by Jake Tapper
“He is good friends with just about everybody,” Troy says, describing a scene this summer when Olson was at a reception for the Reagan Library in Philadelphia during the Republican National Convention. “Nancy Reagan was whispering things in his ear; Ted was chatting with Pete Wilson here, hugging Rudy Giuliani there,” Troy says. “Everybody likes him, and that’s saying a lot for someone as high profile and successful as he is.”
Well, not everybody, of course. Olson’s involvement in so many anti-Clinton activities (he even helped Paula Jones’s attorneys practice for their case before the U.S. Supreme Court) raises the thought—in the minds of some Democrats, at least—that his presence on the Bush legal team really is evidence of a vast right-wing conspiracy.
“He’s very competent, but he’s very right-wing extreme,” a Democratic strategist tells me. “It appears that the Republicans are employing the same extreme strategies that they’ve tried in the past six years. This kind of partisanship over pragmatism and strong policy has failed them in the past, and we feel it will fail them again in this case.”
I dunno. Olson’s pretty good. Call him a right-wing whacko at your own risk, I say.
At noon, Baker walks into the Florida senate hearing room. Somewhere in his journey from the Bush Building to here, “the velvet hammer” lost the velvet. Far from being the voice of caution and respect for the process that is his billing, Baker has overnight morphed into one of those irritating Type A Major League Baseball coaches whose machismo fades into girlish histrionics whenever his team starts losing. His latest urgent, impatient cause: to call this election for Bush even before all of the ballots are in.
As questionable and desperate as the Gorebies’ complaints about unfair voting practices and their threats of lawsuits may seem, the Bush campaign meets the Gore camp’s desperation and raises it: the final recount is not over, but they’re telling everyone that it is. The overseas absentee ballots have until November 17 to be received and counted. But the Bushies are now starting to panic. They’ve decided on a strategy: discredit anything that happens from now on.
“Let me begin by saying that the American people voted on November seventh, and Governor George W. Bush won thirty-one states with a total of two hundred seventy electoral votes,” Baker says. “The vote here in Florida was very close, and when it was counted, Governor Bush was the winner. Now, three days later, the vote in Florida has been recounted.”
At this point, both assertions are essentially untrue. The first count, from Election Night, was official but uncertified, so Bush was never the official winner, since the state’s automatic recount effort kicked in. As for the vote in Florida having been recounted, that’s just not true.
“Now the Gore campaign is calling for yet another recount in selective and predominantly Democratic counties where there were large unexplained vote swings in their favor in the recount,” Baker says. * He asserts that further recounts, especially by hand, will introduce further errors. “This frustrates the very reason why we have moved from hand-counting to machine-counting.”
As for Palm Beach County, Baker says that there is “a rule of law” to be followed. The apparently confusing butterfly ballot was legal, set up by a Democrat and met with no objections before Election Day. He poohpoohs the fact that some voters were apparently so flummoxed by the butterfly ballot that they voted twice.
It’s weird to have Baker here talking about the butterfly ballot and the elderly Jewish voters who mistakenly punched the chad for Buchanan. As ironic as is the presence of Daley, so is the presence of Baker, chief antagonist of the American Jewish community in the administration of President George H. W. Bush. Amid complaints from American Jews who found the Bush administration needlessly hostile to Israel, Baker is alleged to have said about Jews in 1992: “Fuck ’em. They didn’t vote for us.” In April of the same year, the executive director of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee told attendees at the annual AIPAC conference that “we are most angry about the recent series of Washington leaks, accusations, alleged vulgarities, and the whole patronizing approach this administration’s top officials have displayed toward Israel.” He was talking about Baker.
One wonders how his presence is being received by the confused elderly Jews of Palm Beach.
Baker paints the whole dispute as sour grapes by Gore. “I understand personally… that it is frustrating to lose an election by a narrow margin,” he says. “But it happens.” He cites the case of Nixon in ’60 and Gerald Ford’s 1976 loss to Jimmy Carter. Both “accepted the vote for the good of the country,” Baker says, though it is also true that neither Nixon nor Ford had his election come down to one state’s disputed and 300-some-vote margin of victory.
