Down & Dirty (11 page)

Soaking wet and totally confused, the young Democrats gather in HQ after Daley has bid them adieu for the night. Gore strategist
Tad Devine gathers the crew around and gives them a pep talk. They said Al Gore was dead in the water in New Hampshire, Devine
says, referring to pre-primary polls that showed former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley with a sizable lead in the state Gore
eventually won. “But we stayed and fought!” Devine says, and Gore won New Hampshire. They said Al Gore was going to get demolished
by George Bush, Devine says. But we stayed and fought, and it looks like Al Gore’s going to win the popular vote.

“I don’t know what the outcome of this election will be,” Devine says. “But I feel an obligation to go down there and figure
it out, and stay and fight!” The exasperated Democratic masses cheer. There’s an automatic recount in Florida, Devine says,
and Gore needs guys on the ground to make sure it all goes right.

Donnie Fowler, deputy field director, jumps on a desk and starts shouting out names like he’s in the army. “Backus, Jenny!”
he says. “Bash, Jeremy!” He runs through several dozen. “You got an hour. Go home and pack. Bring about three days’ clothing.”
A charter plane is shipping them all down to Florida at 6
A.M
.

Someone chips in that he did the Virginia recount in 1998, and it took three weeks.

Everybody groans. Three weeks! That’s forever!

Lieberman’s campaign plane—nicknamed “El Al Gore” or “Air Force Jew” by Nashville staffers—is snagged. By 5:30
A.M.
, sixty to seventy staffers have been shuttled to the airport and loaded up onto the plane, which Gore campaign lawyer Jack
Young has dubbed “Recount One.”

Jill Alper briefs the young campaign staffers on what’s going on, tells them to take off their campaign paraphernalia. As
they all drink coffee and
OJ, Young and Joe Sandler, general counsel of the DNC since 1993, brief them on the recount process.

Weeks before the election, Whouley asked Sandler and Young to prepare an immense notebook containing the recount procedures
of twenty states. Some states were dropped as they got closer to Election Day and poll numbers went outside the margin of
error, but it’s a pretty comprehensive volume, and it looks like a stroke of genius now. They thought they’d need it for Missouri.
Earlier in the night, when Iowa looked too close to call, they pulled the book out. They looked to the binder again for information
about Oregon, Washington, New Mexico. And, finally, Florida.

In August 1994, Young and two Democratic attorney colleagues—Chris Sautter and Tim Downs—self-published
The Recount Primer,
a forty-three-page booklet that deals with almost every issue the team will encounter—and the country will learn about—in
the next thirty-six days. In the primer, they laid out the purpose of a recount for “partisan representatives”: “a) preserving
a margin of victory, b) identifying election night mistakes which will turn a narrow loss into a win, or c) creating doubt
as to the outcome sufficient to require a new election.” They will contrast these goals with those of election officials,
who “are concerned with accuracy, not outcome.”

In the front of the plane sits Ron Klain, the guy who’s going to run the legal effort. He’s snoozing.

Klain was Gore’s chubby, assertive chief of staff at the White House before Gore’s second campaign manager, Machiavellian
former House Democratic whip Tony Coehlo, froze him out of Gore’s inner circle in May 1999. Coehlo had decided to run the
operation out of Nashville and didn’t want Klain throwing in his two cents from the Old Executive Office Building in D.C.,
nor did Coehlo want Klain leaving the OEOB to play a role in the campaign, frankly. Klain thought he was unnecessarily cruel.
By August 1999, Klain had announced that he was leaving. To spend time with his family, of course.

Despite years of loyal service to Gore, that was it, no postcards, no letters; he could barely even get through to Gore anymore.
Gore looked away, as if Klain had never existed.

It was a very painful year. He’d tried to keep a sense of humor about it. His new office at the D.C. office of O’Melveny &
Myers featured cue cards from a monologue from the
Tonight
show with Jay Leno, autographed by the host himself:

AND ANOTHER BIG SHAKE-UP IN THE AL GORE CAMPAIGN…. IT SEEMS HIS LONG TIME CHIEF OF STAFF HAS QUIT….

THEY SAID TODAY ON THE NEWS THIS IS THE BIGGEST SETBACK FOR THE GORE CAMPAIGN… WELL… SINCE AL GORE.

It had seemed like a big fall for wunderkind Klain. The Hoosier had come to D.C. in ’79 to go to Georgetown, and he immediately
began interning for Indiana Democratic senator Birch Bayh. After Harvard Law, Klain clerked for U.S. Supreme Court justice
Byron White, served as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, domestic policy adviser to Clinton in ’92, associate
counsel to the president, chief of staff to Attorney General Janet Reno, and, as of November 1995, top aide to Gore.

Superconnected. On March 19, 1993, Justice White called him at the White House and asked him to hand-deliver his resignation
letter to Clinton. Clinton asked him to lead the team to pick a replacement. One of Klain’s first calls was to the Senate
Judiciary chairman, Delaware Democratic senator Joe Biden. He knew them all.

He was moving, always moving, working his ass off, downing Cokes and M&M’s while his wife raised their three kids. In 1994,
Time
magazine had named him one of America’s fifty “most promising leaders” under age forty. Now what?

To Gore, people are expendable. Klain was just one of several dissed in the Coehlo era—Jack Quinn and dying media man Bob
Squier were two notable others. And as Gore tore through campaign managers like the rest of us go through a box of Kleenex,
Coehlo was soon shoved aside as well. It helped that he had been sick, a better excuse than that “spend time with my family”
bullshit, and in June 2000, when Commerce Secretary Daley was brought in to get the campaign functioning better, Klain was
no longer persona non grata. He was, again, persona grata—though slightly demoted. That summer and fall, Klain ran the campaign’s
war-room effort, getting out instant response to Bush attacks against Gore’s policies and character.

