Down & Dirty

by Jake Tapper

  Investigations were launched in Texas, too. In fact, that month in Chicago a first-year Kirkland & Ellis associate attorney named Fred Bartlit—who forty years later would emerge as a Bush lawyer in this dispute—was hired by the Republican Party to investigate vote fraud in Texas. Only six or so weeks on the job, Bartlit concluded that there was plenty of evidence of electoral shenanigans in Starr and Duval Counties in South Texas, where the votes were still controlled by the same team—led by George Parr,“the Duke of Duval County”—who stole a Senate election for LBJ in 1948. * Some historical accounts have GOP chieftains concluding that they just didn’t have enough hard evidence to mount the challenge. For whatever reasons, the Republican Party decided not to contest the results. But little, if any, of it was rooted in Nixon’s magnanimity.

  That said, before Bill Daley, the mayor’s youngest son of four, turned thirty, he had seen his dad both disgraced during the 1968 Democratic convention and buried in 1976. He and his older brother Richie Daley had to struggle to be taken seriously, to be seen as anything other than anachronisms, relics from a corrupt and ugly era. Legendary Tribune columnist Mike Royko once famously described the two as “too dumb to tie their shoes.”

  The oldest of the Daley sons, Richie, won his dad’s state senate seat in 1973 to little aplomb and even lower expectations. But working with his brother Bill, the two fashioned together a coalition of liberal Democrats, minorities, and—yes—good-government types, which elected Richie mayor in 1989 and has kept him there ever since. Their father’s machine is dead, and they are clean. †

  Bill Daley, in fact, had built such a stellar reputation, and been such an asset to Bill Clinton in his clean victory in Illinois in 1992, he was close to being named transportation secretary in early 1993. That is, until Clinton’s self-imposed “cabinet that looks like America” quota led him to abandon Daley at the last minute in favor of Federico Peña.

  Ever the loyal soldier, however, Daley agreed to come on board the Clinton administration during one of its hardest times—the August 1993 budget fight—to take on an even harder-seeming task: heading up the administration’s then-floundering effort to get the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement passed. Three months after he took the job, it was hard to imagine that it had ever been so questionable; thanks to Daley, NAFTA passed. Three years later, Clinton made him commerce secretary, where he earned marks for running a clean, effective, and bipartisan shop. He helped Republicans when they called, eliminated dozens of political appointee positions, cleaned up the trade mission shit and all that.

  In June, Gore called Daley late one night to ask him to be his campaign chair—a job he’d turned down three times already. The controversial former chairman, Tony Coehlo, had made the tough decisions to chuck the deadwood, but Coehlo was sick and had to take leave. And, of course, Coehlo was doing a pretty crappy job. Daley got to work, to mixed reviews. Some thought that Coehlo fostered better communication among the staff, but Daley was a better face for the campaign than Coehlo—who was then under a criminal investigation run jointly by both the State Department inspector general and the Justice Department’s public integrity section for financial dealings he’d made at the Expo ’98 world’s fair in Portugal.

  Today it’s tough to imagine Daley being brought on board the Gore campaign because of his stellar reputation. Rush Limbaugh calls him “Bugsy Daley,” but it’s not just talk radio that targets the man as dirty. On ABC’s Good Morning America that morning, Daley appears—his comments far more serene than yesterday’s—and is followed by former senator Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican whose own presidential run, in 1996, was the lamest GOP effort since Barry Goldwater.

  “It’s always good to hear from Bill Daley from Chicago, where even the dead vote on a regular basis for Democrats, and where Gore carried Chicago nine-to-one,” Dole says. “Maybe we ought to take a look at Chicago, where the same ballots were used, to see if people understood that.”

  The ABC producer offers Daley the opportunity to return on air, to rebut the charge, but Daley demurs.

  Still, he’s not happy. “That motherfucker,” Daley says. “That mother-fucker. Talking about my father.” His dad’s been dead and buried for twenty-four years, for Chrissakes.

  Daley hasn’t slept in days, and he gets the game, he understands that his Thursday statement was hot, as he was told to make it, and he understands that he’s going to take a hit for it. But going after his father is below the belt, he thinks.

