Down & Dirty (7 page)

In Miami, Democratic senator Bob Graham has just completed an interview with Tom Brokaw when a producer asks him if he’ll
be willing to
remain miked-up and in front of the camera to talk to MSNBC anchor Brian Williams. Graham says yes and is flabbergasted when
only a few minutes later NBC calls Florida for Gore.

There are a few congressional districts not even completed with their voting, Graham thinks, those west of the Apalachicola
River. And as the senior Democrat in the state, Graham knows just how razor-thin the race is, how anyone can win it.

“They’re really stretching it,” Graham thinks.

In Fort Lauderdale, the three members of the Broward County canvassing board are in the supervisor of elections’ warehouse,
watching TV with mouths agape. They and the election workers haven’t even counted one Broward County ballot before the state
is awarded to Gore. They typically don’t watch TV while they count the ballots, but this is the closest election in recent
memory, and no one can resist.

“Oh, that’s very kind of Mr. Brokaw to just give this away,” says longtime supervisor of elections Jane Carroll, seventy,
one of the few Republican officeholders in the overwhelmingly Democratic stronghold.

The chairman of the canvassing board, Judge Robert Lee, a Democrat, is incredulous at Brokaw’s pronouncement. Not one precinct
has come in! And Florida’s in two time zones—the polls aren’t even closed in the western part of the Panhandle!

As the night goes on and the ballots start pouring in—accompanied by sheriff’s deputies—Lee, Carroll, and Democratic county
commissioner Suzanne Gunzburger occasionally poke their heads into the back room, where every fifteen minutes they transmit
the county results via a computer.

On the secretary of state’s special Web site—for which they need a special password—Lee sees that Gore is hardly running away
with the state. “Why are they calling Florida for Gore when it’s so close?” he wonders.

Soon a few local Republican muckety-mucks—Shari McCartney and Ed Pozzuoli—storm into the warehouse. Where are the ballots
from Weston? they ask.

Weston is one of the few GOP areas in the county, as far west as you can get without standing in the Everglades. It’s a place
of wealth and power, where several members of the Miami Dolphins live. Interstate 595 was built for Weston.

McCartney and Pozzuoli think something’s amiss. Where are the Weston ballots?! Have they been stolen? Are they going to be
counted?!
Have they even arrived yet?! Carroll explains that it’s no big mystery, Weston is forty-five to sixty minutes away, and it’s
not as if there are two deputies assigned for each of the county’s 609 precincts. Each team is assigned several precincts
where they’re to pick up and escort the ballots back to the warehouse. The ballots will get there.

At a party in Washington, D.C., Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor watches Dan Rather give Gore Florida.

“This is terrible,” she says.

She rises to get a plate of food. Her husband explains that his wife, a Reagan appointee and former Republican leader of the
Arizona state senate, wants to retire, but feels that she can do so only if a Republican is in the White House to name her
successor.
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But what can she do? She’s had her one vote.

The press “pool”—the dozen or so members of the press whose turn it is to experience smaller events firsthand, after which
we have to report back to the larger, more unwieldy, press corps—is bused to the governor’s mansion.

“He preferred to be at home,” says an aide, Gordon Johndroe, to the pool. “He found his house was more relaxing than the hotel,
where there was a lot of activity.”

As the pool waits for the call from Bush to allow us to walk in to see him, big news comes in via cell phone. One of the networks
is about to call Pennsylvania for Gore, filling the last third of the Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania trifecta that is
essential to a Gore victory.

Minutes later, as I walk into the upstairs living room of the governor’s mansion, Bush doesn’t look so panicky. He’s sitting
with his wife and parents, and though a handful of reporters swarms in—and a cameraman knocks over a vase, spilling water
and flowers all over the place—Bush stays cool.

