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Indeed, heading into Election Night, a primal fear of the Bush campaign was that they would win the popular vote but lose in the Electoral College—the only vote that really mattered. So concerned were they that the campaign had armed its surrogates—the men and women who would appear on the various networks throughout the evening—with arguments challenging the legitimacy of such an outcome, raising the possibility that a few “rogue electors” or state legislatures or the (likely) new Republican Congress would deliver the presidency to Bush.
“It was part of the talking points,” said Ken Duberstein, a former White House Chief of Staff and one of the best-connected Republicans in Washington. “Even if it wasn’t something they thought they could win, they could certainly make an issue out of moral authority.”
Now, the last-minute revelation that young George W. Bush had been busted for drunk driving, combined with a massive Gore ground game fueled by the labor unions, had given the Democrats that symbolically significant national popular-vote plurality.
At Gore’s command post in Nashville, the network projections were the cause of more than celebrations—they triggered a profound sense of relief. All day, calls had been coming in from Palm Beach, Florida, about massive ballot confusion in the heavily Democratic, heavily Jewish districts, with people fearing that the confusing “butterfly ballot” design had misled them into voting for right-wing independent candidate Pat Buchanan.
“We were getting calls at eight in the morning on Election Day from people worried they had miscast their vote,” said Randy Schultz, editor of the Palm Beach Post’s editorial page, “and it just built from there.”
But now it didn’t matter. Al Gore was winning Florida anyway; and the mishaps in Palm Beach would be a footnote, fodder for some poli-sci dissertation or late-night liquor-fueled recollections on a future campaign trail. And shortly after 11 p.m. in the East, Governor George W. Bush called Vice President Al Gore to offer his congratulations.
“You gave us a real fight,” Gore said.
“Well, your guys on the ground did a heck of a job, Al,” Bush replied.
But even as Bush was putting down the phone, his campaign command was furiously pushing back against the “Gore has won” narrative. Karl Rove and Bill Bennett were on CNN, ABC, and Fox, demanding to know why the Gore states were being called early while states likely to go for Bush were being described as “too close to call.” Mary Matalin was telling CNN that the Florida numbers were “unreliable.”
And as the night wore on, even with Gore’s Florida margin holding steady at 30,000 votes, there was still a path for Bush to make it to 270 electoral votes. He had won Ohio, another intensely contested swing state, as well as Arkansas and Tennessee, the home states of Clinton and Gore. Ralph Nader’s 22,000 votes in New Hampshire had put that state into Bush’s column (by 7,000 votes). By midnight, three states still hung in the balance: Iowa, Wisconsin, and New Mexico. If Bush could win all three, those twenty-three electoral votes would give him 270 in all—precisely the minimum number needed for the Presidency.
When the votes were counted, however, all three states, by the closest of margins, had gone for Gore: Wisconsin by 5,200 votes, Iowa by about 4,000; and New Mexico by just 367 votes. That gave Gore 291 electoral votes—and triggered one of the Republican Party’s favorite Election Day talking points.
“It’s voter fraud, pure and simple!” Republican lawyer Ben Ginsberg told NBC’s Tim Russert. “We have documented proof that students in Wisconsin and Iowa, with residence in New York and Illinois and Minnesota, voted illegally.”
“A classic case of sore-loser-itis,” James Carville cracked on CNN. “Last time I checked, the governor of Wisconsin was a Republican. Does anyone think Tommy Thompson was trying to rig the election for Al Gore?”
The razor-thin margins were enough for George W. Bush to place a highly unusual phone call to Vice President Gore shortly after midnight Central time, when the networks projected California and the other two West Coast states as Gore’s—enough to give him the White House.
“Mr. Vice President,” he said, “I just want you to know that I’m seeing the same numbers you are—and there are just too many close states for me to offer you a concession after all. If Iowa or Wisconsin or New Mexico really end up on your plate, I’ll be happy to call back with a handshake.”
“Let me understand this,” Gore said in disbelief. “You’re calling me to tell me you’re not conceding?”
“Well, you might want to get that burr out of your saddle,” Bush said. “We just want to make sure all the votes—the legitimate votes—are all counted.”
It looked like an unprecedented post-election fight might delay the outcome. But by midafternoon the next day, the high command of the Bush campaign—including the candidate himself—had come to a reluctant, inescapable conclusion: A post-election fight simply could not be won.
“In Florida, there was just too big a margin for a recount to matter,” one Bush insider admitted. “We thought we had a chance when we saw what was happening in Palm Beach and up in Jacksonville; those screwed-up ballots were costing Gore a whole bunch of votes. But we just didn’t get what we needed out of Little Havana,” he said.
And the next morning, over a breakfast empanada at Miami’s Versailles restaurant, one veteran of political wars pointed to a factor that had been consigned to utter obscurity over the past ten months.
“Imagine,” said prominent Democratic pollster Sergio Bendixen, “where we’d be if Elián González’s mom hadn’t survived and he’d been sent back to his father in Cuba. Imagine the protests, the rallies, the fury on Spanish talk radio. The whole community would have been up in arms, and it wouldn’t have mattered how much Gore tried to distance himself from his own administration. A six-year-old boy forced back to Fidel Castro’s Cuba? I shudder to think.”
