Gore didn’t, and now the War Memorial is the Fort Sumter of 2000–the opening scene in a bitter civil war to win the victory neither contender could secure on election night. Even as the Bush family celebrated in Austin, Texas–a false start for the Bush Restoration, it turned out–the Gore team was plotting a new assault. With photo ops and spin, lawsuits and leaks, recounts by machine and by hand, Gore and Bush fought to affect the final count in Florida–Bush’s unofficial lead was 300 and shrinking–and to control the moral high ground in the nation.
If war is politics by other means, this was campaigning by other means: an unsettling struggle for power that risked veering out of control with no wise men to stop it. With TV clickers in hand, voters settled in for another round of what they’d come to expect during the Clinton years: bitter, agonizing, 24/7 litigiousness on matters that used to be handled calmly, behind closed doors and with a sense of mutual good will. It was Monica Madness all over again, this time about power instead of sex.
Having fought one war to a standstill, the candidates were girding for another, and the historical echoes were deafening. Gore’s team was led by Daley, whose father (the late mayor of Chicago) was instrumental–to say the least–in ensuring John F. Kennedy’s Democratic victory 40 years ago. Bush’s side was led by former secretary of State James A. Baker, who managed President Gerald Ford’s cliffhanging loss to Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Both sides claimed a noble objective: to bestow legitimacy on whoever would be judged the ultimate winner. But the candidates’ transparent posturing and legal maneuvering reminded voters of just what they disliked about each one: Gore’s merciless hunger, Bush’s smirking arrogance. And that, in the end, could lower the standing of whichever one lands in the White House. Each would be seen by his foes–half the country–in the worst light: Bush, the Accidental President, elevated by the miscast ballots of elderly voters in Palm Beach condos; Gore, the Ruthless Prince, propelled to power by spinners, lawyers and his own guile.
The presidential stalemate seemed emblematic: the world’s largest supercomputer of democracy–American politics–had crashed under the strain of division, too much information and just plain weirdness. Voters were hopelessly Balkanized, as if two distinct countries voted, Gore controlling the coasts and the shores of the Great Lakes, and Bush nearly everything else. Congress is just as divided, and potentially immobilized. Republicans held on to the House, but will “enjoy” one of the smallest majorities in modern history. The Senate could be evenly split for the first time since 1880, and will be a circus in any case. One of the new senators is serving for her husband, who was elected posthumously. Another is Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose husband plans to join the Spouses’ Club. As for the media, they were humiliated on election night, as anchors summoned polling drones from deep in the newsroom to explain on camera why they’d called Florida wrong–twice. (The first call–for Gore–came before polls closed in the Republican-dominated Panhandle, and as a result may have cost Bush up to 10,000 votes, a Yale researcher noted.)
The chaos ahead could make election night look placid. Nightmare scenarios lurked in the musty Electoral College. One: that Florida, and perhaps other states (New Mexico and Oregon were also too close to call), might be unable to certify their results by Dec. 18–the day electors meet in their respective state capitals to cast electoral votes. In that case, Gore probably would win a majority of the remaining electors. In case of a tie–a mathematical possibility–the decision would be left to the U.S. House. We’re talking the Blair Witch Project of politics here: an eerie place the country hasn’t ventured into since 1824, when another son of a president–John Quincy Adams–won in the House after failing to amass a majority in the popular vote.
Of course, neither Bush nor Gore thinks it’ll go that far: both are convinced they’ve already won. Gore led in the popular vote, by 200,000 out of 101 million cast. Florida remained in Bush’s column, barely and unofficially–but just enough for him provisionally to claim victory in the only tally that counts, the Electoral College. Pre-emptively, Bush adopted a grave, weight-of-the-world demeanor, and began assembling what he called his “possible administration.” Before heading off to his ranch for the weekend, he looked genuinely, presidentially haggard, and even wore a Band-Aid to cover a boil on his cheek.
