by Jake Tapper
At around 4 P.M., Judge Charles Burton—chairman of the Palm Beach County canvassing board—sits in the conference room with LePore and the third member of the board, Democratic county commissioner Carol Roberts.
An elections office employee brings Burton over a ballot.
“Vote for Gore,” she instructs him. Burton had voted the week before, via absentee ballot.
Burton looks at the ballot, sees the clear arrow from the Gore-Lieberman ticket to the third hole, punches the hole, bang.
“What’s the problem?” he asks.
“Well, people are getting confused,” she says.
“I don’t really see it,” says Burton, a low-key guy. “But, well, OK.”
Roberts, a strong partisan Democrat, says, “You know they’re starting to say this ballot was illegal. You may need to get your own lawyer,” she advises LePore.
The phone lines are all jammed. LePore learns that Democratic voters are being hepped up, told by a phone bank to call her to complain if they think they may have screwed up the ballot. The lines are being blocked from voters at the polls right now, she thinks.
LePore asks Burton what he thinks. Was the ballot illegal? He gets a book of election law, reads the statute. It’s clearly OK. The section of law the Democrats are referring to—101.151 (3) (a)—applies only to paper ballots, not ones for punch-card voting.
“I don’t really think it’s illegal,” he tells LePore. “But whatever.”
It’s not “whatever” for LePore. She feels like her world is crashing down around her.
At 5:30 P.M., Lieberman calls Rhodes in a previously arranged “Get Out the Vote” interview.
“You’ve got a very confusing ballot in Florida, have you heard?” Rhodes asks Lieberman.
“I just heard as I was listening and waiting to come on,” Lieberman says, “and that’s the first I heard about it.”
“We have a serious problem,” Rhodes says. “And in fact, for those who found the ballot confusing, we have an attorney at one of our big law firms” asking us to “please file an affidavit.” The Democrats have already set up a phone number and retained an attorney to hear voters’ complaints. “I’m not sure if I voted for you and Al Gore, or Pat Buchanan and Ezola Foster,” Rhodes adds.
“Wow!” Lieberman responds. “Now, there’s a big difference. You’ve got to be careful. The affidavit idea is very important. Because if the election is close, there’s going to be contests all over America.”
At that moment, Mitchell Berger is preparing for such an event.
Berger has known Al Gore since the early 1980s, when he was helping his dad’s flailing mall development/management business in Chattanooga and Gore was a young congressman. Berger was interested in environmental issues, new economy issues, things that few politicians were discussing except for young Congressman Gore. They further bonded after Berger moved to Florida—where he built a successful law practice with offices in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Tallahassee—and Gore ran for president in 1988 with few other contacts in the Sunshine State.
Berger’s respect for Gore knows no bounds. If you give Berger a minute, he’ll spend five telling you how Gore’s 1988 presidential run paved the way for Clinton’s successful bid four years later. How New Democrat Gore was distancing himself from Jesse Jackson during the 1988 New York primary, thus allowing Clinton to do the same to rapper Sister Souljah four years later. He thinks that one of the most unreported stories about Al Gore is how Gore essentially ran the country while Clinton was stuck in the impeachment quagmire but had to keep such a fact quiet for the country’s sake. And Berger has disdain for the reporters who covered the Clinton administration so aggressively, necessitating his giving Gore advice during some of the veep’s own fund-raising scandals.
In frequent contact with Brochin and Palm Beach County Democratic chieftain Monte Friedkin, Berger’s alarmed. He tells Brochin and lawyers in his firm, mainly Leonard Samuels, to get ready to litigate. He doesn’t know who’s going to litigate, he doesn’t know how, but he wants to be prepared.
At 7 P.M., Berger’s at the Miami airport, on the phone with Gore attorneys Joe Sandler and Lynn Utrecht and Gore’s chief of staff, Charles Burson. He’s getting ready to hop onto a 7:15 Southwest Airlines flight to Nashville, hopefully for the Gore celebration, but he’s not so sure that he should go.
“Should I stay in Florida?” he asks the Gore attorneys. “’Cause there’s a lot of bad things that went on here today.” Some in Nashville were under the impression that Berger was ready to file a lawsuit against the butterfly ballot at that very moment.
