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When Gore Beat Bush—A Political Fable
By Jeff Greenfield
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Copyright © 2012 by Jeff Greenfield
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Cover image © AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall
ISBN: 978-1-61452-046-7
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Table of Contents
Introduction
November 25, 1999: Thanksgiving Day
Election Day
Inauguration Day
The State of the Union
Summer 2001
September 11, 2001
In the Aftermath
January 30, 2002
April 10, 2002
Afterword: How the Facts Shape Speculation
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About Byliner
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Introduction
In the many-mansioned house of Alternate History, I occupy a small corner. The trio of what-ifs I chronicled in Then Everything Changed all begin with tiny, highly plausible twists of fate that lead to hugely consequential shifts in history:
Jacqueline Kennedy does not come to the door on a December Sunday in 1960 to see her husband off to church, so the suicide bomber parked outside the Kennedy home triggers his dynamite and John Kennedy is killed before ever assuming office; and Lyndon Johnson, with his very different understanding of foreign policy and power diplomacy, is in command during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Robert Kennedy’s brother-in-law enters the ballroom of a Los Angeles hotel on primary night in 1968 a few minutes early, and so is between Kennedy and Sirhan Sirhan in that kitchen pantry; and Kennedy and his presidential campaign survive—and triumph.
In a key debate moment in 1976, President Gerald Ford realizes that he misspoke about the Soviet Union’s domination of Poland and spares his campaign a crucial week of pain, thus changing the outcome of the Carter-Ford election.
It’s the “butterfly effect,” as first portrayed in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” where one dead butterfly millions of years ago leads to a contemporary world immeasurably more coarse, less kind. It’s the notion of the old nursery rhyme: “For want of a nail the kingdom was lost.”
When the book was published, I was asked countless questions about other scenarios, via e-mail and during my talks about the book. There are bookshelves of such works, of course, including several volumes of essays by historians under the what-if heading, and novels by the score. Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, recounting the election of Charles Lindbergh as president, is the most literary of such works; Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle both deal with a Nazi Germany victory in World War II.
The question I was asked most—by far—was What would have happened if Al Gore had defeated George W. Bush in 2000? Unsurprisingly, the question came overwhelmingly from disappointed Democrats, convinced that (a) the Republicans had stolen the election and (b) things would have gone a lot better with Gore in the Oval Office.
The assumption behind most of these questions was that the events of the Florida recount would somehow have played out differently: The Supreme Court would have let the vote counting continue; the count would have shown Gore winning; neither the governor, the legislature, nor the Supreme Court would have stepped in.
For me, this assumption was misplaced.
Among other things, the Republican-dominated Florida legislature had already indicated its readiness to use its power and assign the state’s electoral votes to Bush—a power that would have triggered a Constitutional battle royal. The Supreme Court, in my view, would have been fully prepared to resolve such a dispute in favor of Bush, either out of political motives or out of the more defensible notion that finality was essential, to avoid political chaos. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the ultimate arbiter of the electoral-vote count, would never have sanctioned a Gore win in Florida based on a recount.
No, the only way to present a Gore victory was to use the same approach I had in Then Everything Changed: find a tiny, plausible twist of fate that would have led to an unquestioned Gore victory.
With that small alteration of reality, this work puts Al Gore in the White House in January 2001.
And then … the law of unintended consequences goes to work.
November 25, 1999: Thanksgiving Day
There wasn’t a whole lot Al Gore was thankful for this day.
Here he was, the sitting vice president, seeking the presidency with assets that most candidates would have killed for. The country was at peace, the Cold War a decade in the past, with no credible threat to the nation’s security anywhere on the horizon. The economy? Too good to believe: a jobless rate under 4 percent, no inflation to speak of, twenty million new jobs in the past eight years, real incomes rising for the average American after decades of stagnation, and a budget surplus—a surplus—of $250 billion a year, a number so big that the pencil pushers were debating not if we could wipe out the national debt but whether we should.
And was there any presidential candidate better prepared than Gore? Elected to the House of Representatives before he was thirty, a U.S. senator at thirty-five, vice president by his mid-forties, with a grasp of public policy that was staggering. An interviewer would ask about, say, Africa, and Gore would respond, “The problem areas are Congo-Kinshasa, where the civil war has mutated into eight or nine simultaneous subregional civil wars. The movement toward stability in the Great Lakes region is proceeding very slowly, with Burundi making some progress in the wake of the Clinton-Mandela intervention. Rwanda’s president, Paul Kugame, is beginning to play a more constructive role.” Ask him why the stock market dropped 85 points yesterday and he’d interject, “88.75.”
