Down & Dirty

by Jake Tapper

  Reporters will try to establish direct ties between Harris and W. It’s not as if they need to—Harris is on the program from the get-go. But the fact that Stipanovich is by her side during most of the next month—while Ken Sukhia, Stipanovich’s law partner at Fowler White, simultaneously represents George W. Bush—is one connection never made.

  And Harris, chief elections officer of the state, is the Gladeswoman the Gorebies are most wary of. Harris, first elected in 1988, was Bush’s Florida co-chair as far back as October 1999. “I am thrilled and honored to announce my support of George W. Bush for the Presidency,” she said in a “Bush for President” press release. Harris said that working with Bush’s younger brother,“has provided a constant reminder of the power of values-based leadership—the same leadership George has shown in Texas. I also share George’s commitment to education, and I look forward to sharing his vision with Floridians.” She would later serve as a Bush delegate during the Republican National Convention.

  This is the woman whom the state is relying upon for fair and impartial service.

  Democrats shake their heads as they read the opposition research brief their staffers have prepared. Harris’s activities on behalf of Bush went far beyond the normal activities of a state chair. She was a presence on the Bush campaign back in January, traveling with Jeb and 138 other Floridians as they flew from Miami and Tallahassee to New Hampshire on a leased Boeing 727 to campaign for the Texas governor in his primary campaign against McCain. Harris’s presence on the tour—called “Freezin’ for a Reason”—brought lovely photo ops of her and her fellow Floridians handing out bags of Florida oranges and Plant City strawberries. It has also brought serious questions in light of her authority in the Florida controversy.

  This isn’t the first time that Harris’s involvement with the Bush campaign has had her critics questioning her impartiality. An October story in the Tampa Tribune about the $100,000 of state funds that Harris had spent on trips to New York City, Washington, D.C., and abroad, reported that, “Speculation has Harris seeking an ambassadorship if Texas Gov. George W. Bush is elected president.”

  Additionally, it was Harris who reportedly personally enlisted Ret. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf in a Florida public service TV announcement urging Floridians to go to the polls. Schwarzkopf, a well-known supporter of Bush, not only vouched for Bush during the Republican National Convention, but appeared with the Texas governor at numerous campaign stops throughout the Sunshine State. Democrats and others criticized Harris for selecting someone so clearly aligned with the GOP candidate.

  The Democrats gripe. They want a Harris of their own. Instead they have Bob Butterworth, the state’s Democratic attorney general.

  Many leading members of the Gore team don’t think too highly of Butterworth, not his smarts or his loyalty. They’ve heard that he wants to run against Jeb for governor in 2002, that his eyes are on that election, not this one.

  The Dems get word that Jeb has announced that he’s recusing himself from the three-person state elections board, on which he serves with Harris and Jeb Bush–appointed supervisor of elections Clay Roberts, also a Bush backer. Harris soon announces that Jeb will be replaced by Agriculture commissioner Bob Crawford, a Democrat. Crawford also happens to be a Democrat who endorsed Jeb Bush for governor in 1998, and George W. Bush for president in 2000.

  Even those individuals not loyal to Jeb who are skiffing through the murky political swamps of Florida politics right now are more inclined not to help Gore. His brother stands an excellent chance of being sworn in as the next leader of the free world on January 20. This is his state; he’s the governor; he appoints judges, promotes others, names individuals to boards, freezes people out, or plucks them from obscurity. This is the Jeberglades.

  For a guy like Al Gore, it’s pretty dangerous terrain.

  On Thursday, Butterworth’s office places a call to circuit judge Robert Rouse, chief judge of the Seventh Judicial Circuit, who picked Volusia’s canvassing board’s chairman, Judge Michael McDermott, a Republican. The three—McDermott, Rouse, and Butterworth—get a conference call to discuss Volusia’s recount.

  Butterworth wants to make sure that whoever’s in charge of the Volusia recount knows that it’s supposed to be a full recount. Some of the counties are just comparing the final count with the numbers from the machine tallies instead of rerunning the cards through the machine. Butterworth also wants to make sure that McDermott knows what he’s supposed to be doing.