But it hadn’t happened.
Because Elián and his mother were now living in obscurity in Cárdenas, Cuba, Al Gore did not have to contend with an outraged Cuban community. And, while virtually no one realized it at the time, the survival of the boy’s mother almost a year before Election Day was the reason Al Gore won the state of Florida—and with it the presidency of the United States.
* * *
With the 2000 election finally resolved, both victor and vanquished spoke gracious words of harmony.
Governor Bush, appearing before a joint session of the Texas legislature, acknowledged that “Vice President Gore and I put our hearts and hopes into the campaign; we both gave it all we had. But now the campaign is over; now we must put politics behind us and work together to make the promise of America available for every one of our citizens. … I hope and believe that President Gore and a Republican Congress, guided by a spirit of common sense, common courtesy, and common goals, can unite and inspire the American people.”
“Great speech, Governor,” whispered Texas house speaker Pete Laney, a Democrat. Others were less charitable. “If that asshole Rove hadn’t tried to cover up that drunk-driving bust,” said Lieutenant Governor Rick Perry, “I’d be heading into the governor’s mansion right about now.”
A few moments later, from his Carthage, Tennessee, farm, Al Gore thanked Bush for his kind words and said, “What remains of partisan rancor must be put aside. Now is the time to recognize that what unites us is greater than that which divides us.”
If those words gave the listeners the impression that the Gore presidency would begin an Era of Good Feeling, they were badly mistaken.
The Republican fury ranged freely in all directions. Some of it was aimed at the man who had directed George W. Bush’s campaign and who had directed Bush’s political ascent for years. The recriminations aimed at Karl Rove had begun even before the Bush camp finally conceded.
“What kind of idiot spends millions of dollars in California and New Jersey?” thundered Bill O’Reilly. “That pinhead Rove gave us four years of Al Gore!”
“Any Republican who hires Karl Rove to run any campaign again,” the magazine wrote, “will prove that Rove has a fool for a client.” (Rove soon announced that he would retire from politics to pursue a doctorate in American political history at Rice University, where he then began a distinguished teaching career.) The Standard also asked rhetorically, “Does anyone doubt for a moment that John McCain would have beaten Gore like a rented mule?”
These shots signaled the beginning of a low-grade civil war—some bemoaning the party’s failure to choose its most electable candidate, others welcoming the chance, as House Majority Leader Tom DeLay put it, “to apply some much-needed chemotherapy to the malignant liberalism that infects our ranks.” Ex-speaker Newt Gingrich, in a speech to the employees of the mortgage giant Freddie Mac, declared, “Frankly, as a historian, I am unaware of any presidential campaign mismanaged in so stunningly stupid a manner, nor one so fundamentally inept.”
The heaviest Republican fire, though, was aimed at the incoming president and the Democrats.
A Stolen Election? was the title of a one-hour Fox News special; the broadcasts of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity and the radio shows of Rush Limbaugh and company dispensed with the question mark.
Moreover, there was something deeply personal about the GOP’s disdain for Al Gore.
“A lot of us kind of liked Clinton,” outgoing Florida senator Connie Mack said. “He could see your point of view, he knew our states and districts better than we did sometimes, and he was comfortable with the give-and-take of politics. But Gore? Pompous, self-righteous—and absolutely convinced that he was the smartest guy in the room, and would be pleased to prove it you. And by the way,” he added, “there were a hell of a lot of Democrats who thought the same thing.”
Most important was the stark political threat to the GOP’s future. As longtime Washington scholar Norm Ornstein noted just before the inauguration, “if Al Gore succeeds, that will mean twelve consecutive years of a Democratic president presiding over an increasingly satisfied electorate. And this time, there won’t be a scandal to mar the record. I mean, can you imagine Al Gore being accused of sexual misconduct? The Republicans could find themselves wandering in the political desert for twenty years, as they did all through the Thirties and Forties. So there’s no way they can afford to let Gore succeed.” Rush Limbaugh underlined that point when he said, the day before the inauguration, “I want him to fail—nothing less than the future of America depends on it.” The sentiment of most Republicans was made clear when Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott reportedly told the Senate GOP caucus, “Our biggest priority is to make Al Gore a one-term president.“
There were more early storm clouds for Gore, however, in the form of difficulties within Democratic Party ranks. For one thing, there was Bill Clinton. Gore never got over the feeling that Clinton’s behavior had nearly cost him the presidency, something he made abundantly clear in a one-on-one meeting with the outgoing president just before Thanksgiving. While no one else was present, reports from intimates told pretty much the same story: Gore confronted Clinton with the consequences of his behavior. “Your hormones damn near cost me the White House!” he snapped. “And don’t talk to me about ‘private behavior.’ Donna Shalala was right when she said if you’d been a teacher at any university in America, they’d have fired your ass!” Clinton, for his part, was dumbfounded that Gore did not have the political smarts to use the administration’s economic record or deploy him effectively in the closing days of the campaign. “Did it ever occur to you,” Clinton reportedly asked Gore, “to turn to Bush just once and say, ‘What is it about eight years of peace and prosperity you don’t like?’ ”
As one Clinton friend quipped, “what he was really asking Gore was why he never thought to ask the voters to weigh one blow job against twenty million new jobs.”