The Gore camp, meanwhile, insisted that there had been widespread vote irregularities in Florida, and encouraged lawsuits while demanding “hand counts” in four counties that could well put him ahead. Some party insiders in Washington warned that Gore risked looking like a sore loser, willing to wreak havoc to delay the inevitable–if Bush was indeed inevitable. But Gore himself was calm in private and sporty in public as he played touch football with the family on the lawn of his official residence. Daley professed unconcern. The Electoral College doesn’t meet until December, he noted, and Inauguration Day -isn’t until Jan. 20, 2001. “First of all, we think we won,” he told NEWSWEEK. “Second, I don’t see the reason for all this talk about ‘crisis.’ We don’t need a new guy until January. What’s the rush?”
Daley seemed right–up to a point. Voters in the new NEWSWEEK Poll evidently want to know what really happened in Florida, and were willing to wait awhile to find out. By a 66-22 percent margin, they thought that Gore had done the right thing by withdrawing his concession to Bush once he got to the holding room inside the War Memorial. By an overwhelming 72-25 percent margin, they preferred removing “all reasonable doubt” about the Florida voting rather than “getting matters resolved as soon as possible.” But 44 percent thought the matter in Florida should be settled by the first state-mandated recount or no later than this Friday, when all the absentee ballots are counted from overseas. Only 36 percent thought the process should continue until “all the legal issues” in Florida are resolved. “The Gore people have to be careful not to overdo this,” said one Democratic senator. “If they can win it on recounts, fine. But they can’t go any farther.”
The Gore crowd doesn’t think they’ll have to. It seems bizarre but true: the election may turn on the holes (or lack of them) punched in the ballots of voters in Florida. The controversy threw a harsh spotlight on the process of voting, arguably the most precious American act–yet one governed by an arcane patchwork of local officialdom and antiquated machinery, some of it dating back to the 19th century. The system would be amusing were it not creaking so loudly–and dangerously–under the collective weight of the closest presidential election in modern history. Voters, already terminally cynical about candidates and campaigns, might come to feel the same way about the sanctity of the vote count. They certainly feel that way about the Electoral College. By a 57-33 percent margin in the NEWSWEEK Poll, they want to get rid of it.
Still, there was something gaudily appropriate about rerunning the entire campaign in the confines of rootless, anything-goes Florida, the home of Disney World and Elmore Leonard’s seriocomic scam artists. Ground zero in the Overtime Campaign was Palm Beach County, on the east coast north of Miami and Ft. Lauderdale. Once known for its old money and Kennedy compounds, the area has become the home of gated retirement communities for aged refugees from up North.
The crisis of Election 2000 began there inconspicuously early this fall with an apparent effort–by a Democrat–to make balloting easier for the legions of the elderly. Theresa LePore, the county’s elected supervisor of elections, designed a “butterfly” ballot for the standard punch-card machines used throughout the state. It listed the presidential contenders on opposite sides of the card, with the punch holes in between. Copies of the ballot were publicized, as required by law, though without the holes’ being depicted in the newspaper ads and mailers.
But punching the holes is where the problems really started. Many voters, and not just the elderly, were confused by the staggered listing. Some voters–it seems as many as 3,000–may have voted for Pat Buchanan (listed across from Gore) rather than for the vice president. Later reports showed that more than 19,000 voters in the county had “double punched” their ballots for two presidential candidates, rendering all of them invalid in a county that went overwhelmingly for Gore. In Nashville, the vice president’s and Democratic National Committee aides began picking up reports of problems with the ballot early on Election Day. At 11:24 a.m., the DNC’s chief counsel in Florida faxed a letter to LePore, expressing concern that the presidential ballot was “quite confusing” and asking that she “immediately” instruct all local election officials to advise voters to be especially careful.
LePore responded with an “Attention All Voters” memo that was posted in election sites throughout the county. But DNC officials may have played a role in fanning the hysteria that soon followed. Aware that early exit polls showed Florida neck-and-neck, DNC officials took their own initiative. They instructed a Texas-based telemarketing firm called TeleQuest to phone voters in Palm Beach and alert them to the issue. “Some voters have encountered problems today with punch card ballots in Palm Beach County,” the callers’ script read. “If you have already voted and think you may have punched the wrong hole… you should return to the polls and request that election officials write down your name so that this problem can be fixed.” The call ended this way: “Do you believe that you may have voted for the wrong candidate for president?”
