Down & Dirty (18 page)

The Gorebies are disappointed. Some top members of the blue-chip law firm Holland & Knight agreed on Wednesday to take the
Gore case: Martha Barnett, a senior partner at the firm and president of the American Bar Association, and Chesterfield Smith,
the H&K partner who’s the dean of Florida lawyers. But by Thursday they tell the Gore lawyers that there’s a potential conflict,
which they’re working on resolving. We’ll get back to you, they tell the Gorebies.

But Team Gore never hears from them again. Bye-bye, Holland & Knight.

The Democrats are disappointed but not surprised. This is Jeb Bush’s terrain. All the major law firms in the state have offices
in Tallahassee, so all are beholden to an extent to Jeb and the GOP-controlled state house and state senate.

Imagine the Everglades in the mid 1930s. Gladesmen hunted gators and otters, poling their skiffs through mangroves for weeks
at a time, sleeping on small piles of peat at makeshift campsites with names like Break-A-Leg and Buzzard and Camp Nasty.
¹
They fended off predators and irritants ranging from gator fleas to moonshiners to God-knows-who and God-knows-what. Now
picture dropping Harvard boy Albert Gore, Jr., smackdab in the middle of it all. The Gladesman—who know their way around
the marshes, the swamps, the jungles—are not inclined to help the foreign preppie.

One such Gladesman is Frank Jimenez—a slight, intense guy whom I run into one night at Tallahassee hot spot Café Cabernet.
Jimenez sits with Katie Baur, Jeb’s communications director. Jimenez is angry. He says chad are on the floor. He says Daley’s
a thug. When I point out that Daley was twelve when his dad helped JFK, Jimenez calls me naive. He’s motivated by anger, and,
having taken an unpaid leave as Jeb’s assistant general counsel, his charge is whatever it takes to help his boss’s brother.
Three other members of Jeb’s legal staff take time off to help as well, as does Baur.

Another Gladesman is J. M. “Mac” Stipanovich, a former Marine who helmed the gubernatorial campaigns of Bob Martinez in ’86
and Jeb in ’94, and who spent ’98 helping both Jeb and Katherine Harris win. Stipanovich used to be much higher profile, always
quick with a quote for reporters. But from ’98 on, the lawyer/lobbyist at Fowler White learned to keep his trap shut while
he sat in the money-laden nexus of Tallahassee politics, raising money for Republican candidates, then turning around and
lobbying them on behalf of clients like Big Tobacco. Stipanovich, who has likened politics to the Vietnam War, was drafted
into duty by a senior Bush adviser the Thursday after the election, and he has been closely advising Harris ever since. All
the while, he’s been talking to Bushies. And Stipanovich’s call is not the call of law or justice. It is the call of victory.

Reporters will try to establish direct ties between Harris and W. It’s not as if they need to—Harris is on the program from
the get-go. But the fact that Stipanovich is by her side during most of the next month—while Ken Sukhia, Stipanovich’s law
partner at Fowler White, simultaneously represents George W. Bush—is one connection never made.

And Harris, chief elections officer of the state, is the Gladeswoman the Gorebies are most wary of. Harris, first elected
in 1988, was Bush’s Florida co-chair as far back as October 1999. “I am thrilled and honored to announce my support of George
W. Bush for the Presidency,” she said in a “Bush for President” press release. Harris said that working with Bush’s
younger brother,“has provided a constant reminder of the power of values-based leadership—the same leadership George has shown
in Texas. I also share George’s commitment to education, and I look forward to sharing his vision with Floridians.” She would
later serve as a Bush delegate during the Republican National Convention.

This is the woman whom the state is relying upon for fair and impartial service.

Democrats shake their heads as they read the opposition research brief their staffers have prepared. Harris’s activities on
behalf of Bush went far beyond the normal activities of a state chair. She was a presence on the Bush campaign back in January,
traveling with Jeb and 138 other Floridians as they flew from Miami and Tallahassee to New Hampshire on a leased Boeing 727
to campaign for the Texas governor in his primary campaign against McCain. Harris’s presence on the tour—called “Freezin’
for a Reason”—brought lovely photo ops of her and her fellow Floridians handing out bags of Florida oranges and Plant City
strawberries. It has also brought serious questions in light of her authority in the Florida controversy.

This isn’t the first time that Harris’s involvement with the Bush campaign has had her critics questioning her impartiality.
An October story in the
Tampa Tribune
about the $100,000 of state funds that Harris had spent on trips to New York City, Washington, D.C., and abroad, reported
that, “Speculation has Harris seeking an ambassadorship if Texas Gov. George W. Bush is elected president.”

Additionally, it was Harris who reportedly personally enlisted Ret. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf in a Florida public service
TV announcement urging Floridians to go to the polls. Schwarzkopf, a well-known supporter of Bush, not only vouched for Bush
during the Republican National Convention, but appeared with the Texas governor at numerous campaign stops throughout the
Sunshine State. Democrats and others criticized Harris for selecting someone so clearly aligned with the GOP candidate.

The Democrats gripe. They want a Harris of their own. Instead they have Bob Butterworth, the state’s Democratic attorney general.

Many leading members of the Gore team don’t think too highly of Butterworth, not his smarts or his loyalty. They’ve heard
that he wants to run against Jeb for governor in 2002, that his eyes are on that election, not this one.

The Dems get word that Jeb has announced that he’s recusing himself from the three-person state elections board, on which
he serves with Harris
and Jeb Bush–appointed supervisor of elections Clay Roberts, also a Bush backer. Harris soon announces that Jeb will be replaced
by Agriculture commissioner Bob Crawford, a Democrat. Crawford also happens to be a Democrat who endorsed Jeb Bush for governor
in 1998, and George W. Bush for president in 2000.

