Breaking down the election

White House aide and former Bush campaign manager Karl Rove has a folder saved on his his laptop computer called "Florida." And a subfolder called "Recounts." Rove was among the top campaign leaders from the Gore and Bush camps who gathered Saturday for the Annenberg School Election Debriefing. It was an opportunity for those off the campaign trail to discuss their take on the 2000 election with political scholars from across the nation, to define future research agendas and to learn from each other. And the day became a tell-all affair. Rove, for instance, spoke about President Bush's decision during the campaign to conceal a 1976 drunk driving incident. "It was a decision that I agreed with," Rove said. "Are we going to have politics where we require every candidate to address themselves all the way back to [the age of] 18 months... and talk about the things they have or have not done?" Rove admitted that the decision might have cost Bush the state of Maine, and with it, five electoral votes. And while former senior Gore strategist Carter Eskew and Bush media director Mark McKinnon shook hands on Saturday, their parties' takes on the election remain far apart. "We actually believe that we won the election -- we won the popular vote by more than 500,000," Eskew said. "Our sense in the Gore campaign is that a fair counting of the votes would have led to an Electoral College victory as well." Rove maintained that Gore lost the election because he was "just another ordinary pol." "The Gore campaign didn't seem to know what its center was," Rove said. "You wake up any morning and pick up the newspaper and you could pick up what the Bush message was and what we wanted it to be -- it's not a secret. We wanted 105 million voters to know what the Bush strategy was." "And the fact that we then saw several different personas... I'm Mr. Populist, then in another town it was I'm Mr. High-Tech, and it was Mr. Earth Tones and then it was the Alpha Male. People said 'Who is this guy?'" Rove said of Gore. "There was never a question about George W. Bush. He had a clarity of who he was." A frequent cause of indecision for Gore was the role of President Clinton during the campaign, as Gore tried to be "his own man." "We definitely wanted to build on Clinton's record," Eskew said. "We embraced the notion of prosperity, but we also knew that we had to take it to the next level." Gore/Lieberman senior advisor Bob Shrum shrugged off the issue of tension between the Clinton and Gore camps, calling it an "obsession for the press" and denied that it was a problem. "[Clinton] gave us extraordinary political and financial support," Shrum continued. "But for a lot of the swing voters the election was as much about restoring honor and integrity to the White House as it was about the economy. And that's why I assume Bush kept saying it." "But does anyone doubt the plain fact that if there had been no so-called scandals... who would be sitting in the Oval Office today?" Shrum asked. A lack of money also hampered Gore's efforts to get his message across -- Bush spent $122 million between the conventions and the election, but Gore could only afford $76 million. "We had a candidate who had all of the downsides of being a vice president, despite the fact that he was one of the most involved and effective vice presidents in history," Eskew said. "The public had really no sense of that and just saw him as a guy who was just standing behind and not doing very much." During the debates -- a Gore speciality -- Bush managed to take much of the wind out of the vice president's sails, some of the participants said. "The Bush team did a really good job of jumping on the misstatements that the vice president made during the debates," Eskew said. "It became a very difficult thing for us to deal with -- it became the public's perception of the debate." Another reason why many feel Gore is today teaching journalism at Columbia University is because of votes siphoned off by Green party candidate Ralph Nader, especially as the environment was one of Gore's signature issues. But just don't tell Nader supporters that directly. "One argument that did not work against Nader voters was to insult them -- 'Don't be dumb and waste your vote,'" Gore pollster Stan Greenberg said. "You lost Nader votes that way." Annenberg senior researcher Michael Hagen said that the people who run these campaigns "are pretty darn smart." "Those of us who study politics in academics tend to think that sometimes that's not the case, but these people... they're on top of things." Annenberg graduate students had the opportunity to moderate each of the nine panels through the day. "I think that seeing them interact with each other is a wonderful experience," said Annenberg graduate student Dan Orr of watching the political experts. "Seeing them ask each other questions back and forth, it's very, very enlightening."