Down & Dirty

by Jake Tapper

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2001 by Jake Tapper

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  The map on page 2 appears courtesy of Time Inc. The butterfly ballot, page 18, and chad diagram, page 118, appear courtesy © 2000 Sun-Sentinel Company.

  Excerpts from John DiIulio’s essay “Equal Protection Run Amok” originally published in The Weekly Standard of December 25, 2000, appear courtesy of Mr. DiIulio and The Weekly Standard, copyright 2000 News America, Inc. Excerpts from The Recount Primer appear courtesy of Jack Young.

  Hachette Book Group

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  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: March 2010

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2318-0

  Contents

  Copyright

  Preface

  Chapter 1: “Do you get the feeling that‘Florida might be important‘in this election?”

  Chapter 2: “You don’t have to be snippy about it.”

  Chapter 3: “Do you remember us hitting anything?”

  Chapter 4: “Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold.”

  Chapter 5: “That limp-dicked motherfucker.”

  Chapter 6: “You fucking sandbagged me.”

  Chapter 7: “etc., etc.”

  Chapter 8: “I’m willing to go to jail.”

  Chapter 9: “We need to write something down.”

  Chapter 10: “You know what I dreamed of today?”

  Chapter 11: “Es un circo.”

  Chapter 12: “ARREST HIM! ARREST HIM!”

  Chapter 13: “We’re fucked!”

  Chapter 14: “This has to be the most important thing.”

  Chapter 15: “Like getting nibbled to death by a duck.”

  Chapter 16: “We’re going to massacre them.”

  Chapter 17: “You were relying on the Gore legal team to give you the straight facts, weren’t you?”

  Chapter 18: Subject: gore clean up

  Chapter 19: “A little matter down the road.”

  Chapter 20: “Boy, that was some Election Night, huh?”

  Postscript

  Notes

  APPENDIX

  To Dad

  Preface

  Usually when Americans go to Florida for a spell, they come back looking better—tan, refreshed, relaxed, a few piña coladas under their belt.

  It didn’t quite work out that way for America as a whole.

  America is the greatest country in the history of the world, and the fact that we had a peaceful transfer of power even after everything that went down from November 7 through December 13, 2000, is a testament to that fact. But what happened in Florida brought out the ugliest side of every party in American politics, as if the state became a fun-house mirror with harsh lighting, magnifying the nation’s blemishes and cellulite.

  Democrats were capricious, whiny, wimpy, and astoundingly incompetent. Republicans were cruel, presumptuous, indifferent, and disingenuous. Both were hypocritical—appallingly so, at times. Both sides lied. Over and over and over. Far too many members of the media were sloppy, lazy, and out of touch. Hired-gun lawyers pursued their task of victory, not justice. The American electoral system was revealed to be full of giant holes.

  The people themselves were split into three groups: Those who cared so much about their candidate winning they lost all sense of reason, consistency, or civility. Those who were so apathetic they couldn’t care one way or another, they just wanted it to be over. And people like you, gentle reader, who fell somewhere in between.

  In many ways, Florida was the perfect setting for the freak show. Long before Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush began battling over Florida—pouring millions of dollars and days and days in campaign stops in pursuit of its 25 electoral votes—the area currently known as the Sunshine State was ground zero for the eighteenth-century struggle for domination over the New World. With Britain, France, and Spain tripping over one another in the northern end of the state—Britain in Georgia, France in Louisiana, and Spain in Florida—the three superpowers constantly squared off against one another.

  Gore isn’t even the first to refuse to concede Florida in the face of crushing evidence to the contrary. When Seminole chief Billy Bowlegs surrendered after the Third Seminole War, going west in 1858 with about one hundred of his fellow Native Americans, more than three times that number remained in the Everglades. The Seminole tribe never officially conceded, remaining to this day in a declared state of war with the United States. Even Gore didn’t prove that tenacious.

  What happened in Florida was the perfect ending to campaign 2000. Gore was an uninspiring technocrat politician—cold and ruthless— who constantly sold out his friends, staffers, and values in his pursuit of power. So anemic were his campaign and communication skills, so apparent and easily exploitable were his vulnerabilities (especially his tendency for puffery), he couldn’t manage that last final step to the crown that he had been groomed from the crib to assume. His three debate performances were so different in tempo and temperature, it was as if he hadn’t spent his entire adult life in the public eye. More important, the multiple personality disorder seemed to symbolize the larger problem of a man who didn’t really know who he was.

