Bush’s 2004 Campaign Quietly in High Gear

While President Bush floats above the fray, White House strategists are laying the groundwork for his reelection effort, targeting key states and working to undermine the Democrats hoping to run against him in 2004.

The hub of activity is the Republican National Committee headquarters on Capitol Hill, stocked with key members of the Bush team and fashioned to serve as the president’s reelection operation in all but name. The idea, say those familiar with the arrangement, is to distance Bush and the White House from overt politicking as long as possible, without ceding ground in a race expected to be hard-fought and probably close.

The war in Iraq and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks “changed Bush’s presidency ... and made him a commander in chief,” said Scott Reed, a Republican consultant and former top staffer at GOP headquarters. “That gives Bush a huge advantage over his Democratic opponents, and this White House will work to keep him in that seat as long as possible.”

“By becoming ‘candidate’ Bush, you put yourself on the same level as ‘candidate’ Kerry,” Reed added, referring to Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, one of the nine Democrats competing for the party’s nomination. “Evolving from a candidate to president is a big step, and you never want to go backward.”

Bush’s top political aides declined to be interviewed for this article, and the White House has actively discouraged other Republican operatives from talking about the president’s reelection plans; most of those willing to discuss Bush’s strategy and the planning quietly underway would not do so for attribution.

“There is no campaign,” said Jim Dyke, chief spokesman for the Republican National Committee, where all major decisions flow from the White House and the president’s chief political aide, Karl Rove.

But others suggest that the Bush campaign never let up after the 2000 election, despite efforts to portray the White House as paying little attention to politics. “It’s the campaign that never turns off,” said a Western GOP operative, who participates in one of several weekly strategy calls that originate at party headquarters and tie in dozens of GOP operatives across the country. “They’ve been at it ever since they’ve been inaugurated.”

Tom Rath, a veteran New Hampshire GOP strategist and leading Bush hand in that key state, said he had breakfast with Rove within 10 days of Bush’s swearing-in and has regularly talked strategy with him since.

The reelection effort has picked up even more in recent weeks after Bush told aides to proceed with planning for 2004 -- provided they don’t expect his active involvement soon.

But even before that signal came from the top, Rove -- a lover of history -- and others in the White House began plotting the 2004 strategy, starting with research into past reelection campaigns. Special care was given to study the failed effort of Bush’s father, down to his day-to-day schedule in 1992 and the timing of campaign media statements, according to one Republican. But the working model for this Bush’s reelection bid has been adapted from the last two presidents to win second terms: Republican Ronald Reagan and Democrat Bill Clinton.

Reagan, who was personally popular in the way Bush is today, stayed out of the political mix until well into his reelection year. Clinton, in turn, amassed a huge financial advantage over his opponent and used that to begin a springtime advertising campaign that pounded the GOP nominee, former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, before Dole had the means to adequately respond.

Bush is expected to enjoy a similar financial edge and emulate Reagan and Clinton by standing aside while aides launch an aggressive assault on whomever the Democrats nominate. That candidate should emerge sometime around March; the White House hope is that he or she too will lack the financial resources to effectively respond until the Democratic National Convention in July -- by which time it may be too late.

A consultant who has worked closely alongside Rove described his operating style this way: “In your face. Offense, offense, offense. Attack, attack, attack.

“They want to do whatever they can to put banana peels under every single Democrat running” even before it is clear which of them Bush will face, the GOP strategist said. “Whoever [the Democrats] nominate, they want him weakened by the time he gets through the process.”

Many of those who served with Rove in Bush’s first presidential campaign are expected to reprise their roles, including pollster Matthew Dowd, media advisor Mark McKinnon and finance director Jack Oliver, who now serves as deputy chairman and day-to-day overseer of the Republican National Committee. Ken Mehlman, the White House political director, is likely to serve as campaign manager, and Karen Hughes, Bush’s closest advisor-without-portfolio, will also play a key role, perhaps out of a satellite campaign office in Austin, Texas. Marc Racicot, chairman of the RNC, may assume the same role and title at Bush’s reelection committee.

Along with deciding those personnel matters, White House strategists have conducted a painstaking review of the electoral college map, with an eye toward tailoring Bush’s travels to states that would allow him to shore up his skimpy 2000 electoral college margin. At the top of the list of states Bush lost and now plans to target are Pennsylvania and Michigan, according to party insiders.

As for the campaign’s treasury, in 2000, Bush raised more than $100 million, a record, to capture the GOP nomination in a crowded field. With the ceiling for individual contributions now doubled, to $2,000, and Bush enjoying the advantages of incumbency, he could easily top that amount in 2004. However, it is unclear how much Bush intends to raise; a White House strategist dismissed reports of a $200-million to $250-million budget as wildly speculative, but declined to offer another figure. Regardless, the president is expected to easily raise whatever sum he needs, allowing him to put off fund-raising for at least a few more months, as he would like.

A delay also fits into the White House strategy of keeping Bush out of the political back-and-forth as long as possible by taking trips that are billed as presidential in nature even though they carry political weight too -- trips like the ones he has recently taken to Missouri, Ohio and Michigan, states vital to his reelection. (It also means that taxpayers pick up the tab instead of Bush’s reelection committee.) Even when Bush starts campaign travel closer to the end of the year, it will be limited largely to a handful of select states, such as early-voting Iowa and New Hampshire, and will be tailored to appear “presidential” rather than blatantly political in nature, a White House advisor said.

That leaves the RNC to function, for now, as the reelection campaign in absentia, building support in key states, tending to the party’s big donors as well as grass-roots activists and, perhaps most important, harrying the nine Democratic candidates.

To that end, RNC researchers have compiled dossiers on all the party’s hopefuls and distributed them to reporters under such provocative headlines as, “Who is John Edwards? An unaccomplished liberal in moderate clothing and a friend to his fellow personal injury trial lawyers.”

The purpose, explained one party communications strategist, “is to get journalists to run a whole series of stories that build upon each other” until finally a negative image “takes root” -- the way former Vice President Al Gore came to be depicted in the 2000 campaign as a serial exaggerator.

Democrats have a similar research and message-dissemination operation at their headquarters just a few blocks away from the Republicans. But even party insiders acknowledge that the Democrats lack the resources and discipline that make GOP efforts so effective.

“Republicans have, since the 1960s, been building and using the RNC to make it an active and aggressive campaign tool with investments in databases, in direct mail, in phone banks, in Internet technology,” said Jenny Backus, a recently departed Democratic Party spokeswoman in Washington. Although Democrats have made significant strides over the last two years, she said, they haven’t caught up.

Also, Democrats lack the powerful echo chamber created by a wealth of sympathetic media outlets that can turn a set of “talking points” sent from GOP headquarters into a story that dominates the political news for days. “You put a message out and if the traditional media don’t cover it, talk radio and the cable [television] people will,” said Don Fierce, who helped run the RNC through the mid-1990s. “There’s much more amplification than there used to be.”

A good illustration is the recent flap over Kerry’s quip calling for “regime change” in the 2004 election. Within 24 hours, a media account of Kerry’s remark had been dispatched as part of the RNC’s regular Thursday e-mail briefing to 350,000 party activists. The party’s congressional leaders condemned Kerry, the story made national headlines and the Massachusetts senator was forced to repeatedly respond to reporters’ questions about his comment.

Then, for good measure, Kerry was assailed by military veterans in each of the next several states he visited; their quotes were corralled by GOP leaders and passed on to reporters in Arizona, South Carolina and California, keeping the story alive and helping shape local news coverage.

“Message repetition is pretty fundamental,” said a California GOP strategist who has worked closely with the White House . “It’s basic stuff that doesn’t always get done right. And this group is very, very good at it.”