  “Mr. Butterworth, with all due respect, I believe you should disqualify yourself from any involvement in this matter,” McDermott says. Butterworth was, after all, Gore’s state campaign chair until just the other day.

  Butterworth seems to get a bit huffy. “Well, I guess I’ll leave the room, then,” he says.

  Butterworth leaves his own office, slamming the door behind him.

  In Palm Beach County, Theresa LePore is worried.

  On Thursday, she, Judge Burton, and Democratic county commissioner Carol Roberts grant both the Democrats’ and Republicans’ requests—a hand recount for the D’s, another machine recount for the R’s.

  Even though their votes were unanimous, LePore feels very much alone. Neither of her colleagues—Burton, forty-one, a Democratic former prosecutor appointed to the bench by Gov. Jeb in May, and Roberts, sixty-four, a very partisan Democrat and former West Palm Beach mayor first elected in ’86—is suffering the same slings and arrows as is she.

  Thursday morning, county attorney Leon St. John phones up local legal hotshot Bruce Rogow, who represented the raunchy rappers from 2 Live Crew in their obscenity and copyright infringement cases and who sued to get ex-Klansman David Duke on the presidential ballot. Rogow, sixty, has been before the U.S. Supreme Court eleven times, more than any other Florida lawyer.

  “It looks like Theresa’s going to need a lawyer,” St. John says.

  It’s unclear just what she’ll need one for, but she’ll assuredly need one, St. John says. The rhetoric in the air—that accusation that she lost the election for Gore, that the butterfly ballot was illegal—is scaring her, he says. More immediately, St. John says, LePore’s the target of a federal lawsuit filed yesterday by an attorney named Lawrence Navarro on behalf of a voter named Milton Miller, and it’s set for a hearing today before U.S. District judge Kenneth Ryskamp, a hard-ass Republican.

  In the coming days, Miller will be joined in his anti–butterfly ballot, anti-LePore charge by seventeen other Palm Beach County plaintiffs, in several other lawsuits. Thursday alone brings four circuit court suits and one federal court suit demanding a revote. Some of the plaintiffs are surely sympathetic. Like Sylvia Szymoniak, eighty-four, of Palm Springs, a Democrat who hasn’t missed an election since she began voting in the 1930s, who says that she was rushed out of the voting booth. Or Florence Zoltowsky, seventy, a Boynton Beach Holocaust survivor whose possible vote for Nazi-defender Buchanan literally makes her ill. Or Lillian Gaines, sixty-seven, of the Coalition for Black Student Achievement, the Urban League, and the Sickle Cell Foundation of Palm Beach County.

  Then, of course, there’s Andre Fladell. Fladell, fifty-three, a chiropractor and Democratic operative from Delray Beach—he and LePore once served together as judges in a hot dog–eating contest—who has more than once been referred to as the “unofficial prince of Palm Beach County,” not always as a compliment. If there was ever a guy to stick himself into the middle of a mess, Fladell was him.

  On Wednesday, looking out upon the sea of potential lawsuits, Rogow called an old friend of his, Environmental Protection Agency chieftain Carol Browner, whom he’d known since she was twelve. He left a message for her: You need to tell Gore to get somebody on the ground here. It’s chaos in Palm Beach. It’s insanity. Someone needs to squash these suits. But now his first order of business is not to make helpful suggestions to Gore, for whom he voted, but to represent LePore against Miller’s suit. Miller went to the 1st Korean Christian Reform Church on Election Day, where voti
ng at precinct 214 was taking place, and was immediately confused by the ballot. “The names were zigzagged so that the punch holes were not in the correct order,” the complaint says. Miller told “agents” of LePore and Harris that he was having problems understanding the ballot “but took no action to rectify the situation.”