Now, however, Klain has an opportunity to be in charge again, to run things for Gore, to get him elected president.

At around 8:30
A.M.
, Klain, Sandler, Young, DNC spokeswoman Jenny Backus, and a few others get off the plane in Tallahassee; it will also stop
in
Tampa and Fort Lauderdale. As Backus is interviewed by a local TV station—in a town like Tallahassee, it’s kind of hard to
miss a plane with “Gore-Lieberman” painted on its side—another plane lands. It belongs to Gov. Jeb Bush. He talks to the camera
after Backus concludes.

At dawn, a plane leaves Austin packed with lawyers and political operatives, flying due east. There’s Ben Ginsberg, of course,
as well as other Bush-Cheney campaign lawyers, like Joel Kaplan and Ted Cruz.

Ginsberg’s the expert; he’s been through tons of recounts before. In fact, Ginsberg’s life has been changed by recounts. It’s
something he’ll tell junior lawyers repeatedly over the next thirty-six days: “Recounts change lives. I can’t tell you how
this one will change your life, but it will.”

Ginsberg’s career trajectory had always been shaped by serendipity. He was raised by liberal Jewish Democrats on Philadelphia’s
Main Line, but his politics were shaped as a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, where Ginsberg saw what he felt
was the great fallacy of Great Society–style paternal liberalism in the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, or CETA,
which tried to help gang members by giving them jobs. It didn’t accomplish anything, Ginsberg thought. It just threw money
at the problem.

As editor of the
Daily Pennsylvanian,
he became a reporter—at the
Philadelphia Bulletin,
the
Boston Globe,
the
Berkshire Eagle
in Western Massachusetts, the
Riverside
(California)
Press-Enterprise.
Whenever he could, he’d ask to cover CETA, because he knew there would be good stories there.

In Riverside in the late ’70s, in what was then the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country, Ginsberg covered the
housing-and-development boom and was shocked to discover how much he didn’t know. So he applied to Georgetown Law and started
in ’79. In the meantime, flaky Jerry Brown was elected governor of California in ’78, which convinced Ginsberg for the first
time to register as a Republican.

In 1982, thirty-one-year-old Ben Ginsberg was just a “grunt associate” at the D.C. law firm Baker & Hostetler when the Republicans
on the House Administration Committee hired the firm to find precedents on recounts. No one had bothered to look into it at
all, and the committee wanted to have the information ready, if needed. Ginsberg did the work.

Just two years later came “the bloody eighth.” In November 1984, in Indiana’s 8th congressional district, one-term Democratic
congressman Frank McCloskey was unseated by Republican Rick McIntyre by 34 votes out of 233,500 cast. McCloskey lost the recount
as well. But the U.S. House
was in Democratic hands, 252 to 182, and led by Speaker Tip O’Neill, D-Mass., the House conducted its own recount—which had
Democrat McCloskey winning by four votes, 116,645 to 116,641. Though just a kid of thirty-three, Ginsberg had been flown to
Indiana for the recount, and the whole experience radicalized him. It was a stolen election, he thought, it was not an honest
process.

Ginsberg was hired as counsel for the National Republican Congressional Committee in June of ’85, and as such was flown into
Minnesota in ’86 to supervise another recount. There he met up with aides to Republican Minnesota senator Rudy Boschwitz,
head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, who brought him in as counsel to that shop in ’87. Through that office,
Ginsberg observed another Florida recount, that between Republican businessman Connie Mack and Democratic representative Buddy
MacKay—the race Theresa LePore had in mind when designing the butterfly ballot.

After talking with Bush campaign chair Don Evans, plans are made to phone up George Terwilliger at White & Case, as well as
other high-profile GOP barristers—most notably Ted Olson and Michael Carvin. From time served in Indiana and Minnesota, Ginsberg
knows that the team needs red-meat local boys. So he calls Jeb’s counsel, Frank Jimenez.

“We need Florida lawyers,” Ginsberg tells him. “We need a statewide firm. We need litigators.”

Jimenez has one recommendation: Barry Richard, from the Tallahassee branch of Greenberg Traurig.

Richard’s a Democrat—a former state rep from Miami Beach, whose dad was mayor there back in the 1950s—but he’s nonpartisan
in his legal work. He represented Jeb Bush in his ’98 gubernatorial bid, as well as in a case this year brought by Democrats
who objected to an absentee-ballot mailing—“From the Desk of Gov. Jeb Bush”—sent out to Republicans and using, improperly,
the Dems alleged, a symbol that resembled the state seal. The mailing was eventually canceled, though the suit was thrown
out of court before Election Day by circuit court judge Terry Lewis. But Richard has represented Democrats, having served
as campaign counsel just the past year for Insurance Commissioner Barry Nelson, a Democrat, in his successful Senate race.

I’m interested, Richard says when Jimenez calls, but I’m flying off to Miami to visit my eighty-eight-year-old dad, who’s
ill. I’ll be back in Tallahassee Thursday, Richard says. I’ll meet up with you guys then.

In a downtown Miami office building, Murray Greenberg—a twenty-eight-year veteran of the Miami-Dade County attorney’s office—calls
Supervisor of Elections David Leahy. He can’t contain himself.

“This is the best election we’ve ever had!” Greenberg, a short, sweet, longtime Miamian, gushes to Leahy, a twenty-year county
vet himself. The county had close to 90 percent voter turnout, there were no close races in the county mandating a recount,
no problems getting returns in, no allegations of lost ballot boxes. Since Bush’s statewide margin of victory had been so
slim, they had to conduct a mandatory machine recount like every other county, of course. But that day’s machine recount results
in less than a 100-vote difference from their original score, well within the norm.