Even those individuals not loyal to Jeb who are skiffing through the murky political swamps of Florida politics right now
are more inclined not to help Gore. His brother stands an excellent chance of being sworn in as the next leader of the free
world on January 20. This is his state; he’s the governor; he appoints judges, promotes others, names individuals to boards,
freezes people out, or plucks them from obscurity. This is the Jeberglades.

For a guy like Al Gore, it’s pretty dangerous terrain.

On Thursday, Butterworth’s office places a call to circuit judge Robert Rouse, chief judge of the Seventh Judicial Circuit,
who picked Volusia’s canvassing board’s chairman, Judge Michael McDermott, a Republican. The three—McDermott, Rouse, and Butterworth—get
a conference call to discuss Volusia’s recount.

Butterworth wants to make sure that whoever’s in charge of the Volusia recount knows that it’s supposed to be a full recount.
Some of the counties are just comparing the final count with the numbers from the machine tallies instead of rerunning the
cards through the machine. Butterworth also wants to make sure that McDermott knows what he’s supposed to be doing.

“Mr. Butterworth, with all due respect, I believe you should disqualify yourself from any involvement in this matter,” McDermott
says. Butterworth was, after all, Gore’s state campaign chair until just the other day.

Butterworth seems to get a bit huffy. “Well, I guess I’ll leave the room, then,” he says.

Butterworth leaves his own office, slamming the door behind him.

In Palm Beach County, Theresa LePore is worried.

On Thursday, she, Judge Burton, and Democratic county commissioner Carol Roberts grant both the Democrats’ and Republicans’
requests—a hand recount for the D’s, another machine recount for the R’s.

Even though their votes were unanimous, LePore feels very much alone. Neither of her colleagues—Burton, forty-one, a Democratic
former prosecutor appointed to the bench by Gov. Jeb in May, and Roberts, sixty-four,
a very partisan Democrat and former West Palm Beach mayor first elected in ’86—is suffering the same slings and arrows as
is she.

Thursday morning, county attorney Leon St. John phones up local legal hotshot Bruce Rogow, who represented the raunchy rappers
from 2 Live Crew in their obscenity and copyright infringement cases and who sued to get ex-Klansman David Duke on the presidential
ballot. Rogow, sixty, has been before the U.S. Supreme Court eleven times, more than any other Florida lawyer.

“It looks like Theresa’s going to need a lawyer,” St. John says.

It’s unclear just what she’ll need one for, but she’ll assuredly need one, St. John says. The rhetoric in the air—that accusation
that she lost the election for Gore, that the butterfly ballot was illegal—is scaring her, he says. More immediately, St.
John says, LePore’s the target of a federal lawsuit filed yesterday by an attorney named Lawrence Navarro on behalf of a voter
named Milton Miller, and it’s set for a hearing today before U.S. District judge Kenneth Ryskamp, a hard-ass Republican.

In the coming days, Miller will be joined in his anti–butterfly ballot, anti-LePore charge by seventeen other Palm Beach County
plaintiffs, in several other lawsuits. Thursday alone brings four circuit court suits and one federal court suit demanding
a revote. Some of the plaintiffs are surely sympathetic. Like Sylvia Szymoniak, eighty-four, of Palm Springs, a Democrat who
hasn’t missed an election since she began voting in the 1930s, who says that she was rushed out of the voting booth. Or Florence
Zoltowsky, seventy, a Boynton Beach Holocaust survivor whose possible vote for Nazi-defender Buchanan literally makes her
ill. Or Lillian Gaines, sixty-seven, of the Coalition for Black Student Achievement, the Urban League, and the Sickle Cell
Foundation of Palm Beach County.

Then, of course, there’s Andre Fladell. Fladell, fifty-three, a chiropractor and Democratic operative from Delray Beach—he
and LePore once served together as judges in a hot dog–eating contest—who has more than once been referred to as the “unofficial
prince of Palm Beach County,” not always as a compliment. If there was ever a guy to stick himself into the middle of a mess,
Fladell was him.

On Wednesday, looking out upon the sea of potential lawsuits, Rogow called an old friend of his, Environmental Protection
Agency chieftain Carol Browner, whom he’d known since she was twelve. He left a message for her: You need to tell Gore to
get somebody on the ground here. It’s chaos in Palm Beach. It’s insanity. Someone needs to squash these suits. But now his
first order of business is not to make helpful suggestions to Gore,
for whom he voted, but to represent LePore against Miller’s suit. Miller went to the 1st Korean Christian Reform Church on
Election Day, where voting at precinct 214 was taking place, and was immediately confused by the ballot. “The names were zigzagged
so that the punch holes were not in the correct order,” the complaint says. Miller told “agents” of LePore and Harris that
he was having problems understanding the ballot “but took no action to rectify the situation.”

Miller “will suffer irreparable harm due to the Defendants’ actions in the event a preliminary and permanent injunction”—against
the certification of Palm Beach County’s tally—“is not granted. Defendants’ actions have caused Plaintiff to suffer emotional
distress for which he cannot adequately calculate money damages.” Miller is asking for LePore and Harris “to order a new election
in Palm Beach County.”

It’s nonsense, Rogow thinks.

Soon, as Rogow drives on I-95 to represent LePore before Ryskamp, Democratic attorney Mitch Berger calls him on his cell.
“We want to get this case dismissed,” Berger says.

“So do I,” Rogow says. “But what do you want me to do?”

“We’d like to have the lawyers who are involved call us,” Berger says. “So when you get there, see what you can do.”