THE LAST BATTLE OF THE '60s:

How Bush Did It: A team of NEWSWEEK reporters unveils the untold fears, secret battles and private emotions behind a historic election (Newsweek, 11/15/04)

In the winter of 2003-04, Jenna Bush, one of president Bush's 22-year-old twin daughters, dreamed that her father lost the election. Jenna had never before shown any interest in politics or much desire to get involved in her father's campaigns. But now she, along with her sister, Barbara, volunteered to help their father get re-elected. The president was overjoyed to have the girls on the campaign bus, recalled his wife, Laura. His mood lightened, to the relief of his handlers, who had been anxiously discussing their candidate's surliness and impatience. [...]

It is not clear when George W. Bush and John Kerry first met. Kerry once recalled Bush, none too fondly, to writer Julia Reed of Vogue magazine: "He was two years behind me at Yale, and I knew him, and he's still the same guy." Bush says he has no recollection of meeting Kerry at Yale. Both presidential candidates were members of the same college secret society, Skull and Bones, but brothers they were not. The two men had disliked each other before they knew each other.

Bush did not remember Kerry but he knew the type: sanctimonious suck-ups who looked down on fun-loving fellows like George W. Bush. In the world according to Bush, guys like Kerry were not out just to ruin Yale. They wanted to take over the whole country, to impose the smug, know-it-all liberal ideology on regular, God-fearing, hardworking Americans. Kerry's regard for Bush was just as dismissive. Kerry may or may not have met Bush at Yale but he had met his kind before. At Kerry's prep school, boys like Bush were known as "regs," regular guys, the cool, sarcastic in-crowd that made awkward, too-eager-to-please boys like John F. Kerry feel low and left out. The regs were insular, stuck up, too sure of themselves to reach out to, or even see, the wider world.

It is impossible to understand the 2004 presidential campaign without appreciating the nature of the animus between the two men. It wasn't entirely personal; the candidates were capable of saying gracious things about each other's family. But their differences went beyond party or ideology or styles of leadership. Each saw the other as a symbol of the wrong side of the great post-1960s divide. Bush eyed Kerry and saw the worst of Blue State America—a pseudo-intellectual, a Frenchified phony, a dithering weakling. Rove built a whole campaign around this point of view, casting Kerry as a "flip-flopper," "out of the mainstream," clinging to the effete "left bank" of society. Kerry looked down on Bush and saw the worst of Red State America, a know-nothing who blustered and swaggered, even though his head was stuck in the sand. The two candidates could debate lofty issues in a time of war, but their mutual disdain showed through.