Down & Dirty

by Jake Tapper

  Jim Wilkinson, a spokesman for the Bush recount team who was present at the protest outside the Miami-Dade canvassing room, says to me that there was nothing orchestrated about the protest. “There were between eighty and a hundred of us” outside the room, Wilkinson says,“and it was a very emotional group of young people. But they thought the election was being held behind closed doors.”

  Wilkinson observes that the Democrats have their share of protesters in Miami, too. “Al Gore has union volunteers that they’ve bused in from out of town to down here in Miami,” he says. “Jesse Jackson brings a thousand or ten thousand volunteers to Florida, and they have no problem with it. All of a sudden, we have a hundred people and we’re intimidating. Republicans are using Democrat protest tactics, and they don’t like it.”

  Jesse Jackson’s a hack, but his demonstrations in Florida (which never approached the ten thousand mark), while increasingly irresponsible in rhetoric, weren’t even remotely like the ugliness on the nineteenth floor. And off the record, even Bushies acknowledge that this was not their team’s proudest hour. Some are worried about a PR backlash. Then there are those like Ken Mehlman who are just happy that the count ended.

  In any case, there’s an immediate attempt by the Republican Party, and their media allies, to pooh-pooh any acknowledgment whatsoever that the mob was hostile and tried to be intimidating and clearly played some role—if only as an obstacle, or as a last straw—in stopping the hand recount. “In my life I have never found anything more frightening than a mob of young Republicans,” jokes Fox News Channel’s Brit Hume on Sunday, November 26. “They have on light green corduroy pants, and they’ve got on little belts with little frogs on them, and little pink shirts and everything. And, I don’t know about you, but those Republican preppies just scare the daylights out of me.” *

  On the other side of the Coin of Crap, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., comes forward on November 25 to refer to the GOP protest as a “riot,” charging that “a whiff of Fascism is in the air.”

  “A mob threatened them [the members of the canvassing board], banged on their doors, roughed up people, threatened them, and they succumbed to the mob violence and the intimidation,” Nadler says at a press conference. “That is frankly un-American of the mob to do that, it’s un-American of the Republican leaders to lead that, and it’s un-American for the Dade County board of canvassers to succumb to that threat.”

  Nadler’s overheated demagoguery is an insult not only to his constituents but to the memory of anyone who ever came face-to-face with actual Fascism. While it’s true that Benito Mussolini once said that “Fascism is reaction,” that’s where the comparison ends. For Nadler to compare a bunch of obnoxious Republican protesters who probably deserved to get roughed up a little by some of Whouley’s pals from Southie (a thought that crossed Whouley’s mind more than once) to Fascists is nothing short of sickening. Mussolini, Generalissimo Franco, Adolph Hitler—these are men responsible for slaughter, for mass murder, for genocide.

  On November 22, 2000, on the nineteenth floor of the Miami-Dade County Government Building, fifty or so Republican activists got obnoxious, and hostile, and violent, and clearly some of them should have been escorted out of the building if not arrested. On November 21, 1920, outside the Bologna, Italy, City Hall, ten newly elected Social Democratic councilmen were slaughtered in a hail of gunfire by Fascists, who soon began patroling the countryside, taking over villages and murdering labor leaders and leftists. These events couldn’t be more different; Nadler should be ashamed.

  Those nonpartisans who were actually there, however—as opposed to those who seldom leave the confines of the Beltway—have a slightly more nuanced take on it all.

  “Was it meant to be intimidating?” asks Villafana. “I believe so. Did they intend to disrupt the process? Yes.” The canvassing-board members are “in the public spotlight, and they know how to handle it,” he says, but “I think the protesters accomplished their goal. They had a victory party after the vote was stopped; they felt jubilation.”

