Down & Dirty

by Jake Tapper

It wasn’t the circumstances of his evasion of service, even though it came in the midst of an era when five hundred American GIs were dying each week, Kerrey was giving up a leg, and McCain was being held in a POW camp even though, as the son of an admiral, he’d been offered early release. No, even bearing all that in mind, it was the idea that Kerrey read the Globe story while Bush was talking about being guided by his conscience, by refusing to do what was politically expedient, while Bush was making the character of Army enlistee Al Gore an issue.

  Now here it is again, Kerrey thinks, as he watches Lieberman fumbling on TV. The political surrogates who defended Gore weren’t so hot, Kerrey thinks. Congressmen Hastings, Wexler, Deutsch—they were good guys and doing their best, but Gore needs someone more experienced down there to help him, someone with a national reputation. Bush was beginning to use the whole Republican Governors’ Association, and they were killing Gore!

  Kerrey phones up Gore.

  “You need to get somebody down there, for Godsakes,” Kerrey says. They were getting killed. Surrogates matter, he thinks.

  Gore explains to him that the thinking in Goreland is that they want to use local politicians. That’s the story they’re laying out—local people, local canvassing boards, their decision.

  But Carol Roberts can only do so much, Kerrey believes. It’s very difficult for a local person to debate Norman Schwarzkopf on the issue of military ballots. We need the same sort of surrogates the Republicans are using. Especially in this overseas-absentee-ballot dispute, which in Kerrey’s opinion is “totally bogus.”

  “We may have made a mistake in sending the memo out,” Kerrey thinks, “but it’s no mistake to say that if a ballot is illegal, it should be disqualified. It might help for me to go down there. They won’t expect a one-legged Vietnam veteran Medal of Honor winner to argue that a ballot that’s two weeks late should be disqualified. It’s bullshit to say otherwise. That’s one thing you learn in the military—you take responsibility for your actions, you follow orders, and even if you don’t know the rules, you can be court-martialed for not following them.”

  But it’s not just the absentee-ballot issue that’s getting Kerrey fired up; he thinks the Republicans have basically launched a campaign based on The Big Lie. Tell a lie loud enough, often enough, with sufficient conviction, and sooner or later people will believe you. Take hand recounts, for instance. The Votomatic is a shitty device, one that hasn’t been used in Nebraska—Nebraska!—since 1982, the year Kerrey was first elected governor. Everyone knows it isn’t as accurate as a hand count.

  In addition, Kerrey is flummoxed to hear Republicans pretend that hand recounts are anything but the norm in close elections. Everybody in politics understands that in a close election, you do a hand recount, he thinks. Racicot, a former attorney general, knows that the things he’s saying aren’t true, Kerrey thinks. But Racicot says them repeatedly, over and over, and because he does so, people start believing that they must be true.

  And the people running the interviews don’t challenge him.

  Kerrey’s aghast at the fact that the media allows the Republicans to even argue that the validity of hand recounts is a debatable point. Kerrey doesn’t blame the Republicans, really. They’re trying to prevent the hand count, that’s their objective, and they’re doing what they need to do. But that national journalists would actually fucking sit there and nod their heads and say, “Senator Kerrey, this is a very good point that the governor has raised,” when it wasn’t a good point at all! It was a joke!

  And the Bush team clearly had gotten permission from their people to say anything they wanted to say. Look at House Majority Whip Tom DeLay: “The Democratic Party is prosecuting the war to reverse the results of a fair, free election by any means necessary,” DeLay says. “Make no mistake, we are witnessing nothing less than a theft in progress, and the American people, the Constitution, and the rule of law are all potential victims.”

  They were out there saying that Gore was stealing the election, committing fraud, and what the fuck were the Democrats doing? So even though it’s not quite the Gore plan, an infuriated Kerrey flies down to Florida, spends a day in Miami and a day in Palm Beach. Somebody, he thinks, has got to do something.

  “Fucking Butterworth!” one Gorebie mutters under his breath.

  The attorney general issues a letter on Monday, November 20, telling elections supervisors to allow overseas ballots from members of the military that don’t have a postmark—as long as the ballots are signed and dated no later than the date of the election. “No man or woman in military service to this nation should have his or her vote rejected solely due to the absence of a postmark, particularly when military officials have publicly stated that the postmarking of military mail is not always possible under sea or field conditions,” Butterworth writes. The Gorebies are not only upset with the content of the letter, they are pissed that they didn’t even get a heads-up from Butterworth before it was issued.

  Now the Bushies can contrast the Herron memo not only with what Lieberman said, but with Butterworth.

  There go the Dems, like ships from a sinking rat.

  On Tuesday, Kerrey holds a press conference.

  “Having been in the military, one of the things that was driven into me when I was in the United States Navy is that failure to get the word is no excuse,” Kerrey says. “Everybody that’s in the military understands that. And we should not be playing politics with our military as a consequence of that standard being in place every single day for our fighting men and women. If they have a legal ballot, it should be counted. If it’s not a legal ballot, it should not be counted. Men and women in the military should not expect and do not expect to be treated in some fashion that has them being a pawn in a political argument that’s very tense and very passionate here in Florida.

  “In the military we accept responsibility for our mistakes, we don’t blame it on somebody else. And if I’m not prepared and I didn’t get the word and I come to my commanding officer and say, ‘Gee, I’m sorry, Captain, I didn’t get the word,’ my commanding officer will say, ‘Lieutenant, failure to get the word is no excuse.’”

  The ballots that have been tossed for technicalities are being done so because of a lack of postmark, Kerrey says. “And the day after these accusations are made, what we’re discovering is signatures are not there, voter IDs are not there, addresses are not there, witnesses aren’t there….And we’re discovering that the number of people who were thrown out this time around are no greater or no less than what happened in 1996.”

  There are three lessons Kerrey learns in Florida.

  One, the Republicans are just all-out lying about the hand recounts being chaotic. He tells reporters this at one press conference, but they basically ignore him. Chaos is always a better story than calm.

  Two, he thinks, the Democratic Party of Palm Beach County committed campaign malpractice by not noticing and filing a protest against the butterfly ballot before the election. An old woman approaches him to tell him how she’s voted ten times in Palm Beach. She knows the rules, she tells him, she knows that the presidential candidate who’s the same party as the sitting governor is listed first and the other party’s candidate is listed second—so she punched the second hole, mistakenly thinking that it was for Gore. The idea that she voted for a man who denies the horror that she lived through during World War II appalls her. The woman, who has a concentration camp number tattooed on her arm, is crying; Kerrey is very moved.

  Three, Kerrey sees firsthand that some of the ballots the Democrats want to be counted as votes—the dimples, specifically—simply cannot be called that. In Palm Beach County, he’s shown a disputed ballot, and he thinks, “Oh my God, you can’t assert that this is a vote.” He says as much.

  “Of course you can, you can see it right there,” a Democratic lawyer asserts.

  Kerrey still can’t see it.

  Some of the marks that the Democratic lawyers are calling “dimples” that show �
��intent” don’t look like marks to him. But then again, that’s a testament to the Democratic Party’s strength and weakness, he thinks—we care about fairness. The Republicans simply don’t, he thinks. Not in this battle, anyway.

  He’ll come to think that the Democrats’ dimple lust will help the Bush people paint the entire recount as illegitimate. And he’ll know, even as he flies back to Washington, D.C., that the Republicans used the overseas-ballot issue very effectively, they drove it home, and—despite his best efforts—the Gore campaign buckled and lost. It didn’t matter what the truth was, it didn’t matter that Racicot and Dole and Sen. Alan Simpson said what Kerrey considered to be out-and-out lies, the media was letting them get away with it, and there was nothing he could do. He tried.

  In retrospect, Kerrey will come to see the dispute about overseas absentee ballots as the moment when the Bushies turned the corner and started to put this thing away.

  Though no one knew it for sure at the time, there was a good reason for the Herron memo. Before the election, 23,246 overseas ballots were mailed out from the state of Florida, and more than half of them—14,415—had come in by Election Day. As of Monday, November 13, Florida’s sixty-seven counties had received 446 military overseas ballots since November 8.

  By Thursday afternoon, that number had swelled to 2,575. By Friday, it was 3,733.

  Democrats like Nick Baldick were suspicious: Where did this sudden surge of overseas ballots come from, more than a week after the election? Military mail is often far more efficient than regular post office mail.

  Baldick’s suspicions were well founded. According to a knowledgeable Republican operative, on either November 10 or 11, after Warren Tompkins was assigned by the Bush campaign inner circle to be in charge of absentee ballots, there was a sixty- to ninety-minute conference call for political operatives scattered throughout the state. Tompkins was on the call.

  Many matters were attended to. They talked about finding people to be observers. They talked about drumming up protesters. They talked about assigning operatives to different clerks’ offices to wait for the overseas absentee ballots, and to report on what the Democratic operatives were up to.

  According to a knowledgeable Republican operative, in the course of that conversation they discussed having political operatives abroad and near military bases encourage certain soldiers who had registered to vote—but hadn’t yet done so—to fill out their ballots and send them in. Voter registration ID made it so they could identify not only which soldiers, sailors, and airmen were Democrat and which were Republican, but which were black and which were white. They would target the right ones.

  We’ll get them to send them in, and we’ll argue about the postmarks later, one of the operatives said, according to this source. We’re gonna raise a stink and force them to count these ballots. We don’t know how they’re gonna come in, but we need every vote we can get.

  If this idea was carried out, then the Bush political operatives involved were committing a serious crime. But barring a major law-enforcement investigation into the matter—where phone records can be subpoenaed, and operatives can be threatened with perjury charges if they fail to tell the whole truth, two powers I simply do not have—the world may never know if this plan was carried out, and if so, how it was carried out and how many votes Bush may have gained as a result. (Neither Tompkins nor Mehlman returned calls for comment.)

  10

  “You know what I dreamed of today?”

  In Tallahassee, the Florida State Seminoles—ranked no. 3 in the country, with a 10-and-1 record—are a religion. Same in Gainesville, where the 9-and-1 Florida Gators are ranked no. 4. So on Saturday, November 18, Gore v. Bush is pushed aside for a more important contest: Florida v. Florida State. A bunch of us—lawyers, reporters, pols—get tossed from our hotel rooms to make way for alumni and fans that had their rooms booked up to a year in advance of today’s game.

  Even the august Mr. Baker gets booted by the Doubletree Hotel; he moves to a rental apartment where he’ll remain ’til the bitter end. Curiously, despite the fact that, when all is said and done, the Democrats will have been outplayed and overrun by the Republicans, Christopher successfully negotiates to keep his room at the Governor’s Inn. Perhaps there’s some deeper meaning in this. In any case, I’m not sure how well he slept—outside his window, bars were packed, bass pumping, co-eds losing themselves in pursuits Christopher probably hasn’t thought about since the Carter administration.

  It’s cold—something like 40 degrees, in the 30s with the windchill, we’re told—but that doesn’t stop FSU’s Doak Campbell Stadium from quickly being packed with 83,042 fans, some with faces painted, others more than a tad boozy. FSU sticker–adorned cars in the parking lot have alligator dolls hanging from the trunks.

  Some of the fans’ hand-painted signs, of course, allude to the other war being waged in town. A big theme revolves around comparing visor-clad Gators coach Steve Spurrier—who led his team to a Sugar Bowl win in ’96 but can’t buy a victory in Tallahassee, where he has a record of 0–4–1—to Al Gore. “Who’s A Bigger Crybaby? Spurrier or Gore?” taunts one sign. “Visor Boy, your chads are dangling,” reads another. Forgoing any football connection whatsoever, state GOP chair Al Cardenas and Insurance Commissionerelect Tom Gallagher hand out “Sore-Loserman” campaign signs.

