When the deadline set by the Florida Supreme Court came and went without all votes being counted, Harris immediately declared Bush the Florida winner by 537 votes. But Democrats got another Florida Supreme Court decision not only to reopen the Dade County hand counting but also to hand count ballots for which no choice was recorded for president in all sixty-seven counties in Florida.
AND THE WINNER IS … Republican lawyers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their case, which the court agreed to do on December 1. In oral arguments, Bush’s lawyers claimed that hand counting must be stopped because it failed to provide Bush equal protection under the law—the votes had already been counted, had been recounted automatically as per law, and the Democrats did not have a right to a hand count.
Democrats replied that it was quite odd that the Republicans, fierce state’s rights champions, should ask the court to intervene in what should essentially be an issue for the state of Florida to decide.
On December 9, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a stay of the recount. The decision was made by a sharply divided court, with five conservative justices triumphing over four moderate ones. On Monday, December 11, the Court heard arguments in Bush v. Gore. On December 12, they refused to allow the manual recounting to go forward, thus effectively handing the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush.
SO HOW DIRTY WAS IT? Bush had lost the popular vote but won in the Electoral College 271 to 266, thus becoming president. Historians turned to 1888 to find the last time that a presidential candidate—Benjamin Harrison—did not win the popular vote but won in the Electoral College.
If anything, the 2000 election most closely resembles the Rutherford Hayes vs. Samuel Tilden contest of 1876, which Tilden almost certainly won but had the election stolen from him by Republican “returning boards” in Louisiana, South Carolina, and, yes, Florida. The election was so dirty that Hayes never really recovered and became a one-term president.
In some ways, Republican efforts in Florida were not as sleazy as they have been made out to be. Roadblocks were not put up to keep blacks from voting, as has been reported. But no Republican official in Florida, entrusted with the votes of an entire state, acted in anything other than a partisan manner.
Had the tables been turned, had Democrats controlled the state, would they have acted in a less partisan fashion? No one knows. But other factors that helped Gore lose the election could not be blamed on the Republicans:
Had Gore been able to win his home state of Tennessee, which he did not, the whole Florida issue would have been moot.
Had Ralph Nader or even Pat Buchanan not run third-party challenges, Gore would have won.
Had Bill Clinton not acted as he did while in the White House (or had Gore decided to allow the still-popular president to campaign for him), Gore would probably have won.
And, if Gore and his forces had decided to fight as dirty as Bush’s forces did in Florida, they might have won as well. But from the very moment of his too-early concession, Al Gore acted like a gracious loser rather than a tough-minded winner.
A self-fulfilling prophesy, as it turned out.
YOU LOW-DOWN DIRTY RAT! One day during the summer of 2000, a Gore volunteer was watching a Republican ad attacking Gore’s prescription drug plan when he saw the word “RATS” flash across the screen. He reported it to Gore campaign officials, who played the ad slowly and also noticed the word, written in big white capital letters, followed by the phrase BUREAUCRATS DECIDE.
Was this an example of the so-called subliminal advertising that had first been tried in the 1950s, the art of hiding secret messages in television commercials? The FCC, while not specifically forbidding this type of advertising, does consider it deceptive.
Democratic Party operatives managed to make the story a cause célèbre. The Republican ad man who created the spot claimed, somewhat lamely, that he had merely flashed RATS because it was the last part of BUREAUCRATS, and wanted to make “a visual drumbeat.… You want to get [viewers] interested and involved.”
Bush, appearing on Good Morning, America, claimed that RATS was meant to be seen—although most watchers did not notice it unless they were warned ahead of time—and further made the whole thing laughable by repeatedly mispronouncing the word “subliminal” as “subliminable.”
The Republican National Committee yanked the ad, but it had already run more than four thousand times in different markets across the country.
Hanging chads, swinging chads, dimpled chads, pregnant chads—by the time the 2000 election was over, voters were thoroughly sick of chads.