Appearances mean so much in the Bush campaign plan. His easygoing demeanor, as with his campaign’s bold victory predictions,
is all about conveying an air of inevitability. And that’s kind of the story of W. Grandson of one senator, son of a president,
W. has had a life that’s been largely about coasting, failing upward, from Andover to Yale to Harvard Business School. His
daddy’s connections got him a cushy spot in the Texas Air National Guard during Vietnam; he started an oil business and ran
it into the ground, but no matter, because one of his daddy’s friends bailed him out of
that, too. His daddy’s rich friends helped him raise the dough to be the public face of the partners that bought and ran the
Texas Rangers. And suddenly he was governor, and then he was the ordained candidate for president, and then he was here, in
this room.

“We’re not conceding anything until we see the actual vote,” Bush says on the phone to Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge. “Tom,
I appreciate your calling.”

He hangs up.

“I think Americans oughta wait until all the votes are counted,” Bush says to us. “I don’t believe the projections,” he says,
about both the Keystone State and Florida. “In states like Florida, I’m gonna wait for them to call all the votes,” he says.

Jeb, who earlier in the night was saddened and apologetic when the networks handed his state to his brother’s nemesis, has
had a shift in mood. His political people back home have the race too close to call—at the very worst.

Jeb shares the news with his brother’s chief strategist, Karl Rove, who is pleased to hear it. He directs his staffers to
call up the networks and yell at them for their premature projections. Rove thinks that the nets have a double standard—other
states that Bush will end up winning far more handily, like Ohio and Alabama, are still “too close to call.” Giving Gore Florida
is insanity, Rove thinks. Not to mention that six counties at the western Panhandle of the state are under the central time
zone, so the polling locales for those voters in those largely Republican areas were still open when the nets told them, essentially,
to go on home, Gore won. Rove and other Republicans will later argue that the early call cost Bush maybe 10,000 votes.

In Nashville, Gore’s field strategist, Michael Whouley, is sitting in the “boiler room” he’s set up, watching Rove dispute
the networks’ gift of Florida to Gore.

He’s confused. Is Rove trying to send a message to the western states that things are still in play enough, that Bush can
still win without Florida, as it is his obligation to do? Or does he actually believe that Bush is gonna win Florida? Rove
had been talkin’ smack all week, saying Bush was gonna win by 6 or 7 points, a Reaganesque sweep.

Whouley isn’t sure which one it is.

Bush has his jacket off and is sitting between his wife, Laura, and mother, Barbara. His father, former president George H.
W. Bush, is leaning back on the sofa, gripping his hands, legs crossed.

“I’m pretty darn upbeat about things,” W. says. “I don’t believe some of these states they’ve called.”

His father is asked if this is anything like the mood in 1992, when he lost to Bill Clinton.

“Helluva lot worse,” Bush Sr. says.

“Ditto,” Barbara Bush says.

“I’m pleased to carry Tennessee,” Bush says. “That’s an interesting development.”

Indeed, news of that had been a real psychic blow to Gore, who always held out hopes that, despite daunting poll numbers,
he’d pull out a state victory.

Born to Tennessee senator Albert Gore, Sr., Gore Jr. was always child of both Carthage, Tennessee, where his family still
owns land, and Washington, D.C. As a congressman, Gore was far more conservative on issues like abortion and guns than his
later political incarnations, as he proceeded up the political food chain to senator (elected in 1984) and vice president
(1992). Unlike Bush, who seemed to stumble into all this, Gore has been running for president from the time he was a zygote,
and he was constantly trying to figure out what others wanted him to be—his positions on issues, his circle of advisers were
always changing, changing, changing. His public manner was stilted, often condescending; his inner turmoil peeked out and
reared its head from time to time, and it wasn’t pretty.

Clinton-Gore carried Tennessee’s 11 electoral votes in 1996, but only barely, and only after sinking unconscionable amounts
of cash into the state in the last weeks of the campaign. (Whouley called ’em “the most expensive electoral votes in history.”)
Tonight it is official: Gore can now officially consider D.C. his home, because Tennessee has rejected him. Bush is pleased.

We’re escorted out of
maison Bush.
In minutes, the networks pull Florida from Gore’s column and put it back under “too close to call.”