  Miller “will suffer irreparable harm due to the Defendants’ actions in the event a preliminary and permanent injunction”—against the certification of Palm Beach County’s tally—“is not granted. Defendants’ actions have caused Plaintiff to suffer emotional distress for which he cannot adequately calculate money damages.” Miller is asking for LePore and Harris “to order a new election in Palm Beach County.”

  It’s nonsense, Rogow thinks.

  Soon, as Rogow drives on I-95 to represent LePore before Ryskamp, Democratic attorney Mitch Berger calls him on his cell. “We want to get this case dismissed,” Berger says.

  “So do I,” Rogow says. “But what do you want me to do?”

  “We’d like to have the lawyers who are involved call us,” Berger says. “So when you get there, see what you can do.”

  Rogow agrees, figuring that Berger and the Gore team—which apparently Berger’s on—would rather be in state court than federal, since the former is generally more sympathetic to Democrats, the latter to Republicans. He also figures that the Dems are probably afraid of this chaotic litigation. Additionally, others in the legal community observe, Ryskamp is probably not the most sympathetic ear for Jews and African-Americans complaining about ballot woes. Nominated to the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by then-president Bush in 1990, Ryskamp had his nomination rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991. It wasn’t just that Ryskamp belonged to a Coral Gables country club that didn’t have any Jewish or African-American members, though that rubbed some people the wrong way. It was more the substantive complaints about his alleged hostility to plaintiffs with age, gender, and race discrimination complaints, whom he ruled against almost nine out of ten times, often exhibiting—as the St. Petersburg Times wrote—“an insensitivity sometimes bordering on the Neanderthal.”

  Berger, meanwhile, tells an attorney, Dawn Myers, to go to federal court and squash the suit. He has an idea for how the butterfly ballot case can be won, but these guys are putting the cart before the horse, asking for a remedy — a revote—before the ballot’s even been proved to have been illegal. That’s more appropriate litigation for the “contest” phase of an election challenge, not the “protest” phase. Berger and his team want to do everything they can to get the uncounted votes included in the tally before Gore breaks any new ground by contesting an official election result.

  Berger thinks that he could possibly argue for some sort of remedy—an allocation of ill-cast votes isn’t entirely unprecedented. He can sure meet one of the two criteria, showing that there was significant confusion. And in a Palm Beach County court case, after witness after witness after witness, perhaps the momentum would be with him. Then he could jump the second hurdle in proving the illegality of a ballot, convincing the judge to see the conflicting measures of ballot law the way he would present them.

  But Navarro won’t back off until he has a private phone conversation with Daley himself. So Daley calls him. Afterward, Navarro explains to reporters why his client brought, and is now withdrawing, his suit.

  “Al Gore’s going to step up and fight this battle.”

  As the masses of election protesters accumulate outside the Palm Beach elections office, the Rev. Thomas Masters, pastor at the New Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, looks out contentedly at his handiwork.

  Masters, the brother-in-law of former former D.C. mayor Marion Barry, is the local go-to man for civil rights causes, especially when televised. Not all of Masters’s causes have necessarily been embraced by the community as a whole—not his March and April tirades against the Domino’s, Pizza Hut, and Papa John’s deliverymen who didn’t bring their pies to black neighborhoods, for instance, though eventually the chains capitulated. And certainly not his June demonstration outside the state attorney’s office after prosecutors decided to try as an adult a thirteen-year-old who killed his teacher. Didn’t matter. What Masters saw as an injustice, he spoke out against. Considering the charge, he barely even blinked after a jury ruled in favor of a seventeen-year-old retarded kid who’d accused Masters of rape, awarding his family $2.45 million in damages from Masters and his church—which a judge was nice enough to reduce to just $1.3 million only from Masters.

  As with Barry, Masters knew the Rev. Jesse Jackson a bit, had enlisted Jackson in a 1996 demonstration against a local supermarket where a thirty-three-year-old—suspected of shoplifting a toothbrush and toothpaste—died of asphyxiation after eight employees pinned him down. Yesterday, after hearing about the voter problems, he worked with a few others—including Representative Wexler, who specifically focused on getting Jews to participate—to organize this march. He told them he’d get Jackson there.