GEORGE W. BUSH
VS.
JOHN KERRY
“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we.
They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we!”
—President George W. Bush, in a 2004 campaign speech
Four years after the election of 2000, the mood of America had changed dramatically. The sexual scandals of the Clinton years now seemed like the high jinks of a bygone generation, as dated as raccoon coats or hippie headbands. In their place was the somber fact of September 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and crashed another plane, intended for the White House, into the ground in Pennsylvania. Three thousand Americans lost their lives.
Bush, who had been limping along, now received approval ratings into the ninetieth percentile, as high as those of his father after the first Gulf War. With broad, bipartisan support, the president invaded Afghanistan and retook it from the Taliban, although American forces failed to capture Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. The president’s approval ratings remained high even after he invaded Iraq in 2003—his rationale being that dictator Saddam Hussein supported al-Qaeda and possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened the world.
The only problem was that neither of these allegations turned out to be true. As the insurgency took hold in Iraq and more and more American soldiers died, people at home began to question Bush’s judgment. And it didn’t help any—it never does—that the stock market and the economy were in a post-dot-com nosedive.
As 2004 approached, however, the Republican Party was firmly behind George Bush, to the tune of an $86 million campaign purse even before the primaries—where Bush ran practically unopposed—began.
The Democratic primaries were a different matter, a rough-and-tumble affair. Al Gore had announced in 2002 that he would not be seeking office, which left the field open to the likes of retired general Wesley Clark, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, former North Carolina senator and trial lawyer John Edwards, and Vermont governor Howard Dean. Dean ran a grassroots campaign based on his early opposition to the Iraq war and support of new health-care initiatives in America. But Dean self-destructed in the Iowa caucus in January 2004, coming in third and essentially ending his campaign with a guttural primal yell that became known as the “Dean Scream.” Senator John Kerry rolled to the nomination of his party.
THE CANDIDATES
REPUBLICAN: GEORGE W. BUSH As progress in Iraq headed south, so did the presidency of George W. Bush. His manic performance shortly after the initial phase of the war ended—landing on a U.S. aircraft carrier wearing a full flight suit and making a triumphant speech in front of a banner that read, “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED”—was beginning to look more and more ludicrous as the fighting intensified. When it turned out that weapons of mass destruction were missing from Iraq, and the U.S. economy continued its dismal slide, the Bush presidency seemed to be in deep trouble.
DEMOCRAT: JOHN KERRY John Kerry began his nomination speech at the Democratic National Convention with the words: “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty.” This was no casual phrasing, for Democrats had recruited their first war-hero candidate since George McGovern, another vocal opponent of an unpopular war. Raised in an upper-middle-class family in Massachusetts, Kerry attended Yale in the 1960s and then—an unu
sual choice for someone of his age and background at the time—enlisted in the navy and served two tours as a Swift boat skipper in Vietnam, where he earned a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts.
Kerry was a bit wooden and at times even seemed a little detached. His handlers did their best to present him as a plain-spoken regular guy who loved ice hockey and hunting. But a great deal of Kerry’s media attention was devoted to his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, the heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune. According to Forbes magazine, she was worth about $750 million.
THE CAMPAIGN
As the fall of 2004 began, political signs began disappearing all over America. One night, you’d plant a candidate’s sign in your front yard and by the next morning, poof! It had vanished. In one Pennsylvania town, nearly five hundred Bush/Cheney yard signs were ripped off. Hundreds of Kerry/Edwards signs were taken in Pensacola, Florida, where Kerry supporters responded by hanging Bush signs from tree limbs. There were also thefts in South Dakota, Wisconsin, Washington, Kentucky, Ohio, Colorado, Michigan, and Oregon.
One presidential historian wrote that whenever signs start to disappear, it’s an indication of a divided and polarized country engaged in a tough, no-holds-barred election. That certainly describes the 2004 presidential battle. It raged 24/7 via Internet, cable news shows, talk radio, and newspapers. The Democrats were out to win back the presidency from a man they felt had stolen his seat and brought the country into a dangerous and unnecessary war. The Republicans were just as certain that Democrats would make a peace without honor in Iraq, leaving America open to more attacks like 9/11.