  Villafana is even more offended, perhaps, by the Republican Party’s lies about what was going on inside the government building. “As an American, I personally believe in hard-fought contests, but there comes a time when essentially misinformation to the public should not be part of the process,” Villafana tells me. “Confusing the American people as to what a community’s attempting to do should not be part of the process, and that’s an issue of ethics and what you believe in.”

  In the end, the Democrats’ attempt to argue that the Republicans intimidated the canvassing board into quitting is at least unproven. There certainly were other possible factors. Political pressures may have played a role; De Grandy’s continued references to the area’s Hispanic vote—as subtle as a battalion of armed INS agents storming into a Little Havana hovel before sunrise—could certainly have weighed on the minds of the elected judges on the panel.

  Then, of course, there’s the question of where Mayor Alex Penelas was during the whole deal.

  Rep. Harold Ford, Jr., Democrat of Tennessee, walks into the Miami-Dade government building right as the Republican punks are storming it. There he meets up with state senator Kendrick Meek. A few hours later, after the recount is canceled, Meek invites Ford to come with him to pay a visit on Penelas.

  Penelas tells them that he’s as disappointed as anyone that the count isn’t going to continue. He indicates that he’s troubled by the board’s decision and says he hopes they’ll reconsider. It’s not his decision, he stresses, but Penelas says that he’s going to write a statement to that effect. He tells Ford and Meek that it will be completed in half an hour.

  In a conversation with Gore around that same time, Penelas makes similar comments, leaving a similar impression. Though Penelas has been AWOL from the Gore campaign—he had to distance himself from the Clinton administration’s Elián blunders—he’ll come through on this, it seems to Gore.

  Ford and Meek tell him that they’ll wait in a conference room. Penelas says he’ll have it done soon.

  Twenty minutes or so later, Ford, Meek, and a bishop from Meek’s district tell Penelas that they’re going to return to the lobby.

  “No problem,” Penelas says. The statement will be done in a moment.

  A few hours pass, and though Ford never sees the statement, he takes Penelas at his word that it is coming. “I had a meeting with Mayor Penelas today, the mayor of Miami-Dade County,” Ford says via satellite on CNN’s Crossfire that night. “And he indicated that the county was prepared to put all the resources needed to ensure that Miami-Dade—the canvassing board—be able to provide an accurate recount.”

  That isn’t, of course, the message of the statement Penelas eventually issues, which merely states that he has “no jurisdiction over that board’s decisions.”

  “I don’t know him well enough to feel betrayed,” Ford says later.“But at a minimum, I wish he’d been more candid and more truthful.”

  Gutierrez, who worked for Penelas years ago but no longer does so, says that Penelas’s shift was just a manifestation of the thirty-eight-year-old mayor’s personality. “Knowing him, he was probably trying to please everybody,” Gutierrez tells me. But when other details about Penelas’s activities bubble up in the New York Times, thanks to Florida’s open-government laws, Democrats start thinking more was going on in Penelas’s world of conflicting pressures than just a desire to please.

  The day before the count was canceled, the Times story details, Penelas was in Tallahassee where he reportedly lunched at the Governor’s Club with Republican state representative Mario Diaz-Balart and met with other Republican legislators. The legislature is charged with redistricting the state and adding a congressional seat, Democrats whispered; Penelas is said to want to run for Congress. Calls were traded back and forth. But it’s difficult to figure out what angles Penelas is playing. He phoned both the Republican cloakroom in the U.S. House in Washington, D.C., as well as several advisers to Gore.
Monday night, GOP state chair Cardenas spoke with Penelas’s no. 1 political adviser, Herman Echevarria.

  “I don’t think they were asking about the weather,” Boies will later tell me.

  I meet with Mayor Penelas in December. In the newspaper, his cutie face smiles as he bestows gifts upon Miami. At the Miami International Airport, his soothing voice welcomes me, personally. In the conference room this afternoon, he’s ambition in a suit. Cold, prickly, hostile. A jungle cat.

  What about the New York Times story? I ask him. Any truth to any of it?