  “If they want to point to something in my background that they want to criticize and say, this is bad, and this guy’s bad, and yada yada yada, fine,” Daley thinks. “But all these people out there talking about Chicago and my dad and all that shit—it’s some pretty chickenshit stuff.” His mom’s ninety-three years old, and she’s sitting in Chicago watching this stuff on TV. “Don’t let it bother you!” Momma Daley admonishes her son, reminding him of all the good things his father did. Still, Daley thinks, why does she have to deal with this thing?! Why does she need to hear this shit?

  Oklahoma GOP governor Frank Keating * comes on Fox News Channel, railing against “the twenty-seven-inch-neck crowd… from Chicago… Boss Daley’s boys” that he claims are intimidating canvassing boards. What the hell’s Keating talking about?! “Twenty-seven-inch-neck crowd?!” What does that even mean?!

  The problem is, Daley thinks, he can’t respond without ratcheting it up. He’s not about to call people who have flowed in from Oklahoma to help Bush, a bunch of Okies from a state that has nothing going on. And these are the same people who talk about how the tone of politics has gotten really horrible, and we gotta change that! Unbelievable!

  And what’s more, these guys are totally chickenshit, Daley thinks. Take Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, the loud-mouthed former fire chief of Marcus Hook, who tells the Washington Post, “I will use every ounce of energy I have to deny the electors being seated if I believe the political will of the people was thwarted by the son of Mayor Daley of Chicago.” After Daley sees this comment, he has an assistant call Weldon. All he wants to say is, “Hey, lookit, I hope twenty-six years from now, if you’re dead and your kids are in this business, that somebody’s not talking about you, and something you did or didn’t do.” He would be more than pleased to talk about the 1960 election, about the fact that the Democratic Party of Cook County offered to pay for a statewide recount and the Republicans said, “No way.” He’s prepared to tell Weldon that his dad was investigated for twenty-two years by every federal prosecutor that Republicans could sic on him—and Clinton thinks he’s been investigated a lot?!—and no one could ever find anything on him.

  Yeah, that’s what Daley wants to tell Weldon. But Weldon doesn’t return the call. So the next day, Daley has another call placed to Weldon’s office. Still no return call. Then another. Then another. For eleven days in a row, Daley will call Weldon, and the bombastic Weldon will never take the call, nor will he even return it. “Chickenshit,” Daley thinks.

  The heft of Daley’s ire will be reserved for Dole, however.

  On Sunday, November 12, Sam Donaldson asks Dole, “If people’s votes weren’t counted fairly, you certainly wouldn’t argue that they shouldn’t be counted.”

  “Oh, I don’t—I don’t argue that, but where does it stop?” Dole says. “Are they going to—why don’t they do all fifty states then? Why don’t they go to Chicago, where they invented irregularities. You know, Bill Daley’s an expert on irregularities.”

  As Daley watches this, one of his colleagues sneers and calls the World War II combat veteran and Viagra pitchman a “one-armed, limp-dicked motherfucker.”

  “You shouldn’t attack somebody’s war wound,” Daley says.

  “How about ‘limp-dicked motherfucker’?” the colleague asks.

  “That’s different,” Daley says. He himself refers to Dole as a “limp-dicked motherfucker” from then on. “We all knew he was dysfunctional from the waist down,” Daley says, “now we know he’s dysfu
nctional from the shoulders up, too.”

  But at least one of Daley’s colleagues at the helm of the Gore recount effort notices something odd about Daley’s reaction. After Daley’s fury subsides, he gets more passive. He seems gun-shy. The Bush hardball tactics arouse in him a flash of anger, but then he retreats. Instead of fighting back even harder, he thinks, Daley pulls back. “It’s like they threw a couple hard fast pitches at the head of our team captain, and he got less aggressive,” the Gore chieftain will later say. In other words, according to this colleague and admirer of Daley, the GOP tactics worked.

  Another close associate of Daley’s will dispute this, saying that irrespective of his hot November 9 comments, Daley just tried to keep a cool head about both the ups and downs in the next month’s battle. However, this associate adds, “Those people who went after his dad—he knows who every single one of them is.”

