Down & Dirty (23 page)

Not that defending Phelps cost Olson any friends. Olson’s conservative bona fides are long established; he and Barbara, who
wrote an anti–Hillary Clinton screed called
Hell to Pay,
are the Beautiful People among the Washington Right.

“He is good friends with just about everybody,” Troy says, describing a scene this summer when Olson was at a reception for
the Reagan Library in Philadelphia during the Republican National Convention. “Nancy Reagan was whispering things in his ear;
Ted was chatting with Pete Wilson here, hugging Rudy Giuliani there,” Troy says. “Everybody likes him, and that’s saying a
lot for someone as high profile and successful as he is.”

Well, not everybody, of course. Olson’s involvement in so many anti-Clinton activities (he even helped Paula Jones’s attorneys
practice for their case before the U.S. Supreme Court) raises the thought—in the minds of some Democrats, at least—that his
presence on the Bush legal team really is evidence of a vast right-wing conspiracy.

“He’s very competent, but he’s very right-wing extreme,” a Democratic strategist tells me. “It appears that the Republicans
are employing the same extreme strategies that they’ve tried in the past six years. This kind of partisanship over pragmatism
and strong policy has failed them in the past, and we feel it will fail them again in this case.”

I dunno. Olson’s pretty good. Call him a right-wing whacko at your own risk, I say.

At noon, Baker walks into the Florida senate hearing room. Somewhere in his journey from the Bush Building to here, “the velvet
hammer” lost the velvet. Far from being the voice of caution and respect for the process that is his billing, Baker has overnight
morphed into one of those irritating Type A Major League Baseball coaches whose machismo fades into girlish
histrionics whenever his team starts losing. His latest urgent, impatient cause: to call this election for Bush even before
all of the ballots are in.

As questionable and desperate as the Gorebies’ complaints about unfair voting practices and their threats of lawsuits may
seem, the Bush campaign meets the Gore camp’s desperation and raises it: the final recount is not over, but they’re telling
everyone that it is. The overseas absentee ballots have until November 17 to be received and counted. But the Bushies are
now starting to panic. They’ve decided on a strategy: discredit anything that happens from now on.

“Let me begin by saying that the American people voted on November seventh, and Governor George W. Bush won thirty-one states
with a total of two hundred seventy electoral votes,” Baker says. “The vote here in Florida was very close, and when it was
counted, Governor Bush was the winner. Now, three days later, the vote in Florida has been recounted.”

At this point, both assertions are essentially untrue. The first count, from Election Night, was official but uncertified,
so Bush was never the official winner, since the state’s automatic recount effort kicked in. As for the vote in Florida having
been recounted, that’s just not true.

“Now the Gore campaign is calling for yet another recount in selective and predominantly Democratic counties where there were
large unexplained
vote swings
in their favor
in the recount,” Baker says.
^*
He asserts that further recounts, especially by hand, will introduce further errors. “This frustrates the very reason why
we have moved from hand-counting to machine-counting.”

As for Palm Beach County, Baker says that there is “a rule of law” to be followed. The apparently confusing butterfly ballot
was legal, set up by a Democrat and met with no objections before Election Day. He poohpoohs the fact that some voters were
apparently so flummoxed by the butterfly ballot that they voted twice.

It’s weird to have Baker here talking about the butterfly ballot and the elderly Jewish voters who mistakenly punched the
chad for Buchanan. As ironic as is the presence of Daley, so is the presence of Baker, chief antagonist of the American Jewish
community in the administration of President George H. W. Bush. Amid complaints from American Jews who found the Bush administration
needlessly hostile to Israel, Baker is alleged to have said about Jews in 1992: “Fuck ’em. They didn’t vote for us.” In April
of the same year, the executive director of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee told attendees at the annual AIPAC
conference that “we are most angry about the recent series of Washington leaks, accusations, alleged vulgarities, and the
whole patronizing approach this administration’s top officials have displayed toward Israel.” He was talking about Baker.

One wonders how his presence is being received by the confused elderly Jews of Palm Beach.

Baker paints the whole dispute as sour grapes by Gore. “I understand personally… that it is frustrating to lose an election
by a narrow margin,” he says. “But it happens.” He cites the case of Nixon in ’60 and Gerald Ford’s 1976 loss to Jimmy Carter.
Both “accepted the vote for the good of the country,” Baker says, though it is also true that neither Nixon nor Ford had his
election come down to one state’s disputed and 300-some-vote margin of victory.

It is at this moment that I realize I’ve got to stop counting on the truth coming out of any of these guys’ mouths. These
guys—Daley and Coffey and Christopher, too—are now starting to piss me off, and I wonder what the rest of the country thinks.
How can you say these things with a straight face? Baker, in particular, is grating. How can he state that Bush won the machine
recount? Nothing’s official yet. So I raise my hand.

“Are you basing your assertion that Bush won the recount on the Associated Press’s completely unofficial tally?” I ask.

“I’m making the assertion that Governor Bush won the recount. You all know what the numbers are,” he says.

“But that’s not the official—”

“Wait a minute,” Baker says. “Just a minute. Do you want an answer, or do you want to make a speech?”

No, I don’t want to make a speech, I think. But I would like somebody, please, to give me a straight answer. At this point,
I’ve been in Tallahassee for only a day and a half, but it’s already crystal clear that both Bush and Gore are behaving in
the exact same respective charmless ways that made
me hate covering their nakedly ambitious, morally ambiguous, and essentially empty campaigns this past year. No wonder the
country couldn’t make up its fucking mind.

“Let me say this,” Baker goes on. “We know why the certifications have been delayed from these very same counties where we
have these large unexplained shifts toward the other campaign. If the purpose here is to delay and endless wrangling, and
recount after recount after recount, that game can be played.

“It is important, ladies and gentlemen, that there be some finality to the election process. What if we insisted on recounts
in other states?” Like Wisconsin or Iowa. But when we ask about those states a minute later, he says that the Bush campaign
hasn’t eliminated challenges in those states from the realm of possibility. A recount is already taking place in New Mexico,
which Gore slimly won.

Black is white. White is black. 2 + 2 = 5.

Whouley’s deputy at the DNC, John Giesser, thirty-six, arrived at his Palm Beach hotel at around 2
A.M
. Predictably, Giesser’s from Boston—he met Whouley while working for Dukakis in ’88. In Delray, Giesser meets with Jack Corrigan,
another member of the Boston crew. Corrigan knows this shit firsthand. He was an assistant district attorney working under
Norfolk County district attorney William Delahunt. In 1996, Delahunt ran for congress and lost in the primary by 266 votes
to a rich environmentalist named Philip Johnston. A recount brought Johnston’s margin of victory down to 175 votes. Then Delahunt’s
team—led by P. J. O’Sullivan, now also in Palm Beach for Gore—noticed that 1,540 people who cast Democratic ballots in areas
where one would think Delahunt would have a strong showing didn’t vote in the congressional race. Those undervotes were, at
the time, called “blanks.” A month later, a superior court ruled that Commonwealth law requiring elections officials to gauge
the “intent of the voter” meant that 946 “dimpled” ballots were actual votes. Delahunt was awarded the primary win and went
on to win that November.

Corrigan’s not the only guy on the ground here who knows punch-card ballots and dimples. Boston attorney Dennis Newman, who
represented Delahunt’s opponent in the 1996 dispute, is also down here at Whouley’s request. Then, of course, there’s Chris
Sautter, who, with Jack Young, worked on a 1989 gubernatorial recount in Virginia, when Lieutenant Governor Doug Wilder’s
victory over Attorney General J. Marshall Coleman
wasn’t official until forty-three days after Election Night. Last year Virginia was for Recount Lovers, as Young and Sautter
worked on recounts for state senator (37-vote victory Election Night, 39-vote victory post-recount), Fairfax school board
seat (77 votes Election Night, 79 post-recount), and Broad Run district supervisor (9 votes Election Night, 12 votes post-recount).

It’s easier to be ahead, of course.

Florida law has the same standard as Massachusetts—“intent of the voter”—but it leaves it up to the canvassing boards to make
such judgments. So, for these guys, the plan is to have the four canvassing boards use the most liberal interpretations possible,
so that as many as possible of the predominantly Democratic counties’ undervotes break in the same proportion as the vote
in each county.

The Boston Boys, and other lawyers on the Gore team, will cite the
Delahunt
standard and the Supreme Court of Massachusetts
Delahunt
precedent—which will be, at the very least, an imperfect comparison, if not a completely disingenuous one, because Delahunt-Johnston
was the
only
race on that particular ballot. So, in
Delahunt,
the idea that voters went to the polls and didn’t cast a vote for anyone at all was, of course, less believable than the
notion that Florida voters would go to the polls and not cast a vote for either Bush or Gore. Counting those Massachusetts
dimples as votes was far more logical than counting every nick and scratch on Florida ballots.

But no matter. Applying the
Delahunt
standard will bring Gore more than enough votes to win, the Boston Boys conclude. And if they get the hand recounts going,
and with the standard they want, and they do so quickly, Gore’s name will be at the bottom of the MSNBC screen next to the
number of votes by which
he
leads Bush. “To get there the fastest and get the mostest votes, to paraphrase General Forrest,” Young will later say.

This is what they’ve been sent here to do.

In Austin, Bush sets up a White House-esque photo op, sitting in the governor’s mansion with some of his advisers. “I’m here
with Secretary Cheney; Larry Lindsey, my chief economic adviser; Condi Rice, my national security adviser; Andy Card, who
you know; and Clay Johnson,” he says.“There was a count on Election Night, and there’s been a recount in Florida,” he continues.
“And I understand there are still votes to be counted. But I’m in the process of planning, in a responsible way, a potential
administration.
There’s been a series of ongoing meetings that the secretary and I have had on a variety of subjects, so that should the verdict
that has been announced thus far be confirmed, we’ll be ready.