It is at this moment that I realize I’ve got to stop counting on the truth coming out of any of these guys’ mouths. These guys—Daley and Coffey and Christopher, too—are now starting to piss me off, and I wonder what the rest of the country thinks. How can you say these things with a straight face? Baker, in particular, is grating. How can he state that Bush won the machine recount? Nothing’s official yet. So I raise my hand.
“Are you basing your assertion that Bush won the recount on the Associated Press’s completely unofficial tally?” I ask.
“I’m making the assertion that Governor Bush won the recount. You all know what the numbers are,” he says.
“But that’s not the official—”
“Wait a minute,” Baker says. “Just a minute. Do you want an answer, or do you want to make a speech?”
No, I don’t want to make a speech, I think. But I would like somebody, please, to give me a straight answer. At this point, I’ve been in Tallahassee for only a day and a half, but it’s already crystal clear that both Bush and Gore are behaving in the exact same respective charmless ways that made me hate covering their nakedly ambitious, morally ambiguous, and essentially empty campaigns this past year. No wonder the country couldn’t make up its fucking mind.
“Let me say this,” Baker goes on. “We know why the certifications have been delayed from these very same counties where we have these large unexplained shifts toward the other campaign. If the purpose here is to delay and endless wrangling, and recount after recount after recount, that game can be played.
“It is important, ladies and gentlemen, that there be some finality to the election process. What if we insisted on recounts in other states?” Like Wisconsin or Iowa. But when we ask about those states a minute later, he says that the Bush campaign hasn’t eliminated challenges in those states from the realm of possibility. A recount is already taking place in New Mexico, which Gore slimly won.
Black is white. White is black. 2 + 2 = 5.
Whouley’s deputy at the DNC, John Giesser, thirty-six, arrived at his Palm Beach hotel at around 2 A.M. Predictably, Giesser’s from Boston—he met Whouley while working for Dukakis in ’88. In Delray, Giesser meets with Jack Corrigan, another member of the Boston crew. Corrigan knows this shit firsthand. He was an assistant district attorney working under Norfolk County district attorney William Delahunt. In 1996, Delahunt ran for congress and lost in the primary by 266 votes to a rich environmentalist named Philip Johnston. A recount brought Johnston’s margin of victory down to 175 votes. Then Delahunt’s team—led by P. J. O’Sullivan, now also in Palm Beach for Gore—noticed that 1,540 people who cast Democratic ballots in areas where one would think Delahunt would have a strong showing didn’t vote in the congressional race. Those undervotes were, at the time, called “blanks.” A month later, a superior court ruled that Commonwealth law requiring elections officials to gauge the “intent of the voter” meant that 946 “dimpled” ballots were actual votes. Delahunt was awarded the primary win and went on to win that November.
Corrigan’s not the only guy on the ground here who knows punch-card ballots and dimples. Boston attorney Dennis Newman, who represented Delahunt’s opponent in the 1996 dispute, is also down here at Whouley’s request. Then, of course, there’s Chris Sautter
, who, with Jack Young, worked on a 1989 gubernatorial recount in Virginia, when Lieutenant Governor Doug Wilder’s victory over Attorney General J. Marshall Coleman wasn’t official until forty-three days after Election Night. Last year Virginia was for Recount Lovers, as Young and Sautter worked on recounts for state senator (37-vote victory Election Night, 39-vote victory post-recount), Fairfax school board seat (77 votes Election Night, 79 post-recount), and Broad Run district supervisor (9 votes Election Night, 12 votes post-recount).
It’s easier to be ahead, of course.
Florida law has the same standard as Massachusetts—“intent of the voter”—but it leaves it up to the canvassing boards to make such judgments. So, for these guys, the plan is to have the four canvassing boards use the most liberal interpretations possible, so that as many as possible of the predominantly Democratic counties’ undervotes break in the same proportion as the vote in each county.