And yet his run for the White House—a run he had been on almost from birth—was snarled by a host of troubles, some of his own making, some beyond his control. Despite the peace, despite an economy almost too good to believe, the country seemed to be saying, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
Part of it was that Gore was burdened by what every vice president suffers from: the sense that he had been more like a manservant to the president than a strong, independent political figure. Part of it was personal. That same grasp of detail could strike audiences as “wooden” and—more worrisome—a shade smug, as if he were determined always to prove himself the smartest guy in the room. There was the hangover from the fundraising at a Buddhist monastery back in 1996, an event he had tried to define by robotically insisting that “no controlling legal authority” barred it. There was the repeated refrain of “inauthenticity,” the idea that Gore would shift his words and beliefs to fit the political winds—maybe even alter his wardrobe. (Was the noted feminist Naomi Wolf really on his campaign payroll at $15,000 a month, advising him to wear “earth tones”? No, not really, but it was the kind of half-truth that stuck.)
But more than anything else, there was Bubba.
Bill Clinton had survived a midterm political disaster in 1994, losing both houses of Congress to the Republicans while enduring chronic inquiries into his financial dealings and endless whispers—often shouts—about his extracurricular appetites. After his reelection, in 1996, Clinton had been caught, literally, with his pants down with an intern half
his age and somehow survived impeachment—mostly because the country seemed to say, “We don’t trust you with our daughters, but we trust you with our money.”
But Al Gore could not seem to find the zone in which to distance himself from Clinton’s misbehavior while embracing the record. As columnist Mark Shields wrote, “if Bill Clinton drove through a car wash in a convertible with the top down, Al Gore would get wet.” In fact, he was drowning.
The governor from Texas, George W. Bush, long dismissed as the lightweight older brother of Jeb, was running far ahead of Gore in the polls and—what really caught the eye of the political world—Bush had doubled Gore’s fundraising in the first half of the year. Just as bad, his one rival for the Democratic nomination, former senator Bill Bradley, had topped Gore’s fundraising numbers, was running even with him in Iowa polls, and had passed him in New Hampshire. And if voters doubted the Texas governor’s gravitas, they seemed to be even more put off by Gore’s presumed condescension. (As a much quoted line had it, “Bush speaks as if English were his second language; Gore speaks as if English were your second language.”)
By November Gore had shaken up his campaign staff, jettisoning longtime loyal colleagues, moving the campaign out of Washington to Nashville, and cutting the payroll by 40 percent—all steps guaranteed to drive the political press to find new synonyms for “faltering campaign.”
So it was not a particularly festive mood in the vice president’s household this Thanksgiving morning. But Al Gore was about to get the biggest break of his political life—nine hundred miles away.
* * *
They thought it was a doll at first.
Sam Ciancio was out on his cabin cruiser, along with his cousin Donato Dalrymple, spending Thanksgiving morning off Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when they spotted a large black inner tube with what looked like a doll inside. When they got closer, they saw that it was a child, tied to the inner tube. Local police took the boy to Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital, in Hollywood, Florida, where he told them his name and age—Elián González, six years old—and gave them the address and phone number of his father. He was from Cuba, he said, and had set out with his mother and a dozen others a few days earlier in a small boat. He added, “My mama got lost in the sea.”
But he was wrong.
On that same Thanksgiving morning, thirty miles south of Fort Lauderdale, Juan Ruiz and Reniel Carmenate were coming back to Key Biscayne after a night of fishing when they saw a man and woman huddling for warmth by the water’s edge. The two men brought the couple blankets and learned that they had set out, with thirteen others, from Cárdenas, Cuba, three nights earlier on a rusty fifteen-foot aluminum boat. The two were lovers seeking a new life in America; they had paid the boat owner for passage. A series of storms had finally capsized the vessel, sweeping away their food and water and shredding one of the huge tires they had brought to serve as lifeboats. One by one, the passengers had slipped into the sea; the couple had no idea whether anyone else had survived.
As the two men wrapped them in blankets—they were blistered, shivering, covered with bite marks from fish—they saw sprawled out on the beach a young woman, slipping in and out of consciousness, repeating one word over and over: “Elián … Elián … Elián … ”
* * *
It had all the makings of a major international incident—for thirty-six hours. Juan Miguel González, the father of Elián, had no idea that his ex-wife, Elizabet Broton, had left Cuba with their son. (Juan Miguel had remarried but was a strong presence in Elián’s life.) She had left, he was told, not out of politics but out of love; Rafa Munero, the owner of the boat, was her lover, and she wanted to be with him in America. Juan Miguel had family in Miami—uncles, aunts, a great-uncle Lázaro—and he called them from Cuba, alerting them to the flight of his ex-wife and son, as soon as the hospital called him. He assumed they would work quickly to return Elián to him in Cuba.
He was wrong.
The González family lived on 2nd Street, in the heart of Little Havana—ground zero for a Cuban American population that had reached some 800,000 by the end of the 1990s. It was a community that virtually controlled Miami politics, and that control was driven by a fierce, unrelenting opposition to the regime of Fidel Castro. Its Spanish-speaking radio stations, its newspaper, its politicians of both parties were implacable foes of any policy that even hinted at accommodation with Cuba, and the most powerful force in that world—the Cuban American National Foundation—was known to exact political, financial, even physical retribution against any dissidents in the ranks.