Come to Nashville, Sandler says. There’s nothing you can do. The polls are about to close. And hopefully everything will be the way it’s supposed to be.
So Berger gets on the plane.
2
“You don’t have to be snippy about it.”
He’s fucked!” Mark Fabiani, Gore’s communications director, cackles.
I just told Fabiani that Bush is huddling back at the mansion instead of at the Four Seasons, where he was originally scheduled to watch the election returns.
“He’s in retreat!” Fabiani says. “He’s running home!”
It’s Tuesday, November 7, 2000, around 9 P.M. And at this particular point in the evening, it doesn’t look good for Bush. I do, in fact, picture Bush clutching his pilly, curled up in the fetal position, holding on to his daddy’s leg. The exit polls have been coming in all day, and they’ve been bad. Bush, not surprisingly, is glum. His chief strategist, Karl Rove, had been telling him that it was going to be a Reaganesque landslide. Not quite.
Florida, a state Bush wanted to win, needed to win—little brother, Jeb, is the governor there, after all—is called for Gore at 7:48 P.M. EST. And with that, Bush’s odds of becoming president have plummeted.
Jeb—an acronym for his full name, John Ellis Bush—calls his first cousin John Ellis in New York City. As luck and the fabled “vast right-wing conspiracy” would have it, Ellis helms Fox News Channel’s election decision team, which means he’s in charge of calling states. * Ellis has already spoken to George W. twice earlier in the day, reassuring the candidate not to “worry about your early numbers,” since “your dad had bad early numbers in ’eighty-eight, and he wound up winning by seven. So who knows?” 1
But now the news he has for Jeb is far more pessimistic.
“Are you sure?” 2 Jeb asks Ellis, after Fox News calls Florida for Gore, at 7:52 P.M., after three other networks have done so.
“We’re looking at a screen full of Gore,” Ellis replies.
“But the polls haven’t closed in the Panhandle,” Jeb says.
“It’s not going to help,” Ellis says. “I’m sorry.”
So in a sudden turnabout, the normally cocky Bush abandons plans to watch the returns from a suite at the Austin Four Seasons and instead opts to run for the cover of the governor’s mansion.
An election that his advisers had been predicting he’d win by 7 percentage points and 50 electoral votes is actually turning out to be too close to call.
At the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, President Clinton is like a voracious animal, and what he wants is information about the election. In her quest for the U.S. Senate seat from New York, Hillary cruised to an easy victory, so the president’s mind is focused on his no. 2. In his suite, each time a state pops up on the TV in front of him (ABC News) or to his right (MSNBC), he commands one of the aides around him to get more information. More, more, he’s still not satisfied!
Earlier, when Florida was still in play, he had his former senior aide, Jonathan Prince, call Nick Baldick, Gore’s man on the ground in Tallahassee. When Gore is trailing in Arkansas, Clinton called up his fellow Arkansan Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater to see what he knew.
Gore’s not down by so much, he tells Slater. “We’ve seen that turn around before.”
Nevada comes on the screen.
“Where’s Brian Greenspun?” Clinton asks, referring
to the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun and a former classmate from Georgetown. “Get Brian Greenspun on the phone!” Clinton tells his aide, Doug Band.
“He’s down the hall” at one of the First Lady’s many receptions, Band says.
“Go get him!” Clinton says.
West Virginia comes on the screen. A state that has gone for Republican presidential candidates only three times in eighty years—all three times when the Republican in question was the incumbent president—is a solid Bush win.
“That’s my fault,” Clinton says, turning to chief of staff John Podesta. The environmentally friendly strip-mining policies Clinton pushed fostered resentment for Gore among the coal-mining community. “That policy screwed him,” Clinton says.