The Boston Boys, and other lawyers on the Gore team, will cite the Delahunt standard and the Supreme Court of Massachusetts Delahunt precedent—which will be, at the very least, an imperfect comparison, if not a completely disingenuous one, because Delahunt-Johnston was the only race on that particular ballot. So, in Delahunt, the idea that voters went to the polls and didn’t cast a vote for anyone at all was, of course, less believable than the notion that Florida voters would go to the polls and not cast a vote for either Bush or Gore. Counting those Massachusetts dimples as votes was far more logical than counting every nick and scratch on Florida ballots.
But no matter. Applying the Delahunt standard will bring Gore more than enough votes to win, the Boston Boys conclude. And if they get the hand recounts going, and with the standard they want, and they do so quickly, Gore’s name will be at the bottom of the MSNBC screen next to the number of votes by which he leads Bush. “To get there the fastest and get the mostest votes, to paraphrase General Forrest,” Young will later say.
This is what they’ve been sent here to do.
In Austin, Bush sets up a White House-esque photo op, sitting in the governor’s mansion with some of his advisers. “I’m here with Secretary Cheney; Larry Lindsey, my chief economic adviser; Condi Rice, my national security adviser; Andy Card, who you know; and Clay Johnson,” he says.“There was a count on Election Night, and there’s been a recount in Florida,” he continues. “And I understand there are still votes to be counted. But I’m in the process of planning, in a responsible way, a potential administration. There’s been a series of ongoing meetings that the secretary and I have had on a variety of subjects, so that should the verdict that has been announced thus far be confirmed, we’ll be ready.
“Larry in particular is going to talk about the markets, and Condi is going to bring us up-to-date on a lot of matters. There’s issues in Israel right now that I’m looking forward to hearing about.”
Bush refers all questions about Florida to Baker. Reporters don’t ask him any tough ones, and the cameras go CLICK-CLICK-CLICK.
Shortly after 1 P.M., the Democratic big guns walk into the Florida Senate hearing room to assert a few points of their own. As the Bushies have had their volume turned up to a shrill decibel level, the Gorebies by necessity continue low-tempo, low-key. They’ve gone through further legal discussions and are off the butterfly ballot deal, at least for now, though Berger is still working with Whouley and Fowler in Palm Beach to secure as many voter affidavits as his team is able for possible future use, maybe in a contest. They’re trying to separate the wheat from the chaff; the thousands of complaints Gore staffers have recorded from phone interviews range from the serious to whiny to the just plain silly:
“Confused by 2 holes,” reads the complaint of Fedora Horowitz of Boynton Beach. “Thought 1 for Gore and 1 for Lieberman, so accidentally voted for Buchanan. No one would help her because there were too many people in line.”
“Not enough staff. Small print. Many, many people were very upset. Lines were very long, seniors on walkers, etc., were waiting in long lines,” reads the phone complaint of John and Shirley Birk of Coconut Creek.
“Rumored that Bush would win w/absentee ballots,” reports Maldine Bush of Miami. “Overheard 2 men talking outside a bank a few days prior to election.”
“Marine in Vietnam, PSYCHO!! Hates Cubans, ANSCESTORS on Mayflower. If we don’t follow on Cuban Corruption, he will ‘have to get [his] automatic weapons and take care of us!!…’”writes another Democratic phone interviewer.
Bob Bauer, a D.C. election lawyer, has been brought in to check it out. A Bradley supporter (he even played the role of Gore in Bradley debate prep) who is married to Bradley’s former communications director, Anita Dunn, Bauer quickly comes to the conclusion that the butterfly ballot case lacks legal merit. It will be kept on the table until Thanksgiving, but by Wednesday, November 15, Klain will consider that flying insect to have been swatted.
Now they have new talking points, off the litigation-a-go-go from yesterday. One, they say, this isn’t about them, it’s about the people of Florida. Two, they say serenely, everything’s fine, everything’s good, this is a perfectly normal situation, no big deal. Three, they say, it’s the other side that’s behaving like crazed banshees. And four, they say that they want to get this over with as soon as possible, too—even though their actions speak otherwise.