Democrats say the teleQuest calls prove that the outcry over the Palm Beach ballots -wasn’t ginned up after returns came in showing Gore losing. But Republicans charge that the script shows exactly the opposite: that the DNC took a modest problem and inflamed it. “They were whipping up hysteria over this,” said one Republican strategist. If so, they succeeded. In Century Village, a gated middle-class retirement community in Boca Raton, Jewish voters fretted about having accidentally voted for Buchanan instead of Gore. The Reform Party candidate, whom many Jews regard with suspicion, got 58 votes in Century Village–double his average national precinct percentage. “Can you picture me, a liberal Democrat, voting for Pat Buchanan?” asked Sylvia Lawrence, 59. The ballot’s design, she said, “was deliberately done to confuse us.”
It wasn’t done deliberately, LePore insisted, but it seems clear that voters were indeed confused: 19,000 ballots out of 450,000 in the county were double-punched. An additional 10,000 were submitted with the presidential lines left blank. But Democrats weren’t confining their search for “irregularities” to Palm Beach. Once the decision was made to withdraw the concession, Gore and Daley immediately ordered a full-scale invasion of Florida in search of evidence that the veep had in fact won. “We won the election the first time,” Gore told one top adviser. “Now we’re going to have to win it again.”
Significantly, the first legal hand on deck was Ron Klain, a superbly credentialed lawyer and Gore loyalist who ran the campaign War Room in Nashville. His earlier incarnations include chief of staff in the vice president’s office and the same job in the office of Attorney General Janet Reno. Klain knew that time was of the essence, and ordered his team to quickly gather evidence and affidavits of possible violations. With the aid of an 800 number for call-ins, they collected hundreds of affidavits and tracked down voters who had been interviewed by the media.
The Gore team soon learned about the 19,000 double-punched ballots in Palm Beach County. “That’s when the tone of this whole thing changed,” said one top Gore aide. Shortly thereafter, the Gore team signed up Kendall Coffey, a leading Florida lawyer and former U.S. attorney. The team set up a “recount committee,” chaired by Gore’s longtime fund-raiser-in-chief, Washington lawyer Peter Knight. He aimed to raise $3 million.
The Gore team redoubled its efforts to find evidence of any other irregularities in Palm Beach, Dade (Miami), Broward (Ft. Lauderdale) and Volusia (Daytona) counties. Florida law requires a mandatory “recount” in extremely close elections, but even as it was being carried out (and officials waited for the last absentee ballots from overseas), the Democrats asked for more.
Their goal: hand counts. In states with punch-card voting machines, a “recount” means simply feeding the cards through automatic counters a second time. The Goreans want each ballot inspected by hand, especially since, under Florida state law, county canvassing boards are allowed to examine ballots to divine the voter’s true intent. The Democrats got most of what they asked for. That included a manual count in four “sample” precincts in Palm Beach, which the Democrats hoped would put Gore at least temporarily in the lead, and ultimately force an examination of all the county’s spoiled ballots. They were given a similar recount in three precincts in Broward, where there were believed to be some 6,000 ballots with “hanging chad” –partially punched ballots that were invalidated when first submitted, but potentially allowable if re-examination shows there was “clear intent” to vote a certain way. A request for a full manual recount in Dade was pending. And here, for the Democrats, was what Ross Perot used to call the “beauty part”: though each campaign could have its representatives watching the count in each precinct, the canvassing boards in two of those three counties are controlled by… Democrats.
In Austin, Bush campaign officials were deep in imperial transition mode–and seemed to some other Republicans to be asleep at the switch. Top strategists assumed that his 300-vote lead in Florida would hold up when the final absentee ballots were counted late this week. More important, they assumed that Gore’s first phone call to Bush–the concession call–was still the truer reflection of the vice president’s view, and that the American public would rally behind their man. Former secretary of State Baker, brought in to manage the process, called on Gore to stand down, but did so in a gentlemanly manner. The Austin Powers wanted to seem reasonable unifiers–and didn’t want to look like they were squelching the count. Conservative activists had warned them from election night onward to be prepared for mayhem in Florida. “They ignored the warnings,” said one.