Senator John Kerry was supposed to blunt the quadrennial Republican smear that Democrats were not tough enough to face foreign enemies. Even before the campaign began, Kerry had the military bona fides to be able to criticize the president, saying he wasn’t aggressive enough in using armed forces to capture Osama bin Laden. Senator Kerry had voted for the use of force in Iraq but later voted against $87 billion of additional military aid to the war effort; Bush’s team seized on these facts and tried to brand Kerry as a “flip-flopper.” (They were helped immensely when Kerry, trying to defend his position, said “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”)
Bush, in the meantime, ran as a tough guy, the man who told the terrorists, “Bring it on!” He refused to admit to any mistakes. And he said: “You may not always agree with me, but you’ll always know where I stand.”
Dirty tricks on a fairly minor level began as Kerry was alleged to have had an affair with a young woman (who denied the story). A picture widely circulated on the Internet showed a young John Kerry and the actress Jane Fonda speaking together at a Vietnam War—era rally—but the photograph was a fake. For their part, Democrats sent out scare e-mails claiming that Bush would institute a military draft if reelected.
Kerry and Bush were running almost in a dead heat as Bush’s approval rating sank to under 50 percent due to new setbacks in Iran. But on August 4, a self-styled “independent” group, called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, composed of some of the men who had served on the rivers of Vietnam with Kerry, announced that Kerry “was lying about his [military] record” and that he was “no war hero.”
It’s hard to understate the importance of the Swifties in the 2004 campaign. They thoroughly muddled the public perception of Kerry’s military service and shifted focus away from the important campaign issues. The Washington Post published an article showing that one of Kerry’s main Swift boat accusers had in fact supported Kerry’s account of his wartime service, and Kerry was able to turn back the attacks with some force. But he had spent two weeks of prime campaign time defending himself, and many undecided voters were now unsure what to believe.
Still, Kerry was able to best George Bush in two different debates. And as the race headed for election night, there were predictions that the challenger might pull things off after all.
THE WINNER: GEORGE W. BUSH
Exit polls agreed that Kerry had a fighting chance. Americans watching the networks during the evening of November 2 saw and heard commentators unanimously quoting exit polls that Kerry would be elected president.
Yet by midnight, Bush was shown as winning decisively, and Kerry conceded the next morning. The official tally was Bush 60,693,281, Kerry 57,355,978, with the incumbent winning in the Electoral College 286 to 251. It was not a huge margin of victory—a little more than 2 percent—but certainly the election was not anywhere near as close as 2000.
BATTLEGROUND OHIO Ultimately the 2004 presidential election came down to the state of Ohio, which George Bush won by a margin of 118,601 votes, giving him the state’s twenty electoral votes and victory.
But reports of election irregularities began streaming out of the state even before the polls had closed. Representative John Conyers Jr., the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee (an original member of Nixon’s Enemies List), performed the investigation. In his report to Congress in January of 2005, he outlined “numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters.”
To wit: Early in September, two months before the election, Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who—like Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000, was co-chair of his state’s Bush-Cheney reelection effort—used an outdated regulation to restrict voter registration. He claimed that the paper registrations needed to be printed on eighty-pound, unwaxed white paper (postcard paper). This might make sense for registrations through the mail, but Blackwell insisted that the regulation covered those delivered in person as well and also that all registrations on different paper were retroactively invalid. According to the nonpartisan Greater Cleveland Voting Coalition, at least 15,000 voters lost their ability to vote because of this.
Among other things, according to Conyers, Republicans engaged in a deceptive direct-mail practice called “caging” to trim Democratic voters off the rolls. In the summer of 2004 the GOP, using ZIP codes, sent registered letters to 200,000 newly registered voters in urban areas more likely to vote for Kerry. Thirty-five thousand people who had refused to sign the letters or whose mail came back marked “undeliverable” were knocked off the voter rolls just two weeks before the election.