At the press conference they’re led by Daley, who today kind of reminds me of The Thing from Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four. Behind him strolls a lovely-double-breasted-suit-wearing Warren Christopher.
The recount has shown, so far, “a considerable narrowing of the margin between Vice President Gore and Governor Bush,” Daley says. “When one considers the number of ballots yet to arrive from Americans overseas, and presumably mostly men and women in the military, then it seems very clear that the outcome here in Florida remains in doubt, as it will for several more days.”
Daley says that in the last day, three of Florida’s sixty-seven counties have agreed to hand-count their ballots, as opposed to machine-counting them, “at least on a sample basis.” The hand-count request was made “because of oddities in the computer vote totals. I hope all Americans agree that the will of the people, not a computer glitch, should select our next president.”
Daley puts on a happy face, acknowledging that this whole mess—particularly its wait—is “frustrating” not only to the world, but “to all of us in both campaigns.” He says he hopes “that our friends in the Bush campaign would join us in our efforts to get the fairest and most accurate vote count here in Florida.”
But Daley also slams these “friends.” “Calls for a declaration of a victor before all the votes are accurately tabulated are inappropriate,” he says. “Waiting is unpleasant for all of us. But suggesting that the outcome of a vote is known before all the votes are properly tabulated”—as the Bush campaign repeatedly has done, most notably just minutes before in the same exact place by Baker—“is inappropriate.” He says that everyone should “carefully measure all of our words, recognizing the high stakes involved in these deliberations.”
But it’s doubtful that the words will stay measured, especially since Daley makes it clear that the Gore campaign’s take on “all the votes” being “accurately tabulated” would include the tens of thousands of nullified or mistakenly cast ballots in Palm Beach County. “Our legal team has concluded that the ballot in Palm Beach County was unlawful, it was complained about on Election Day, a complaint that was implicitly acknowledged by the elections supervisor who put out a flier on Election Day warning about the problems.”
AAARGH! LePore put out this flier only because the Democrats asked for it.
When will this all be over?
“As soon as the proper procedures would allow it,” Daley says, elliptically. “All of us want this as quick as possible to be over, there’s no question about that.”
Sure there is. There are plenty of questions about that.
For the Gorebies, “as quick as possible” means as soon a
s every Democratic Floridian has gotten the chance to vote, and vote accurately, even if he screwed up his vote because of a confusing ballot. But for the Bushies, “as soon as possible” means yesterday. Final recount, final shmecount.
As the briefing winds on, Christopher calls the Bush campaign’s bluff that they might challenge Iowa or Wisconsin or New Mexico. Bring it on, the old man says. “The team of Governor Bush has every right to consider challenges in other states if they think they have an obligation to do so, and perhaps they have an obligation to do so if they regard the count as inaccurate,” offers the former secretary of state.
“What we are seeing here is democracy in action,” Daley says.
Is it? Yuck.
6
“You fucking sandbagged me.”
All right,” says Judge Charles Burton. “Good morning, everyone. If we could have quiet in here, we can get through this meeting as quickly as possible and get to the matter at hand. Today is November 11th, 2000.”
With LePore and Democratic commissioner Carol Roberts, Burton is supervising both a second machine recount of the county’s 462,657 ballots upon request of the Bush team, and a 1 percent hand recount upon request of the Democrats. Not surprisingly, the Democrats—or, more specifically, Nick Baldick—picked three patches of land that couldn’t be more Democratic if they were located in Hyannis Port—precincts 193 and 193-E in Boca Raton and 162-E of Delray Beach.
As stacked with Gore votes as the three precincts are, they still don’t add up to 1 percent of the county; vote-wise, they’re still 300 or so votes shy of 4,620. So the canvassing board itself picks the first county with a vote total—349—roughly the size of the debt, precinct 6-B in suburban Palm Beach Gardens.
The word goes forth, and the ballots are ordered in. Teams of three counters apiece, with two observers—one D, one R—per table, set up. Some of the observers want to be able to handle the ballots.