spirits. By Thursday they decided that things were going so well that the candidate didn't need to get in the way of the news. "The news in Florida was so good," an aide says, "we'd let it speak...
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...
...part, Bush "was like a prizefighter pulling himself off the mat," said a source who was in frequent touch with those at the mansion. Bush kept calling Rove at the headquarters, demanding new information. "How's it look?" he would ask. "Anything new?" By 1:30 most states had tumbled one way or the other, and both men had a total of 242 electoral votes. The counts were unimaginably, unbearably close. Florida was still undecided, but by 1 a.m. the Bush camp had more than a 200,000-vote cushion. Bush staff members knew Dade and Broward counties still hadn...
Around 2 a.m., Rove called the Governor. "Mr. President," he began, and then he told him what they'd just learned. They had won enough votes in Florida's Hillsborough County to win the state--and the whole prize. Ninety-eight percent of the precincts were in, and they were ahead by more than 50,000 votes...
...constitutional crisis on the scale of Seven Days in May. Former Secretary of State James Baker, the solemn, senior aide to the Bush camp, says, "Our process is at risk," and we are "on the cusp of having this thing spiral out of control." Bush's strategy chief, Karl Rove, makes a legal battle sound like a civil war. Even a non-alarmist like CNN's Jeff Greenfield likened our democracy to a beautiful antique car sliding over a cliff...