  “I don’t know what the sources are,” he says with steely eyes. “I usually don’t respond to things that I don’t know the sources to.”

  He says that he never told Gore that he’d ask the canvassing board to recommence counting.

  So what’s the deal with all the calls and meetings and conflicting stories?

  “Someday I’ll write my book,” he says.

  “I spoke to them a few times about the issue,” he says about the canvassing board, just “as the mayor, to find out what was going on, because we were getting inundated with media calls about what was going on. I wanted to make sure that [Leahy] knew that we would make available to him and the canvassing board whatever resources they needed to effectuate whatever decision they made.”

  So if that’s all, aren’t you upset about the Times story?

  “I thought it was great,” he says unconvincingly. “I got my name in the first page of the New York Times.

  “I get criticized every day here, that’s part of my job,” he explains.“If you take it too seriously, then you can’t handle the job. When you get back in the car, turn on any one of the talk shows, and I’m getting blasted for everything that goes wrong in this town. From everywhere.

  “For other parts of the country, it may be unusual to deal with all this media and all the controversy, but I’ve dealt with it all, y’know. I’ve dealt with international fugitives and five named hurricanes as mayor and, y’know, fires and a plane crash and Elián González. It’s what makes this job fun.”

  He doesn’t look like he’s having much fun.

  The Democrats allege that you have plans to reregister as a Republican and run for one of the new congressional districts, after redistricting, I say. Any plans to reregister as a Republican?

  “I have been fielding that question for thirteen years, my friend,” he replies. “And I’m still a registered Democrat. I got my voting card right here,” he says, reaching for his wallet. “I’m not going to switch parties.

  “I believe that more people went to vote in Florida with the intention of voting for Al Gore,” he adds.“But because of a series of coincidental events, none of which I believe were intentional, Mr. Bush won the state. But I do think more people went to vote for Gore with the intention of voting for Gore but were unable to execute for one reason or another, butterfly ballots and dimpled chads and all these other things.”

  Well, what do you even think about the whole idea of a recount? Should the undervotes and such be counted? Should the Republicans have taken all the steps they did to stop the counting?

  “I had very strong feelings about it,” he says.

  Ummm… such as?

  “That’s what they are: my feelings,” he says. “Like I said, maybe someday I’ll write my own book about this.”

  C’mon.

  “I favor having every vote counted,” Penelas finally says.

  And then he gets up and, like a tiger, skulks out of the room.

  There’s so much unadulterated bullshit in here it almost pains me to reprint it, but here is what the Bushies put out for their surrogates in the House and Senate to regurgitate.

  Subject: Updated Talking Points on “GOP” Protests

  Author: georgewbush.com at Internet

  Date: 11/25/2000 1:37 PM

  • The protests in Miami-Dade were a fitting, proper and instant reaction to a rash attempt by the canvassing board to count ballots in secret. Imagine all those observers, in place for the purpose of monitoring the manual recount, being told there was nothing to observe because the election board, which didn’t include a single Republican, decided instead to take 10,000 ballots to the 19th floor to count them in secret. That’s what the Board tried to do and the reaction was spontaneous and inevitable, given the imprudent actions of the Board.

  • The press also demanded access to the room where the Board intended to act in secret.

  • Passions in Miami-Dade were rising because the Board also intended to count predominantly Democratic precincts, ignoring the votes cast in overwhelmingly Cuban areas. Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart said the morning of the protest the Board’s action was in apparent violation of the Voting Rights Act.

  • The Board made a series of bad decisions and the reaction to it was inevitable and well justified.

  • Finally, the Board’s ultimate decision not to proceed was based on the fact they couldn’t finish the manual recount by the Sunday 5:00 deadline—not because of these well deserved protests.

  • But how come Joe Lieberman is critical of this protest and not the protests led by Jesse Jackson on behalf of Democrats? Joe Lieberman is less interested in right and wrong and more interested in silencing his opponents. This is the latest example of Al Gore and his campaign saying one thing while doing another. The first amendment applies to both parties and to all Americans.