  The hot ticket today is FSU president Sandy D’Alemberte’s skybox, where you can find Florida Supreme Court justices Major Harding and Leander Shaw, as well as Governor Jeb Bush. Soon, none other than Katherine Harris arrives with her husband, and two bodyguards. She looks lovely, gray sweater hanging from her trim frame like a queen’s robe. Harris has more than a passing interest in this game; the University of Florida football stadium, called “The Swamp,” is officially named after Harris’s citrus mogul grandfather, Ben Hill Griffin, a powerful Floridian worth $390 million in 1990.

  Everyone in the box is sporting name tags.

  “If anyone does not need a name tag, it is you,” one reporter says to her.

  “Really?” she asks. “I guess you’re right. I went to the supermarket today. And a woman said to me, ‘You shop?’ I said, ‘Duh, yeah.’”

  “You know what I dreamed of today?” she says to another reporter. “That I would ride into this stadium, carrying the FSU flag in one hand and the certification in the other to cheers of all those around me.” 1

  Joseph she ain’t. She says she cannot get over her newfound celebrity. “I cannot believe this, I watch Leno, and he’s making jokes about me,” she says. “You know, what joke I loved the best is, ‘If Katherine Harris was a sportscaster of this game, she would call the winner in the third quarter.’”

  How are you holding up? she’s asked.

  She giggles. “What do you think?” she says. “How do I look?”

  “I love this game,” she adds, motioning toward the field. “We will have a winner at the end.”

  FSU beats Florida 30 to 7.

  Strep Throat * calls me back. I haven’t written anything about Harris and Jeb for a bunch of reasons, primarily because I think there is nothing to write. But I also think that it’s disgusting that Strep Throat would even pitch the story to me, a story that, as far as I know, Strep Throat invented out of whole cloth.

  Strep Throat never bestowed upon me this much attention during the campaign, which I resent. And frankly, I’m insulted that he would think I would spread such filth. *

  Strep Throat tells me that he has a lead for me. The name of a guy willing to talk. He’s on the faculty of the University of Miami Law School, I’m told. I don’t call. A few hours later, Strep Throat calls me back and tells me that the guy is actually on the faculty of the University of Miami Medical School. Apparently, he was heard on talk radio saying that everyone knew about the affair.

  At this point, I do call. I’m like the eleventh person to call him, the professor says. ABC, Newsweek, the New York Daily News, a ton of major media outlets have phoned before me. It’s not
him, the Miami guy says. There’s someone else with the same name in Tallahassee or something.

  This is how a senior Gore adviser is spending his time, peddling this filth. Filth that isn’t even remotely true. A few weeks from now, the New York Observer and others will allude suggestively to “the rumor” about Jeb and Harris that the media had put a lid on. Die-hard Democrats will send e-mail after e-mail, begging us to tell the American people the truth.

  True to his word, Bobby Martinez doesn’t go back to the Miami-Dade canvassing board to try to get the count shanked and, more specifically, to get a judge to order the elections-board employees to stop sorting out the 10,750 undervotes.

  Instead, on Saturday, Martinez tracks down circuit judge Margarita Esquiroz at a wedding in the Keys. She’s the duty judge this weekend, and Martinez wants her to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent the countywide count from commencing. He argues, in particular, that sorting out the undervotes will degrade the ballots.

  Really, do we have to do it today? Esquiroz asks him. I’m in the Keys.

  I’m sorry, Judge, Martinez says. But they’re going to sort out the undervotes tomorrow, so I really do need to do this today.

  Have you told the other side yet? she asks.

  Not yet, he admits. I haven’t filed the brief yet. I wanted to talk to you first to see how you think we should do it.

  OK, well, after you tell them, then beep me, she says.

  Martinez arranges hand deliveries of the emergency motion for a temporary injunction—Esquiroz gets one in the Keys, Zack gets one at home, Coffey at Berger’s law firm, and Murray Greenberg gets one, too, since the canvassing board, technically, is the one Martinez is seeking the injunction against.

  They agree to hold the hearing Sunday morning by telephone.

  During the hearing, Martinez tells Esquiroz that “the prudent thing is the very reasonable request that we’re asking for, a very temporary pause of this matter until this afternoon, perhaps, or tomorrow morning.”