Summing It All Up

By Walter Isaacson, Managing Editor

My love affair with presidential campaigns began back in 1980, when I covered Ted Kennedy and then Ronald Reagan as a lucky cub reporter for this magazine. Ever since, like a duck hunter or baseball fan drawn to opening day, I have managed to make it to New Hampshire for the start of the season.

The good thing about being at TIME this year is that I've been surrounded by similar junkies. Nation editor Priscilla Painton, who would overdose on her charming intensity if she didn't have such a good sense of humor, has turned her office into a war room where ideas are smartly debated and assignments juggled. Executive editor Steve Koepp, a calmer soul, provides a nice combination of wisdom and imagination in bringing the ideas to fruition.

Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy, who can match Priscilla's intensity, is totally plugged into each of the campaigns, which helps him dispatch his correspondents and provide some amazing reporting of his own. This week, as he has often in the past, he links up with our chief political writer, Nancy Gibbs, a master at weaving together news and narrative and color and emotions, to produce our main story.

Jay Carney and John Dickerson, who have been covering Bush, and Karen Tumulty and Tam Edwards, on Gore, have shown how it's possible to be sophisticated without being jaded. Chief political correspondent Eric Pooley is a diligent, probing fact finder who has constantly dug deeper into topics that others were treating glibly. And our columnist Margaret Carlson has, throughout the year, provided a tangy mix of sharp wit and common sense, as she does with her column on Bill Clinton this week.

During the primary season, we focused largely on biography. We looked at the candidates' backgrounds, their records, their personalities and their formative experiences. After the conventions, we shifted our focus to issues: where the candidates stood and what philosophies they reflected.

We were helped by the fact that this was, despite some lapses, a rather good campaign. For years, we've said we want politicians to focus on issues and be specific about their plans, and this time they generally did.

We bring it all together this week with a special issue on The Choice. Even though both Bush and Gore tried at times to blur their differences, we believe there are important distinctions, which Michael and Nancy explore. It's illustrated by a series of special photographs by Christopher Morris. Karen and Jay sum up another aspect of the candidates: how they are as managers and what that would mean if they were in the Oval Office. The story also includes charts of the people around both candidates who really influence their thinking. And deputy Washington bureau chief Matt Cooper, who has helped Duffy direct our political reporting, provides the latest in his string of dispatches from the trail. This one is on Ralph Nader.

Steve Lopez, who has been doing campaign diaries for the Nation section as well as his new column at the front of the magazine, visits with undecided voters in Florida and delves into their thoughts a lot deeper than those TV focus groups did. We asked two of our more partisan contributors, Roger Rosenblatt and Peggy Noonan, to make the strongest case they could for their choices. And we have dedicated this issue's Education Special Report, an important monthly feature we launched in September, to the candidates' views on school reform.

We hope you'll find this week's package--and the continuing updates to it on Time.com--helpful And get ready for our next special: we'll be staying up through election night to produce a double-size issue that will be published the next day. Help us get it done on time by voting early!

Walter Isaacson, Managing Editor