...Kerry was fading fast. The press got wind of the infighting and began joking that Kerry's campaign was like Noah's Ark—two of everything—as Kerry straddled the advice given him and tried to please everyone. "I couldn't get the man to make decisions," said Jordan...

...Kerry seemed to be walking on eggshells around Teresa. He wanted her to be happy, in part because she was much more trouble on the campaign trail when she was unhappy. Teresa had a way of letting everyone know that Kerry was her second husband, and that she still loved her first, Sen. John Heinz, who died in a plane crash in 1991. (The portraits of the two Johns hang side by side in her Georgetown mansion.) Teresa above all valued her own candor. She wanted to be able to talk about her Botox injections and yak with women reporters about her views on reincarnation and the pros and cons of hormone-replacement therapy. She did not want to hear about "message discipline." Indeed, her frankness could be refreshing. Some crowds responded with "you go, girl" enthusiasm when she made fun of her husband and voiced a strong opinion on the trail. But others wondered why the slightly eccentric woman introducing the candidate was prattling on about herself in a difficult-to-understand accent. She was not one for the plastic, adoring smile of the traditional candidate's wife. On the other hand, Kerry's handlers wondered, did she have to look sullen?

At one point in the summer, as Dean was starting to pull away, Teresa called Jordan and demanded, "I want you to issue a challenge for me to debate Howard Dean." Jordan was less than diplomatic in telling her it was a crazy idea, and he had a little too much fun sharing the moment with other campaign officials...

...There were other omens that the race was far from over. Before the dinner, a curious event took place. The Dean campaign, eager to show off its vast army of Deaniacs, took reporters out on the skywalk in downtown Des Moines to watch 40-plus yellow schoolbuses rumble into town—shock troops in the Dean onslaught to get out the vote for the January Iowa caucuses, the first electoral test on the road to the nomination. One of the reporters noticed something odd. "Is it just me, or are they empty?" asked Liz Marlantes of The Christian Science Monitor. The other reporters tried to peer through the tinted-glass windows. All they could see was row after row of empty seats...

...On Dec. 9 Al Gore showed the political fingertips that lost him the 2000 election. He endorsed Howard Dean, probably at the precise moment when Dean had peaked and was about to head down. Gore's endorsement came as a blow to Kerry, who had thought Gore was his friend, or at least his political ally. When the Kerry camp heard the rumors that Gore was endorsing Kerry's opponent, Kerry tried to call the former veep to find out if it could be true. Kerry had Gore's cell-phone number and called him. "This is John Kerry," he said when Gore answered. The phone went dead. Kerry tried to call several more times and never got through. He was hurt. "I endorsed him early. I was up for consideration as his running mate," he complained to an aide...

...Dean had always been a loose cannon. In the summer of 2002, his aides had been relieved that no cameras had captured the would-be Democratic nominee, in full cry at a gay fund-raiser on New York's Fire Island, shouting out, "If Bill Clinton could be the first black president, I can be the first gay president!"...In December, Trippi told his aides, Dean had come to him and tearfully confessed that he had run only to shake up the Democratic Party and push for health-care reform, that he never cared about being president and never thought he could win. ("That's a figment of Joe's imagination," Dean told NEWSWEEK. "I mean, Joe just made that up out of whole cloth.")...

...In Esquire magazine, writer Ron Suskind recalled sitting outside Rove's office waiting for an interview to begin. Inside, he wrote, he could hear Rove bellowing at an aide, "We will f--- him. Do you hear me? We will f--- him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever f---ed him!" (A White House spokesman has said that Suskind has a "hyperactive imagination.") But Rove was well aware of his reputation and cultivated it. On Halloween 2003, a NEWSWEEK reporter teased Rove for not wearing a costume. "I'm scary enough," he replied.

Rove made little attempt to hide his feelings. Poking his head into the crowded press cabin on Air Force One during a trip on a frigid day in January, he snarled, "Weenies!"...

...McCain batted away the idea as not serious. But Kerry was intent, and after he wrapped up the nomination in March, he went back after McCain a half-dozen more times. "I can't say this is an offer because I've got to be able to deny it," Kerry told his friend. "But you've got to do this." To show just how sincere he was, he made an outlandish offer. If McCain said yes, he would expand the role of vice president to include secretary of Defense and the overall control of foreign policy. (The deal was reminiscent of the so-called co-presidency offered to Gerald Ford by Ronald Reagan at the 1980 Republican convention; the suggestion fell apart of its own weight.) McCain exclaimed, "You're out of your mind. I don't even know if it's constitutional, and it certainly wouldn't sell."