  The Republicans caricatured him as one who would do anything to get elected, but Gore happily handed them the Magic Markers. And while Gore’s lack of an inner core—behind closed doors as vice president, he reportedly argued with other Clinton advisers against affirmative action, while he tried to slam Bush for opposing it during presidential debates— may have created no more than an uneasiness among middle-of-the-road undecided voters, it had disastrous consequences in his party’s white left wing. After the campaign-finance abuses of the Clinton-Gore 1996 reelection campaign and his administration’s actions on trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT, Gore’s protestations to be a fighter for the little guy rang so hollow that 2,878,000 lefty and disillusioned Americans voted for Ralph Nader—including almost 100,000 Floridians.

  Bush, conversely, was a brilliant schmoozer and deft liar, but he had the intellectual inquisitiveness of your average fern. Not only did the Yale grad actually utter the word “subliminable”—not once but twice—but in the closing months of the presidential race he was still expressing ignorance about federal institutions, like the Food and Drug Administration, laws, like the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and long-passed bills, like the Violence Against Women Act, through which $50 million had been given to his state’s budget during his tenure. He do-si-do’ed his way to the White House with little to recommend him but a fratty charm that wore thin quick. It was barely enough to recommend him for president of DKE, much less commander of the known universe. More darkly, during his South Carolina primary campaign against Arizona senator John McCain, Bush seemed more than willing to cozy up to the eviler forces in his party. His first stop in the Palmetto State: fundamentalist Bob Jones University, where anti-Catholic dogma is the norm, and interracial dating was banned until 2000. McCain and his family were attacked ruthlessly, disingenuously, by Bush and his forces and their allies. Once, after I wrote a story criticizing Bush for “the race-, gay-, and Jew-baiting campaign that he and his allies waged in South Carolina,” a senior Bush staffer called me to angrily complain. “Where was the Jew-baiting?!” * he asked, not even remotely understanding the pathetic hilarity underlying his selective defensiveness.

  Both candidates were wanting. After the first presidential debate, I wrote that “Gore�
�s still unlikable, Bush still seems dumb. Feels like a tie.” And that pretty much summed up the whole shebang. Neither man deserved it. Neither man captured the hopes of the nation as had, say, Ronald Reagan in 1980.

  So it was only fitting that both Gore and Bush were forced to continue their respectively unconvincing pitches for the White House for more than a month after the race was supposed to have ended. Neither of them had proved worthy of the job to begin with, and neither deserved to win as desired a prize as others had. They needed to fight for it even more, and more desperately, and whoever ended up winning it needed the position deflated.

  When it became clear in 1961 that New York Yankee Roger Maris might well break the revered Babe Ruth’s sixty-home-run record, commissioner of baseball Ford Frick made a ruling that would forever sully Maris’s achievement. Frick ruled that since the Babe’s record was set in 1927, when seasons lasted 154 games, Maris would have to break the record in the exact same number of games. Maris broke the record, hitting sixty-one homers, but, because the baseball season in 1961 consisted of 162 games, an asterisk stained his appearance in the record books until 1992, when Frick’s ruling was scrapped. Of course, by then Maris had been dead for seven years.

  Far more so than in the case of Maris, between Gore and Bush it wasn’t tough to argue that whoever ended up winning the presidency needed to have, forever more, an asterisk next to his name.

  And one big mother of an asterisk President Bush did get. We will never know who would have won Florida had all the ballots been hand-counted by their respective canvassing boards. Adding to the confusion were thousands of trashed or miscast ballots—including Palm Beach County’s infamous “butterfly ballot.” We will never know who, therefore, truly was the choice of the most Floridians and who, therefore, really earned the state’s critical electoral votes and therefore the presidency. That Gore ended up winning more than a half million popular votes over Bush complicated matters. Of course, had Gore been the one who successfully engineered a victory, there would have been innumerable reasons why he, too, was undeserving. Perhaps reasons even greater than Bush’s.