  And sure enough, at around 1:30 P.M., the Rev. Jesse Jackson arrives in West Palm Beach. “In Selma, it was about the right to vote,” Jackson says. “Today, it’s about making votes count.

  “While there is—over and over again—a call for a recount, in West Palm there must be a first count,” Jackson says. “We find around the state various irregularities that undercut the credibility of a great election, a great campaign by two worthy opponents. In democracy, everybody counts. Every vote must count.

  “This ballot”—Jackson says, awkwardly holding up the butterfly ballot—“is fuzzy,” alluding to Bush’s campaign slam that Gore used “fuzzy math.”

  Fabiani cringes. Jackson is not helping.

  Their challenge is to create for the public the impression that this can all be resolved quickly and fairly and it’s not going to be dragged down to a destabilizing situation. Anything that strays from that message will hurt—and Jackson leading rallies and calling for a revote certainly falls into that category. It’s not that Gore doesn’t care that people didn’t get to vote because polling places were moved at the last minute, or about other problems, but a revote is never going to happen.

  Donna Brazile is asked to talk to Jackson, to tell him what the campaign’s thinking and how he can help, and how he can be unhelpful if he so chooses. Whether Brazile ever truly conveys that is another question.

  Warren Christopher is pissed at Jim Baker. On Wednesday, Baker told reporters that he’d tried to call his fellow former secretary of state but had not heard back from him. Truth is, Christopher had been traveling all day, and he had tried to get back to Baker, but he was hard to reach, too. But Baker had made it sound like Christopher wasn’t returning his phone calls, and that angered him. In any case, Christopher and Baker finally do connect, and they decide to all meet Thursday afternoon.

  It’s pretty friendly, considering. Baker comes to the Governor’s Inn, where Daley and Chris—the name Christopher’s close friends call him by—are staying, and he brings with him Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh and Baker’s protégé Bob Zoellick. No agreements or anything are reached of course—they quickly realize that they’re going to disagree, but they concur that this should be done in a respectful way. They bullshit a little— How ya doin’? Isn’t this crazy?—and then they say their farewells. The whole thing takes maybe six minutes.

  That evening, Barry Richard returns from visiting his pop in Miami and, in jeans, heads straight to the Bush Building, where he meets Baker and Ginsberg. Wiry and intense, Richard fields their questions, about Florida election law, the Florida courts, about strategy.

  What do you think about the butterfly ballot case? he’s asked.

  Not much, Richard says. Not knowing anything more about it than what he’d seen on TV and in the newspapers, Richard doesn’t think the case has a great deal of substance. It can be won, he says.

  Baker listens a lot, Richard notices, supervising but not really running anything. Baker’s Bush’s eyes and ears here
, Richard thinks, while Ginsberg’s the one actually in charge of the legal team. It’s like Baker’s the general manager, Ginsberg the coach.

  In that metaphor, Richard can be seen as the quintessential yeoman player, hopping team to team with each trade. His father, Melvin Richard, served for twenty-two years on the city council and one term as the mayor of Miami Beach, bringing Jackie Gleason’s TV show to town. After getting his J.D. from the University of Miami Law School, Richard served for the navy’s judge advocate general during the Vietnam War, stationed at a Northern California naval hospital.

  There he was thrust into a position of being indispensable to everyone, including those at the local army and air force hospitals, which didn’t have attorneys. He advised the admiral on discipline and court-martials, taught doctors about medical law that he himself had to learn, answered questions from patients and staffers about problems with their mortgages and marriages, having to rapidly determine the law in each of their hometowns. “It was like getting thrown overboard,” he would later say. “You need to learn to swim pretty quickly.”

  Then it was back to Coral Gables, where he practiced law with his dad and then served as a clerk in the Dade County attorney’s office. He moved up the ladder pretty damn quick: there he was, a young man in his thirties, assistant attorney general for Miami arguing a search-and-seizure case before the U.S. Supreme Court, then moving to Tallahassee to serve as deputy attorney general from ’72 to ’74.