  Tucker Eskew arrives in Miami Friday, to work with Mindy Tucker in the Bush communications department, along with Scott McClellan and Ken Lisaius.

  Eskew’s presence is more telling than the others’, however. He’s kept relatively low-profile since he helmed the communications for Bush’s nasty South Carolina primary campaign. And because when he flies in from Austin, he joins the three other chief Southern strategists who helped Bush score his ugly South Carolina primary win against McCain.

  They are Bush’s South Carolina clan: chief strategist Warren Tompkins, strategist Neal Rhoades, state director Heath Thompson, and Eskew—three of whom were thanked personally by Bush in his South Carolina victory speech. Each is a veteran of the hardscrabble ways of Southern politics, raised at the knee of legendary scumbag Lee Atwater. Which is a nice way of saying that there’s little that they wouldn’t do to get a candidate elected, especially when it comes to—at the very least—turning a blind eye to allied political mercenaries in the hinterlands who race-bait, slander, and dance around election law. After all, in the weeks leading up to the South Carolina primary on February 19, McCain suffered one of the dirtiest personal smear campaigns in modern American political history.

  “We play it different down here,” Tompkins once told reporters. “We’re not dainty, if you get my drift. We’re used to playin’ rough.”

  Indeed. Push polls attacked McCain’s personal life, exaggerated his role in the Keating savings-and-loan scandal, and disputed his war heroism. Leaflets slammed his wife, Cindy, for her past addiction to painkillers; Bush allies told South Carolinians that she had V.D., thanks to her husband. An e-mail from a Bob Jones University professor accused McCain of fathering children out of wedlock. A mysterious public action committee in favor of the Confederate flag—called “Keep It Flying”—sprang up overnight and slammed McCain in 250,000 leaflets. Phone calls and radio talk shows repeated that McCain had a black baby, had been driven insane while in a Vietnamese POW camp, was a lying, cheating whore.

  Were there layers of people separating Bush from this scum? Of course; there always are. But Bush never ordered it stopped—why would he? It was working. Bush engaged in his own delightful activities, appearing at Bob Jones and telling a Christian radio station, “An openly known homosexual is somebody who probably wouldn’t share my philosophy.” He literally embraced a fringe Vietnam veteran activist who erroneously slammed McCain for doing nothing for veterans. He sank lower in the mud than any major presidential candidate in more than a generation.

  “When the going gets tough for Governor Bush, he turns to the darker side of our party,” a senior McCain adviser tells me, after I phone up and report that the four Palmetto State pols are now in Florida. “We saw that in South Carolina, and we see that today.”

  The McCain strategist sees where Tompkins, Eskew, Thompson, and Rhoades might be pushed into service. In Florida, as in South Carolina, Bush stalwarts have an interest in devaluing traditional Democratic voters. Jews and blacks in Palm Beach and Broward Counties, for instance, who have complained about various ballot and voting irregularities, are dismissed by Bush surrogates and Baker every chance they get. Voters who misunderstood the butterfly ballot are called “confused,” “stupid,” or worse. “I’m sure that those Dixiecrats in South Carolina can rest assured that [Bush’s South Carolina team] care deeply about the Holocaust survivors who accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan, or the black voters who were turned away at the polls,” the McCain adviser says. “They can rest assured that they’re being represented well.”

  In consultation with Bush, Ginsberg, Terwilliger, and the rest of the legal team, Baker gives the go-ahead to file a federal suit against the Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia County canvassing boards for going ahead with hand recounts. After consulting with Ginsberg, Bush staffer Ted Cruz calls a former colleague, Michael Carvin, a Reagan administration Justice Department official, and tells him to get down here ASAP.

  They’re going to “go federal”—sue the canvassing boards in federal court. Screw the PR risks, they decide, characteristically. They want the federalis to step into the pending chaos and nip it all in the bud.