  How the figurative asterisk came to pop up next to Bush’s name is a fascinating tale, both for lofty, academic reasons—for what it says about our republic—as well as for the sheer insanity of it all. I spent two years, 1999 and 2000, following Bush and Gore around, and most of the thirty-six days following the November 7 Election Day in Florida, watching in horror and amusement—mostly amusement—the circus. I spent the following months tracking down the players who briefly appeared on our TV screens and catching up on what the rest of us who weren’t in their shoes missed. The following is what I saw and what I learned from the players after it was all over.

  About the research methods for the book.

  Quotes are taken directly from transcripts, reconstructed by one or more of the players in the conversation, or—where noted—from specific media stories. Thoughts attributed to an individual come from an interview with that individual.

  So as not to disrupt the narrative flow of the book, news scoops contained within are seldom attributed to an individual. Two examples: Bill Daley chewing out Bob Butterworth, and Katherine Harris wanting to certify the election results on November 14 despite Judge Lewis’s order but being advised not to by her lawyers. Except where noted, such stories always came from one or more individuals present at the time of the incident and have been checked against the recollections of other participants in the event and either confirmed or at the very least not contradicted.

  I owe a debt to the following individuals for taking their time to talk with me about what happened in this whole mess, while it was going on and afterward.

  Deborah Allen, Jill Alper, Jennifer Altman, Eli Attie, Jenny Backus, Rep. Kevin Bailey, Nick Baldick, Brenda Barnett, Mickey Barnett, Fred Bartlit, Jeremy Bash, Katie Baur, Phil Beck, Mitchell Berger, Achim Bergmann, Harold Blue, David Boies, Kathy Bowler, Daryl Bristow, Rep. Corinne Brown, George and Ethel Brownstein, Judge Charles Burton, Carretta King Butler, Kerey Carpenter, Michael Carvin, Warren Christopher, Judge Nikki Ann Clark, Rep. Garnet Coleman, Barbara Comstock, Jack Corrigan, Denise Cote, Jim Cunningham, Bill Daley, Anita Davis, William Davis, Miguel De Grandy, Rep. Peter Deutsch, Russell Doster, Dexter Douglass, Herman Echavarria, Tony Enos, Randy Enwright, Tucker Eskew, Mark Fabiani, Mike Feldman, Rep. Harold Ford, Jr., Donnie Fowler, Rep. Lois Frankel, Sean Gallagher, Joe Geller, Bert Gluck, John Giesser, Ben Ginsberg, Sandra Goard, Sen. Bob Graham, Murray Greenberg, Peter Greenberger, Jan Crawford Greenburger, Commissioner Suzanne Gunzburger, Armando Gutierrez, Douglas Hattaway, Nicolas Hengartner, Mark Herron, Ed Hollander, Karen Hughes, Harry Jacobs, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Gov. Bill Janklow, Frank Jimenez, David Johnson, Ed Kast, Deborah Kearney, Gov. Frank Keating, Sen. Bob Kerrey, Ron Klain, Joe Klock, Justice Gerald Kogan, Ben Kuehne, David Lane, Henry Latimer, Michael Lavelle, Michael Leach, David Leahy, Judge Robert Lee, Chris Lehane, Theresa LePore, Judge Terry Lewis, Nan Markowitz, Roberto Martinez, Scott McClellan, Jim McConnell, Judge Michael McDermott, Mayor Patrick McManus, Terrell McSweeney, Ken Mehlman, George Meros, Dennis Newman, John Newton, Tom Nides, Mayor Alex Penelas, Dean Ray, Barry Richard, Gerald Richman, Commissioner Carol Roberts, Bruce Rogow, Don Rubottom, Ion Sancho, Joe Sandler, Cindy Sauls, Chris Sautter, Ned Siegel, Judge William Slaughter, Dorrance Smith, Doug Smith, Mark Steinberg, Mark Steitz, Graham Streett, Ray Sullivan, Irv Terrell, George Terwilliger, David Treece, Larry Tribe, Mindy Tucker, Steve Uhlfelder, Jason Unger, Mayco Villafana, Mark Wallace, Craig Waters, Willie Whiting, Michael Whouley, Jim Wilkinson, Quiounia Williams, Jackie Winchester, Anne Womack, Jack Young, Steve Zack.