It’s a small crowd in the room, which consists primarily of Clinton, Podesta, Prince, Band, pollster Mark Penn, deputy chief of staff Steve Richetti, and Joel Johnson, senior adviser to the president for policy and communications. But even with such a small group, there’s a hell of a lot of frustration and disdain toward Gore’s consultants—Carter Eskew, Bob Shrum, and Tad Devine. The consensus seems to be that they ran a shitty campaign for Gore, that they never really cared about him the way James Carville cared about Clinton in ’92, or Dick Morris did in ’96. Devine’s the guy who—when Clinton’s speech at the Democratic convention in 1988 went more than a little long—supposedly turned the lights down on him, and Clinton’s never forgiven him for that. Eskew and Shrum are seen as just part-of-the-problem Washington guys who could envision losing, guys for whom Gore was just another client.
Then there’s the campaign they waged, the running away from Clinton, from the unprecedented peace and prosperity. They barely used the president, since their poll numbers showed that post-Lewinsky he hurt them with swing voters. But to not even get him to Arkansas until that last week?! Even worse, Shrum and pollster Stan Greenberg concocted this pose for Gore that was a total diversion from the New Democrat thing he and Clinton had sold so well to the public.
Clinton has a term for it tonight. He calls it “consultant populist bullshit.”
In Miami, Democratic senator Bob Graham has just completed an interview with Tom Brokaw when a producer asks him if he’ll be willing to remain miked-up and in front of the camera to talk to MSNBC anchor Brian Williams. Graham says yes and is flabbergasted when only a few minutes later NBC calls Florida for Gore.
There are a few congressional districts not even completed with their voting, Graham thinks, those west of the Apalachicola River. And as the senior Democrat in the state, Graham knows just how razor-thin the race is, how anyone can win it.
“They’re really stretching it,” Graham thinks.
In Fort Lauderdale, the three members of the Broward County canvassing board are in the supervisor of elections’ warehouse, watching TV with mouths agape. They and the election workers haven’t even counted one Broward County ballot before the state is awarded to Gore. They typically don’t watch TV while they count the ballots, but this is the closest election in recent memory, and no one can resist.
“Oh, that’s very kind of Mr. Brokaw to just give this away,” says longtime supervisor of elections Jane Carroll, seventy, one of the few Republican officeholders in the overwhelmingly Democratic stronghold.
The chairman of the canvassing board, Judge Robert Lee, a Democrat, is incredulous at Brokaw’s pronouncement. Not one precinct has come in! And Florida’s in two time zones—the polls aren’t even closed in the western part of the Panhandle!
As the night goes on and the ballots start pouring in—accompanied by sheriff’s deputies—Lee, Carroll, and Democratic county commissioner Suzanne Gunzburger occasionally poke their heads into the back room, where every fifteen minutes they transmit the county results via a computer.
On the secretary of state’s special Web site—for which they need a special password—Lee sees that Gore is hardly running away with the state. “Why are they calling Florida for Gore when it’s so close?” he wonders.
Soon a few local Republican muckety-mucks—Shari McCartney and Ed Pozzuoli—storm into the warehouse. Where are the ballots from Weston? they ask.
Weston is one of the few GOP areas in the county, as far west as you can get without standing in the Everglades. It’s a place of wealth and power, where several members of the Miami Dolphins live. Interstate 595 was built for Weston.
McCartney and Pozzuoli think something’s amiss. Where are the Weston ballots?! Have they been stolen? Are they going to be counted?! Have they even arrived yet?! Carroll explains that it’s no big mystery, Weston is forty-five to sixty minutes away, and it’s not as if there are two deputies assigned for each of the county’s 609 precincts. Each team is assigned several precincts where they’re to pick up and escort the ballots back to the warehouse. The ballots will get there.
At a party in Washington, D.C., Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor watches Dan Rather give Gore Florida.
“This is terrible,” she says.
She rises to get a plate of food. Her husband explains that his wife, a Reagan appointee and former Republican leader of the Arizona state senate, wants to retire, but feels that she can do so only if a Republican is in the White House to name her successor. 3 But what can she do? She’s had her one vote.
The press “pool”—the dozen or so members of the press whose turn it is to experience smaller events firsthand, after which we have to report back to the larger, more unwieldy, press corps—is bused to the governor’s mansion.
“He preferred to be at home,” says an aide, Gordon Johndroe, to the pool. “He found his house was more relaxing than the hotel, where there was a lot of activity.”