  It’s suggested that for jurisdictional reasons it makes more sense to have Florida voters suing the canvassing boards than just the Bush campaign. In Broward County, they enlist a Jeb ally, Fort Lauderdale attorney Georgette Sosa Douglas, who led that area’s “Get Out the Vote” push. In Palm Beach, they get Ned Siegel, a big donor and multimillionaire real-estate developer. In Miami-Dade they snag Gonzalo Dorta, a Coral Gables lawyer who sits on the county judicial nominating commission, thus whispering the names of his favorite judge candidates to Jeb. They call Jim S. Higgins, chairman of the Martin County Republican Executive Committee. Hard to imagine Gore being able to network like this.

  The other Floridians on the lawsuit constitute a somewhat motley crew. There’s Carretta King Butler from Daytona Beach, a thrift-shop owner perhaps best known in the area for endorsing a city commissioner candidate who once was accused of trying to run over her daughter. Butler, one of the few African-American delegates at the Republican convention, speaks often about “the Holy Spirit” and maintains that she has a close relationship with the state party chairman, Al Cardenas, despite the fact that she refers to him as “Al Cardison.”

  There’s also Dalton Bray, a former aide to Republican congressman Cliff Stearns and a Clay County sheriff who lost his reelection bid in 1992. And there’s Roger Coverly from Seminole County, about whom the GOP lawyers know basically nothing. It doesn’t matter.

  Ted Olson, the man putting the federal case together, is a beloved member of the Washington GOP establishment. Known for his blond mane, his $1,500 Wilkes Bashford suits, and his pundit/author wife, Barbara, Olson plays an active role “at the heart” of “the vast right-wing conspiracy”—as he once joked at a meeting of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization.

  One of former independent counsel Ken Starr’s best friends, Olson helped ABC News negotiate an interview with Monica Lewinsky, and ran the Arkansas Project—a multimillion-dollar investigation into the life of President Clinton funded by right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. Olson defended controversial Arkansas witness David Hale during the Senate hearings on Whitewater. He has also taken on some landmark conservative causes, defending the Virginia Military Institute in its failed attempt to remain all male and successfully representing four white students who sued the University of Texas Law School, claiming its affirmative-action policy denied them their rightful acceptance.

  I call around, and while Olson is no less beloved for taking on Bush’s fight, there are conservative lawyers in Washington who think the premise of Olson’s fight—that the federal government should intrude on a local election—goes against conservative legal opinion. So why would he even take this on? Isn’t it intellectually inconsistent? Does that even matter?

  Olson’s close friend Daniel Troy, a former clerk for Judge Robert Bork, a constitutional lawyer and an associate scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, explains it all. First, Olson is “sort of
a lawyer of the right, clearly a Republican,” not to mention one of the three co-chairmen of Lawyers for Bush-Cheney. Also, Troy says, Olson has “a very profound sense of fair play… Ted is not as predictable as you might think. The left would caricature him as some true-blue conservative, but in his personal style he’s more iconoclastic.” An example, Troy says, is Olson’s taking up the cause of fighting federal sentencing guidelines in the case of Los Angeles police officer Stacey Koon, one of the cops convicted of violating Rodney King’s civil rights by beating him in March 1991, an argument Olson won before the U.S. Supreme Court in June 1997. On one level, defending a cop is almost always a conservative cause, and defending one of the guys who beat King isn’t exactly left-wing. But federal sentencing guidelines have been a Republican charge for quite some time. So for Olson to have argued that a federal judge was appropriate in deviating from federal sentencing guidelines could be seen as unusual, especially for a lawyer considered by his peers to be a “Borkian originalist,” Troy says. Or it could be seen as defending a bullying white cop who almost beat a black man to death. Depends.

  Even more controversial—in GOP circles, at any rate—was Olson’s defense of New York Newsday reporter Tim Phelps against a special prosecutor hired by the Senate to investigate leaks during the confirmation hearings for then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Phelps broke the story that Thomas had been accused of sexual harassment by law professor Anita Hill.

  Not that defending Phelps cost Olson any friends. Olson’s conservative bona fides are long established; he and Barbara, who wrote an anti–Hillary Clinton screed called Hell to Pay, are the Beautiful People among the Washington Right.