  I would also like to thank those brave souls who agreed to help me get to the bottom of it all but for understandable reasons preferred to keep their names out of it.

  Special notes of thanks to:

  My editors at Salon.com, Kerry Lauerman, Joan Walsh, and David Talbot, and publisher Michael O’Donnell for all their support.

  Daryl Kessler, Dan Karp, John Scully, Chris Haber, David Dimlich, Dan Weiss, and, especially, Nancy Ives for their love and friendship.

  The inspired Geoff Shandler and the wonderful Pamela Marshall at Little, Brown and Company and my gorgeous, brilliant agent, Christy Fletcher, for making this book a reality.

  Mom, Aaron, Stone, Shelly, Lisi, Becky, and Debby, for being so wonderful. And of course my father, to whom this book is dedicated.

  Jake Tapper

  Motel 6

  Apalachee Parkway

  Tallahassee

  January 2001

  1

  “Do you get the feeling that Florida might be important in this election?”

  At 5:55 A.M. in Tampa, Florida, on Election Day 2000, Vice President Al Gore makes a run for the Florida Bakery.

  It’s his third stop of the day—he’s already headlined a South Beach, Miami, midnight rally alongside Robert DeNiro and Stevie Wonder, as well as made a visit to a Tampa hospital. At the bakery, Gore meets up with his running mate, Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.

  The Sunshine State is so critical to his victory, Gore earlier in the year had thought about picking Florida’s Democratic senator, Bob Graham, as his running mate. Instead he went with Lieberman, who has demographic pluses as well: an Orthodox Jew is a big hit in southern Florida.

  The two are offered small Cuban coffees in teeny plastic sample cups.

  “L’chaim,” Gore says to Lieberman.

  “That’s good. That feels like eight hours of sleep,” Gore says, downing his coffee. He’s been going for more than thirty hours now.

  “What do you recommend instead of doughnuts?” He asks the woman behind the counter what a nice Cuban pastry would be.

  Too little too late. Ever since April, when the Clinton administration sent Immigration and Naturalization Service officers to seize Elián González at gunpoint from the bungalow of his Miami relatives in Little Havana, Gore’s been struggling for Cuban-Americans to give him a chance. And in thi
s tight, tight race in Florida he needs their support. Any way he can get it.

  The woman behind the counter recommends guava and cream cheese.

  “We’ll get some of those instead of doughnuts,” Gore says. Gore gives her a $20 bill for the $14.45 check. “Keep that as a tip,” he says. “Gracias.”

  At 6:10 A.M., Gore’s motorcade arrives at the local Democratic HQ, in a small cement building in a Cuban section of Tampa. Lieberman—with his hound-dog mug and subtle, bubbly glee—jumps onstage.

  “Do you get the feeling that Florida might be important in this election?” Lieberman jokes. “The dawn is rising on Election Day, right here in Tampa Bay.”

  “This is the last official stop of Campaign 2000,” Gore adds. “It’s not an accident that it’s here in Tampa. It’s not an accident that it’s in west-central Florida, because Florida may very well be the state that decides the outcome of this election.”

  He tells the crowd about his South Beach rally. “Just before I went out to make the speech, somebody had one of the cable television networks on, and it was reporting news at the top of the hour, and it was a roundup of the campaign activities. And it said, At this hour, George W. Bush is asleep, and Al Gore is preparing to speak to twenty-five thousand people in Florida.’” The crowd goes wild.

  A napping Dubya was not exceptional, especially after a campaign day as busy as was Monday, spent flipping the political bird to Gore and President Clinton, swooping in on his campaign plane to stump in their respective home states of Tennessee and Arkansas. Bush finished up his campaigning Monday night with an airport rally in Austin, and then it would be bedtime. Bush likes sleep. He hits the sack by 9:30 P.M. He carried a down pillow—nicknamed “pilly”—with him on the campaign trail.

  “Well, it’s almost 5:30 A.M. Texas time, and George W. Bush is STILL asleep and I’m still speaking to people HERE IN FLORIDA!!” Gore says. The crowd again goes wild.