Gore had a deeper dilemma with his base in the Democratic Party, who were anxious for a president who would deliver on some of their fondest wishes: universal health care, a major increase in funds for child care and education, and legislation to make it easier for unions to organize and to reverse the long-term decline in union membership. And with the prospect of massive surpluses for years to come—$3 trillion over the next decade!—there was plenty of money to be spent.
Gore, however, had a very different agenda.
“He knows he just won one of the closest elections in history,” his longtime aide Ron Klain said. “There obviously has to be a good deal of bipartisanship in governing.” And with a Republican House and an evenly divided Senate, there was no chance of passing any kind of ambitious liberal program anyway. And if he ruffled the feathers of some of his fellow Democrats, well, hadn’t Clinton shown how politically potent the “different kind of Democrat” message could be? It was a tightrope walk, but President-elect Gore was determined to walk it, balancing his own preferences with enough gestures to the Democratic base to avoid an open revolt.
He knew, for example, that when he picked Richard Holbrooke as his secretary of state, he would bend a lot of senatorial noses out of shape: Joe Biden and John Kerry both coveted that slot, and he had bypassed both when he had selected Lieberman as his running mate. “I know Dick can be a royal pain in the ass,” he said to his top foreign-policy aide, Leon Fuerth, about Holbrooke, “but you saw what he did at Dayton—how many lives were saved when the Bosnian War stopped? Besides, you’ll be at the NSC if he starts going off the deep end.”
So he had the Senate’s self-esteem very much in mind when, in a private conversation that his aides made sure did not remain private, he invited Senator John McCain to the vice president’s official residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory, which until 1974 had been the residence of the chief of naval operations.
“My father and grandfather knew this place well,” McCain said. “And there was a time I thought I might find myself here one day.”
“I have something different in mind,” Gore said. “Secretary of defense.”
McCain shook his head.
“I’m not denying it’s tempting,” he said plainly. “I’d love to see the look on the faces of those goldbricks when they found out I was coming. But Al—Mr. President—would you walk away from another shot at the White House if you were in my position?”
Of course I wouldn’t, Gore thought. But it’s not going to hurt when the public find out I asked the most popular Republican in the country to work with me. Besides, Sam Nunn will be a far more popular choice on Capitol Hill to run the Pentagon.
Gore followed a familiar path in choosing a card-carrying Republican as secretary of the treasury, but this particular selection also fulfilled a political imperative: making sure that one of the Big Four cabinet posts was not a white male. As president of Time Warner, and with a solid banking past, Richard Parsons was a reassuring figure on Wall Street; the fact that he would be the first African American ever appointed to one of the Big Four was a bonus.
“You’re out of your mind!” Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin told Parsons when he declared he was leaving. “Once the AOL merger is done, do you have any idea how much money you’ll be leaving on the table? You’re walking away from a gold mine!”
Apart from staffing, the president-elect and his aides drafted a first-year agenda aimed at winning over skeptics.
“Remember,” said Elaine Kamarck, a longtime close aide, “this is the man who wanted to be known for ‘reinventing government.’ One of the first things he asked me to work on the day after Election Night was to find some government agency we could abolish.”
It was an approach calculated to appeal to the broad middle of the American electorate, to convince them that Gore, like his predecessor, was a “different kind of Democrat,” one in touch with the v
oters.
And it was an approach the new president managed to throw overboard even before he was sworn in—by reaching back to one of his most authentic, deep-seated convictions.
* * *
Al Gore wrote Earth in the Balance in 1992, the same year Bill Clinton chose him as his running mate. It was a cry from the heart, written in near-apocalyptic tones, warning that “we must take bold and unequivocal action: we must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization.” He called for “the elimination of the internal combustion engine in my lifetime” and for a “Global Marshall Plan” to save the planet. The book became a bestseller—and a cudgel gleefully wielded by Republicans to paint the Tennessee senator as an elitist who cared more about snail darters and herons than jobs for working Americans.
“Ozone Man!” President Bush had called him back in ’92—a label that most voters found puzzling if not indecipherable—but it was during the 2000 campaign that Gore’s passionate environmentalism almost proved to be his undoing. On Election Night, coal miners in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee had helped deliver those states to George W. Bush, while loggers in Oregon and factory workers in Michigan and Pennsylvania had almost put those states in Bush’s column.
The incoming president, however, came away from his election with a very different conclusion: You know why a lot of voters thought I was a candidate without convictions? Because I let my hired guns talk me out of speaking about my most passionate belief: that the survival of the planet is in danger. When I speak as president, and when I run for reelection, I am going to speak from the heart.
And so he did—at an informal gathering of longtime associates at the vice president’s residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory just days before the inauguration. It was, the guests were told, “strictly off the record.” So when a member of the president-elect’s senior staff clicked on her digital recorder, she reasoned that she was simply keeping a record for posterity, and for the memoir she was determined to write after her years as a soon-to-be top White House aide were done.