So when Elián González was released into the temporary custody of Lázaro, the idea of sending him home to his father was swiftly replaced by another: Elián must not be sent back to that Communist hell on earth.
The González family was intensely political, even by the standards of the hothouse that was Miami’s Cuban-exile community. Elián’s great-uncle Delfin had been a Castro dissident in the early 1960s. His cousin Marisleysis, despite her youth, was well connected to other young, politically engaged Cubans. For them, and for the hardcore anti-Castro exiles in their families, Elián had been divinely delivered to freedom out of the prison that was Cuba. (Hadn’t dolphins surrounded the little boy, protecting him from sharks and from drowning?) Within hours, prominent political figures like Miami’s Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen were posing for photos with the boy, and radio talk-show hosts were demanding that Elián stay.
Then, on November 28, Elisabet Broton—Elisa, as she was known—regained full consciousness. A series of phone calls from her hospital to and from Cárdenas informed her that Elián was alive and well in Miami. Three hours later, Elisa was at the González home on 2nd Street. At first, she was welcomed as another symbol of freedom. And then she asked the visitors, the photographer, the reporters, and the politicians to leave. And she spoke to the family of her ex-husband.
“I am not going to stay here,” she said. “Our plan—Rafa’s and mine—was to live with his aunt outside the city. Now Rafa is gone, drowned, and I do not know what I will do. But you must know I am not going to stay in the home of the family of the ex-husband who betrayed me with so many women in Cárdenas. Maybe I will stay in Florida; maybe I will return to Cuba. But I did not come here for politics. I came to be with the man I love, and now he is gone, and I need time to decide.”
The González family pleaded, begged, even threatened. “Elián is the symbol of a free Cuba,” they told her. “He is a little boy,” she responded, “who almost drowned, almost lost his mother.”
In the end, there was nothing they could do. A day later, she and Elián were out of the house, out of Little Havana, out of the media spotlight. Three months after that, Elisa and Elián quietly returned to Cuba. One of the more bitter relatives said later, “It would have been better if Elisa had drowned; then Elián would have been a symbol to the world.”
But she hadn’t. And he wasn’t.
And that made all the difference a little less than a year later, on November 7, 2000.
Election Day
It was 6:45 p.m. Central Standard Time, Tuesday, November 7. George W. Bush was in a private room at the Shoreline Grill, on San Jacinto Boulevard in Austin, Texas. He had just finished the Parmesan-crusted chicken and stuffed shrimp and was reaching for the ice cream when his brother called.
“Just got a heads-up from John,” Florida governor Jeb Bush said. John Ellis, a cousin, was working the decision desk at Fox News.
“They’re calling Florida for Gore,” Jeb said. Seconds later, the news was flashing on the TV set that had been wheeled into the dining room earlier that day.
It was as close to a death sentence as the Bush campaign could imagine. Everyone had known it for months: that the election could well come down to Florida and its twenty-five electoral votes. It was the biggest of the swing states—New York and California were in Gore’s pocket, Texas was clearly Bush country—and Florida had, in the C
linton years, turned from reliably Republican to competitive. As candidate and president, Bill Clinton had relentlessly pursued the Cuban American vote, backing stringent restrictions on trade and travel with Cuba. That had brought him within two points of carrying Florida in 1992, and—after he’d signed the Helms–Burton Act, which punished foreign-based companies that traded with the Castro regime—he won the state with a six-point margin over Bob Dole in 1996. Gore had no intention of challenging that policy.
By Election Day the race in Florida had become a coin flip, despite Governor Jeb Bush’s close political and financial ties to the Cuban American community. The African American community, incensed by Governor Bush’s attacks on affirmative action programs, was mobilizing. Older voters were dubious about Bush’s intentions toward Social Security. And Gore’s selection of Joe Lieberman as the first Jewish running mate had excited the significant Jewish community in South Florida.
And now, early on Election Night, the candidate’s brother—the governor of Florida, no less—was delivering the news that the state was being called for Al Gore.
“Karl says it’s an outrage—well, to be exact,” Jeb added, “he said it was a ‘fucking outrage.’ The polls are still open up in the Panhandle—that’s your turf, George. And God knows what this is gonna do to our folks all over the rest of the country. Not only that—John says the computer models are all wrong; we’ve got thousands and thousands more absentees voting. Only thing … ” He paused.
“Yes?”
“Only thing is … we don’t seem to be doing quite as well in Little Havana as we had hoped. You’re winning, of course, but it doesn’t look like the kind of numbers that we—”
“That we need to win the state—is that what you’re saying?”
There was a short, painful silence. “Yeah.”
“Well,” George said, “I’ve got myself to blame. That story of my DUI arrest wasn’t exactly the right way to close out a campaign. Karl says it might be costing us a couple of million votes from the evangelicals, which is enough to cost us the popular vote. And, well, we were banking on winning that.”
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