But all that changed on Thursday. First, there were fighting words from Daley. “Technicalities shouldn’t decide the presidency,” he declared. “The will of the people should.” Then he announced that the Democratic Party would support private suits filed by individual voters (seven of them pending). And Bush operatives instantly saw the import of the Democrats’ request for hand counts in Broward, Dade and Palm Beach. “They’re trying to win what we know they lost on Election Day,” said strategy chief Karl Rove.
The question was: What to do about it? Austin’s initial strategy was to portray a Bush presidency as a done deal, while supporting the inevitable first recount. The campaign encouraged Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris’s plan to “certify” the results as final this Tuesday, pending only the count of overseas ballots. But by Friday, advisers with experience in Florida were nearly shouting about the dangers of the hand counts, especially in Democratic counties. But how to stop them? The Gore campaign had requested them in timely fashion, following the provisions of a state law to the letter. (The Bush campaign had not bothered to request any hand recounts in Republican-dominated counties, and by the weekend could legally do so in only those few counties that hadn’t finished the regular recount.)
After a day of internal debate, Baker emerged on Saturday to give the answer: the Bush-Cheney campaign would file a suit of its own, this one in federal court, seeking to stop the hand counts. He argued that they were less reliable than machine-run tallies (which the Justice Department itself recommended), and liable to the subjective judgment of canvassing boards. More important, Baker said, there had been two counts already, and Bush had won both of them. All the talk of double-punched ballots in Palm Beach County was disingenuous, other Bush aides argued. Farther north in the Jacksonville area, for example, 22,000 ballots were nullified due to double punching, even though the ballot design was different. “At some point,” Baker said, “Florida’s voters, and indeed all Americans, are entitled to some finality in the election process.” In a 50-page request for a temporary restraining order, the Bush campaign argued, among other things, that the Florida election statute violated due-process rights under the U.S. Constitution. Slated to appear for the Gore campaign: constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe of Harvard.
Austin’s decision to file suit won points in the spin war–for the Gore campaign. For one, the Democrats now weren’t the only team that could be accused of running up the courthouse steps. The Goreans quickly pointed out that there had already been a hand count in the Florida presidential race, and that Bush himself had signed a law calling for their use in Texas. When the counting machines had malfunctioned in Seminole County, the initial recount was conducted by hand, and with GOP approval. And Democrats delighted in noting that Bush, an ardent advocate of returning power to the states, now was acting like a Democrat and hauling a state matter into federal court–on a civil-rights claim, no less. “They’re running scared!” said one Gore aide, chortling.
Not exactly. The Bush campaign bolstered its general staff with Washington superlawyer Ted Olsen and was preparing for the possibility of a wider war. There were states in which Gore–not Bush–had won with razor-thin margins. Two of them were Iowa and Wisconsin, and Bush aides hinted they were looking closely at them. Gore campaign topsiders laughed at the notion, pointing out that both states have reputations for squeaky-clean politics and Progressive Party traditions. “They’re going to challenge the vote in Bob LaFollette’s Wisconsin? We love it!” said one Gore adviser in Washington.
While Gore and Bush dug their trenches, a seemingly serene Bill Clinton kept a close eye on developments. At a celebration of the 200th anniversary of the White House, the president paid homage to the Bush family. He told the former president that he should be “proud” of his son. It was all very publicly cordial–though George and Barbara declined the invitation to stay for the night. Privately, meanwhile, Clinton was wargaming a Gore victory. He called the vice president on Friday, advising him to “hang tough.” Aides to the president say he now considers the matter of succession a win-win proposition. If Gore wins, so much the better. But if Bush wins, Clinton thinks W will have a hard time establishing his legitimacy as president. On the other hand, the president jokingly said, he would be glad to stay on if the country can’t settle on a successor. “Hillary’s going to be working, and I wouldn’t mind sticking around,” he told a close friend the other day. It was just a joke, but it’s hard to know these days.
