In My Time - Dick Cheney [151]
I was sure that the news of the governor’s DUI would bring up stories of my own DUIs from nearly forty years earlier, but that didn’t happen because they had already been written about. They were old news. But this Bush story, even though it was twenty-four years old, was now completely new. The late revelation hurt us. Karl Rove has pointed out that before the story broke we led Gore 40–35 in Maine. One night later Gore was ahead of us 44–40. We ended up losing Maine by 5 percent.
ALTHOUGH THIS OCTOBER SURPRISE was unpleasant, I didn’t think it would do us in, and we were in good spirits as we landed at home in Jackson Hole late on the evening of Monday, November 6. We walked through the frigid cold into an airport hangar full of the warmth of friends and family for a final rally. Then we headed home where, too exhausted to sleep, Lynne and I popped popcorn with our granddaughters.
Election Day dawned crisp, clear, and cold. It was one of those late fall mountain mornings I love. We drove the short distance from our house to the Wilson Fire Station to cast our votes. The traveling press corps was there, as was our friend David Kennerly, President Ford’s photographer. David always managed to appear at historic moments in our lives, and this certainly was one.
At the fire station Lynne and I stood in line to vote, and I held my granddaughter Kate’s hand as the election worker handed me my paper ballot and directed me to the voting booth nearest one of the exits to cast my vote. Photographers and cameramen had been allowed to crowd into the exit doorway, and I could hear the whirring and clicking of their cameras as I marked the space for George Bush and Dick Cheney on my ballot.
We went directly from the fire station to the airport. Just before boarding the campaign plane for what—one way or the other—was going to be the last time, we took lots of pictures of family and staff on the tarmac. The photos show happy, exhausted folks in front of the plane emblazoned with the big blue Bush-Cheney letters on the side, and in the background the most beautiful mountains in the world, the Grand Tetons.
To help occupy the time on the flight to Austin, some of the staff organized a pool for people to guess what our total number of electoral votes would be. Two hundred and seventy are needed to win and everyone laughed when Liz’s sister-in-law, Kristienne Perry, took the decidedly lowball number of 280. Liz and Mary teased her, telling her that she clearly didn’t know much about politics if she thought we were going to get only 280 electoral votes.
While we were still in the air, we started to get the first exit poll results. Kathleen Shanahan brought them up to Lynne and me in the front of the plane. They were bad. We were up in Iowa, Missouri, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, but we were down by 3 percent in Florida and 4 percent in Michigan. And the list of states where we were tied was too long for comfort. “It’s going to be a long night,” Kathleen said. We couldn’t have guessed just how long.
As soon as we arrived in Austin, we went to Karl Rove’s office at the campaign headquarters. It had a large wall of glass overlooking the hallway, and as we had our meeting, staffers stared in as they walked by, no doubt trying to assess our mood, anxious for any clue as to whether this was going to be a night to celebrate. In fact, we didn’t know much more than they did.
Based on the way things seemed to be breaking, Karl said it looked likely to be a long night, but he sketched out the path he saw that could move us to the neighborhood of three hundred electoral votes. Needless to say, Kristienne won the pool and was closer to right than most of the experts.
Lynne and I had invited friends and family to join us at the Four Seasons Hotel to watch the early election returns, before we all headed to the big celebration that had been planned