  Mark Fabiani never wanted to stick around in D.C. for the recount; he has a wife and kids (including an eighteen-month-old) in La Jolla, California, and he had to be begged by Gore to stick around after the election. Having directly arranged with Gore a Thanksgiving break for himself, Fabiani takes off to see his family.

  Daley is pissed, frustrated; he tries to reach Fabiani but has trouble doing so. Others on the ground in Tallahassee think the communications team is rather wanting. Hattaway and Backus have been doing what they can, but lots of folks think Fabiani is flaking and Lehane is slacking—though at least they do so alternatingly. *

  To Daley it’s all just more of the same. The campaign he inherited late was fucked-up to begin with. He tried to do what he could, but these consultants were a problem. Shrum, Eskew, Devine, Fabiani—all smart guys, all talented guys, but they leaked like the fucking Lusitania, they went home on weekends, they were soft. Fabiani packed up the weekend before the election, didn’t come in to work that Sunday. What kind of message did that send to the kids who were pulling all-nighters, unpaid? And now, post-election, Daley’s having the same problems. He tries to get everyone to work out of the same conference room at the DNC, but that lasts like all of two hours, whereupon they all scurry back to their cozy little offices. When Fabiani comes back to D.C., he’s even managed to finagle a room at the Ritz, paid for by the recount committee! Christ!

  In La Jolla, Fabiani is fretting about the fact that Gore is now going to be contesting this thing. From a PR standpoint, Fabiani thinks, it’s devastating to have the election declared for Bush—which is what it looks like will happen come Sunday, minus the Miami-Dade ballots.

  Gore and he have talked about it, and Gore, too, knows that there’s a very short fuse on this thing. Gore wants Fabiani to come up with a communications plan to convey that the process is making progress, that there’s an endgame that can work. So Fabiani lays out his thinking:

  From: Mark Fabiani

  To: Bill Daley

  Date: November 23, 2000

  COMMUNICATIONS PLAN: CONTESTING THE ELECTION

  Assumptions

  This plan makes two basic assumptions:

  • By Saturday morning, because of various adverse court decisions and local canvassing board decisions, it is clear that Gore will not have amassed sufficient votes to take the lead by the Sunday 5:00 P.M. deadline.

  • Gore has definitely decided to file an election contest if he is not in the lead by the Sunday 5:00 P.M. deadline.

  Fundamental Principles

  • A decision to file an election contes
t must be explained to the country by Gore personally and in significant detail. This is not a decision that can be explained in the first instance by lawyers and spokespeople.

  • Gore must announce his decision to contest as soon as possible (once the two assumptions discussed above become fact). The alternative—delaying an announcement until Monday—is untenable for these reasons:

  • If it becomes clear on Friday or Saturday that Gore is unlikely to have the recount votes to prevail, the bulk of the news coverage will shift to the issue of whether or not Gore will nonetheless contest the election. In this kind of environment, Gore’s political support will quickly and inevitably erode.

  • As a result, by the time Gore is ready to make a contest announcement on Monday, he will already have come under tremendous pressure not to take such an action.

  • By making an announcement sooner rather than later, Gore at least has the chance to hold potentially wayward supporters in line.

  • In addition, an early announcement allows Gore to set the parameters of the contest and explain how it can be conducted fairly and within a strictly limited period of time.

  • Everyone associated with Gore must begin immediately to speak from the same page. Already there are comments from Gore advisers in the media saying that Gore’s challenge must end on Sunday evening if Gore remains behind in the vote. In light of Miami-Dade’s decision, the facts have changed dramatically, and so should the posture of everyone speaking on behalf of Gore.

  The Alternative

  • If Gore has decided not to contest the election, there is still great value in maintaining the viability of the contest option right up until Sunday. In this case, the dominant themes would be these: