Down & Dirty (46 page)

If two men lie, one stuttering, the other smooth and smiling, it is human nature to disbelieve the stutterer and trust the
man with the confident grin. And right now, the Bush team is smiling.

Considering that behind closed doors Lieberman was the most aggressive proponent of using the law any way that the Gore team
could, his seeming capitulation on the overseas-absentee-ballot issue is astounding.

But since he, not unlike Racicot, is a man who wraps harsh partisan rhetoric in a calming, reassuring package, since he is
far more effective than Gore in communicating, oozing sincerity where Gore can’t even dribble any, and since he is Gore’s
no. 2 and thus able to serve as both attack dog and cheerleader, Lieberman agrees to do all five Sunday shows—ABC’s
This Week,
with Sam and Cokie, CBS’s
Face the Nation,
NBC’s
Meet the Press,
CNN’s
Late Edition,
with Wolf Blitzer, and even Fox News Channel’s
Fox News Sunday
.

On NBC, Tim Russert brandishes the Herron memo and grills Lieberman on it. Throughout the campaign, senior members of the
Gore team whined that Russert, a former Democratic Senate staffer, was in the tank for Bush—Bush wanted him to moderate at
least one of the debates! they point out—and today he does little to change their minds.

“Many controversies swirling in Florida,” he says right off the bat. “The most recent: Democratic lawyers challenging overseas
absentee ballots, some fourteen hundred and twenty were disqualified, more than either Bush or Gore won. Many of them members
of the armed services, and people are very, very concerned. They point to a memo written by Mark Herron, a lawyer who assists
the Gore campaign, telling Democratic lawyers, ‘This is how you knock out ballots from military people overseas.’ They don’t
have a postmark right. They’re not dated properly. Technicalities, if you will.

“How can a campaign who insists on the intent of the voter, the will of the people, not disenfranchising anybody accept knocking
out the votes of people of armed services?”

Lieberman says that he hasn’t read the memo, that Russert’s copy is the first he’s actually seen of it.

“Let me just say that the vice president and I would never authorize, and would not tolerate, a campaign that was aimed specifically
at invalidating absentee ballots from members of our armed services,” Lieberman says. “And I’ve been assured that there were
more absentee ballots from nonmilitary voters overseas that were ultimately disqualified. We’re all about exactly what you
said, having every vote counted fairly and accurately, and I think that was the end aim of what happened with the absentee
ballots, and it’s our aim as the hand counts go on in these three counties in Florida.”

Russert reads from more Bush propaganda, a letter the Bushies secured from the deputy director of the military postal services
who “says that if a sailor is on a ship, it’s hard to get a postmark. Will you today, as a representative of the Gore campaign,
ask every county to relook at those ballots that came from armed services people and waive any so-called irregularities or
technicalities which would disqualify them?”

Lieberman crumbles like a matzoh. “We ought to do everything we can to count the votes of our military personnel overseas….I
would give the benefit of the doubt to ballots coming in from military personnel generally, but particularly in light of the
letter and the kind of statements we’ve heard about that.”

Elections officials are probably afraid of litigation and are therefore following the letter of the law, he says. “I’d urge
them to go back and take another look. Because, again, Al Gore and I don’t want to ever be part of anything that would put
an extra burden on the military personnel abroad who want to vote….I’d give the benefit of the doubt to ballots generally.”

Among those watching
Meet the Press
Sunday morning is Herron, who is stunned to see Joe Lieberman sell him down the river. All his memo did was detail Florida
law. He had written it, for Godsakes, at the direction of the Gore-Lieberman team! He’d already lost his job so he could help
the effort, and here was the vice presidential nominee distancing himself from the memo when all it did was explain Florida
law!

Stunned, Herron takes a walk to calm down. Baldick has a slightly different reaction. As the guy in charge of the kids who
have been running around the state for Gore-Lieberman, the twenty-somethings who were yelled at before canvassing boards from
Panama City to Palm Beach while protesting these ballots—so as to help get Lieberman in the White House—he’s enraged at the
Connecticut senator’s capitulation. And how about poor Mark Herron, who was just shit-canned from his firm because he’s one
of the few Democratic lawyers in Florida—especially in Tallahassee!—
with the stones to work for Gore regardless of what Jeb thinks about it? “
Fuck
Joe Lieberman!” Baldick rants to anyone who will listen. If Lieberman runs for president in 2004, Baldick vows, he will do
everything he can to hurt him in the two states he knows best and Lieberman will need most—Florida and New Hampshire.

Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, is watching this all unfold, and he can’t believe the shit the Republicans are getting
away with saying.

It’s not just this matter of the absentee ballots. Kerrey is retiring from the Senate this year, heading to Manhattan to be
president of the New School, but he is not going softly into that dark night. As a Navy SEAL and war hero, Kerrey left a leg
in Vietnam. In 1992, when he ran against Bill Clinton for the presidency, Clinton’s draft-dodging offended him to no end.
In 2000, George W. Bush’s draft-dodging offended him only slightly more than the cocky way Bush handled it and the free ride
the media gave him.

It wasn’t that Kerrey was such a Gore guy. After all, he was one of only three senators to endorse Bill Bradley in the primaries,
and his later take on the glaring weaknesses of Gore’s Social Security reform plans didn’t do the Democratic nominee any favors.
But surfing the Web in October, Kerrey was shocked to read a
Boston Globe
story detailing how Bush, then the son of a congressman, jumped ahead five hundred places in line to get in the Texas Air
National Guard. He was even more stunned to learn that there was an unaccounted-for year in Bush’s air guard duty, when Bush
was to have reported for duty in Alabama but no one could remember him ever having been there, with no corresponding records
that he ever fulfilled the obligation.

It wasn’t the circumstances of his evasion of service, even though it came in the midst of an era when five hundred American
GIs were dying each week, Kerrey was giving up a leg, and McCain was being held in a POW camp even though, as the son of an
admiral, he’d been offered early release. No, even bearing all that in mind, it was the idea that Kerrey read the
Globe
story while Bush was talking about being guided by his conscience, by refusing to do what was politically expedient, while
Bush was making the character of
Army enlistee
Al Gore an issue.

Now here it is again, Kerrey thinks, as he watches Lieberman fumbling on TV. The political surrogates who defended Gore weren’t
so hot, Kerrey thinks. Congressmen Hastings, Wexler, Deutsch—they were good guys and doing their best, but Gore needs someone
more experienced down there to help him, someone with a national reputation. Bush was beginning
to use the whole Republican Governors’ Association, and they were killing Gore!

Kerrey phones up Gore.

“You need to get somebody down there, for Godsakes,” Kerrey says. They were getting killed. Surrogates matter, he thinks.

Gore explains to him that the thinking in Goreland is that they want to use local politicians. That’s the story they’re laying
out—local people, local canvassing boards, their decision.

But Carol Roberts can only do so much, Kerrey believes. It’s very difficult for a local person to debate Norman Schwarzkopf
on the issue of military ballots. We need the same sort of surrogates the Republicans are using. Especially in this overseas-absentee-ballot
dispute, which in Kerrey’s opinion is “totally bogus.”

“We may have made a mistake in sending the memo out,” Kerrey thinks, “but it’s no mistake to say that if a ballot is illegal,
it should be disqualified. It might help for me to go down there. They won’t expect a one-legged Vietnam veteran Medal of
Honor winner to argue that a ballot that’s two weeks late
should
be disqualified. It’s bullshit to say otherwise. That’s one thing you learn in the military—you take responsibility for your
actions, you follow orders, and even if you don’t know the rules, you can be court-martialed for not following them.”

But it’s not just the absentee-ballot issue that’s getting Kerrey fired up; he thinks the Republicans have basically launched
a campaign based on The Big Lie. Tell a lie loud enough, often enough, with sufficient conviction, and sooner or later people
will believe you. Take hand recounts, for instance. The Votomatic is a shitty device, one that hasn’t been used in Nebraska—
Nebraska!
—since 1982, the year Kerrey was first elected governor. Everyone knows it isn’t as accurate as a hand count.

In addition, Kerrey is flummoxed to hear Republicans pretend that hand recounts are anything but the norm in close elections.
Everybody in politics understands that in a close election, you do a hand recount, he thinks. Racicot, a former attorney general,
knows that the things he’s saying aren’t true, Kerrey thinks. But Racicot says them repeatedly, over and over, and because
he does so, people start believing that they must be true.

And the people running the interviews don’t challenge him.

Kerrey’s aghast at the fact that the media allows the Republicans to even argue that the validity of hand recounts is a debatable
point. Kerrey doesn’t blame the Republicans, really. They’re trying to prevent the hand count, that’s their objective, and
they’re doing what they need to do. But that
national journalists would actually fucking sit there and nod their heads and say, “Senator Kerrey, this is a very good point
that the governor has raised,” when it wasn’t a good point at all! It was a joke!

And the Bush team clearly had gotten permission from their people to say anything they wanted to say. Look at House Majority
Whip Tom DeLay: “The Democratic Party is prosecuting the war to reverse the results of a fair, free election by any means
necessary,” DeLay says. “Make no mistake, we are witnessing nothing less than a theft in progress, and the American people,
the Constitution, and the rule of law are all potential victims.”

They were out there saying that Gore was stealing the election, committing fraud, and what the fuck were the Democrats doing?
So even though it’s not quite the Gore plan, an infuriated Kerrey flies down to Florida, spends a day in Miami and a day in
Palm Beach. Somebody, he thinks, has got to do
something
.

“Fucking Butterworth!” one Gorebie mutters under his breath.

The attorney general issues a letter on Monday, November 20, telling elections supervisors to allow overseas ballots from
members of the military that don’t have a postmark—as long as the ballots are signed and dated no later than the date of the
election. “No man or woman in military service to this nation should have his or her vote rejected solely due to the absence
of a postmark, particularly when military officials have publicly stated that the postmarking of military mail is not always
possible under sea or field conditions,” Butterworth writes. The Gorebies are not only upset with the content of the letter,
they are pissed that they didn’t even get a heads-up from Butterworth before it was issued.