As the pool waits for the call from Bush to allow us to walk in to see him, big news comes in via cell phone. One of the networks is about to call Pennsylvania for Gore, filling the last third of the Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania trifecta that is essential to a Gore victory.
Minutes later, as I walk into the upstairs living room of the governor’s mansion, Bush doesn’t look so panicky. He’s sitting with his wife and parents, and though a handful of reporters swarms in—and a cameraman knocks over a vase, spilling water and flowers all over the place—Bush stays cool.
Appearances mean so much in the Bush campaign plan. His easygoing demeanor, as with his campaign’s bold victory predictions, is all about conveying an air of inevitability. And that’s kind of the story of W. Grandson of one senator, son of a president, W. has had a life that’s been largely about coasting, failing upward, from Andover to Yale to Harvard Business School. His daddy’s connections got him a cushy spot in the Texas Air National Guard during Vietnam; he started an oil business and ran it into the ground, but no matter, because one of his daddy’s friends bailed him out of that, too. His daddy’s rich friends helped him raise the dough to be the public face of the partners that bought and ran the Texas Rangers. And suddenly he was governor, and then he was the ordained candidate for president, and then he was here, in this room.
“We’re not conceding anything until we see the actual vote,” Bush says on the phone to Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge. “Tom, I appreciate your calling.”
He hangs up.
“I think Americans oughta wait until all the votes are counted,” Bush says to us. “I don’t believe the projections,” he says, about both the Keystone State and Florida. “In states like Florida, I’m gonna wait for them to call all the votes,” he says.
Jeb, who earlier in the night was saddened and apologetic when the networks handed his state to his brother’s nemesis, has had a shift in mood. His political people back home have the race too close to call—at the very worst.
Jeb shares the news with his brother’s chief strategist, Karl Rove, who is pleased to hear it. He directs his staffers to call up the networks and yell at them for their premature projections. Rove thinks that the nets have a double standard—other states that Bush will end up winning far more handily, like Ohio and Alabama, are s
till “too close to call.” Giving Gore Florida is insanity, Rove thinks. Not to mention that six counties at the western Panhandle of the state are under the central time zone, so the polling locales for those voters in those largely Republican areas were still open when the nets told them, essentially, to go on home, Gore won. Rove and other Republicans will later argue that the early call cost Bush maybe 10,000 votes.
In Nashville, Gore’s field strategist, Michael Whouley, is sitting in the “boiler room” he’s set up, watching Rove dispute the networks’ gift of Florida to Gore.
He’s confused. Is Rove trying to send a message to the western states that things are still in play enough, that Bush can still win without Florida, as it is his obligation to do? Or does he actually believe that Bush is gonna win Florida? Rove had been talkin’ smack all week, saying Bush was gonna win by 6 or 7 points, a Reaganesque sweep.
Whouley isn’t sure which one it is.
Bush has his jacket off and is sitting between his wife, Laura, and mother, Barbara. His father, former president George H. W. Bush, is leaning back on the sofa, gripping his hands, legs crossed.
“I’m pretty darn upbeat about things,” W. says. “I don’t believe some of these states they’ve called.”
His father is asked if this is anything like the mood in 1992, when he lost to Bill Clinton.
“Helluva lot worse,” Bush Sr. says.
“Ditto,” Barbara Bush says.
“I’m pleased to carry Tennessee,” Bush says. “That’s an interesting development.”
Indeed, news of that had been a real psychic blow to Gore, who always held out hopes that, despite daunting poll numbers, he’d pull out a state victory.
Born to Tennessee senator Albert Gore, Sr., Gore Jr. was always child of both Carthage, Tennessee, where his family still owns land, and Washington, D.C. As a congressman, Gore was far more conservative on issues like abortion and guns than his later political incarnations, as he proceeded up the political food chain to senator (elected in 1984) and vice president (1992). Unlike Bush, who seemed to stumble into all this, Gore has been running for president from the time he was a zygote, and he was constantly trying to figure out what others wanted him to be—his positions on issues, his circle of advisers were always changing, changing, changing. His public manner was stilted, often condescending; his inner turmoil peeked out and reared its head from time to time, and it wasn’t pretty.