Some voters were forced to wait in line for more than twelve hours. Yet there were no long lines in Republican areas. In one county alone, the misallocation of machines reduced the number of votes by an estimated 15,000. Statewide, according to Conyers, African Americans waited an average of fifty-two minutes to vote, compared to eighteen for white Americans.
Voting reforms have been introduced to remedy voter fraud. But with computerized voting expected to come into wide use in 2008—voters will use touch screens on ATM-like terminals—more difficulties can be expected. It’s possible that the new villain of election fraud will be an innocuous-looking computer geek.
MUZZLING TERESA Teresa Heinz Kerry, John Kerry’s fabulously wealthy wife, was not what anyone would call the ideal campaign spouse. Unlike Laura Bush, whom the president’s handlers trotted out at almost every turn, Teresa was not Mrs. All-American.
She was born in Mozambique and moved to New York to work as a translator at the United Nations. In 1966 she met and married Senator John Heinz III, heir to the ketchup fortune. After Heinz died in an airplane crash in 1991, Teresa inherited his vast fortune. She married Kerry in 1995 as a registered Republican, and she remained Republican until her husband ran for president.
Heinz Kerry was often erratic and sullen while on the campaign trail. She once told a reporter to “shove it” and remarked that Laura Bush had never had “a real job.” Her biggest controversy took place behind the scenes at the Democratic Convention. After Kerry gave his speech, tradition dictated that he be joined by his vice-presidential running mate. Instead, Heinz Kerry insisted that she go first. “I am the spouse,” she said. “I go first.” There was no dissuading her verbally, so as Kerry finished his speech, a youn
g campaign aide blocked her with both arms and yelled at John Edwards: “Run!”
BULGEGATE During Bush’s first debate with Kerry, many viewers noticed a “bulge” underneath his suit jacket at about the center of his back. It set off much speculation. Some thought it might be a radio receiver. After all, Bush would often give long pauses before answering questions and once said, “Let me finish!” when no one had said anything to him. After the debates, a NASA scientist enhanced images of the area in question and expressed the opinion that what the president was wearing was indeed a receiver.
Others speculated that the bulge was either a bulletproof vest or, possibly, a cardiac defibrillator that Bush was forced to wear after he choked on a pretzel while watching a football game in January 2002.
For the record, the White House claimed that the bulge was “a wrinkle in the fabric.”
The year 2004 introduced dirty tricks to the Internet—like a bogus photo of John Kerry speaking with Jane Fonda at an antiwar rally.
BARACK OBAMA
VS.
JOHN McCAIN
“As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where—where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border.”
—Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, explaining to CBS’s Katie Couric why Alaska’s proximity to Russia gave her foreign policy experience
Political experts knew the election of 2008 would be unprecedented. To begin with, it was the first time in more than half a century (since the second Truman administration) that neither a sitting president nor his vice president was seeking reelection. This was because George W. Bush was a two-term lame duck and because vice president Dick Cheney’s health problems (not to mention his popular reputation akin to that of, say, Darth Vader) rendered him unable to serve. Furthermore, the Democrats’ chief hope lay in a woman—two-term New York senator Hillary Clinton—who had put together a fat campaign purse and a formidable political machine (not the least of her assets was her husband, popular ex-president Bill Clinton). She was the first First Lady to run for president and the first woman to be considered the favored front-runner heading into a presidential campaign. But as the long election season kicked off in early 2007, there were other serious Democratic candidates vying for attention. The wealthy lawyer John Edwards, running mate of John Kerry in 2004, had announced his candidacy even before the end of 2006. And then there was the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, who had delivered the sensational keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Joe Biden, a malaprop-prone senator from Delaware also running for president, called him “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean” and then immediately “deeply regretted” his remarks.
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