Down & Dirty (73 page)

Later that day Bartlit and Beck watch a TV news broadcast about their press conference that will marry Bartlit’s “holiday
atmosphere” audio with videotape from the ugly, aggressive Miami-Dade protest.

“‘Holiday atmosphere,’” Beck will quip. “Yeah, it was Bastille Day.”

Desperation has an aroma.

It repels singles in bars, clients from Willy Loman–esque salesmen, employers from the laid-off. And this week, in the Florida
state capital, that smell is starting to fill the air, and it’s coming straight from the campaign of those who oppose Bush’s
claim to the presidency. It’s coming from Al Gore.

The stench can be detected on Capitol Hill in Washington. There, some Democratic congressional leaders who are vociferous
in their public support for Gore reveal—off the record and behind closed doors—that they think the man should pack it in.

Even among those who support Gore and are calling for patience, “there’s a sense of despair,” confides one senior Democratic
Senate staffer. “Every day the scenario becomes less and less probable.”

Even some of the earnest Democrats slaving away for Gore on the ground in Florida don’t hold out much hope that this is going
to end well for the vice president. The legal hurdles are too daunting. In order for Gore to end this in the White House,
each one of the following dominoes must fall precisely right in the next twelve days:

1. Circuit judge Sanders Sauls—or, alternatively, the Florida Supreme Court—must allow the following net votes for Gore: the
   215 late Palm Beach County votes; the 157 votes that came from Miami-Dade County’s partial manual recount; and Nassau County’s
   51.
   
2. Sauls or the Florida Supreme Court must rule against the Palm Beach County canvassing board’s decision to exclude the 3,000-odd
   “dimpled chad” ballots, and against the Miami-Dade canvassing board’s decision not to evaluate the 10,750 undervotes. Almost
   no one believes that the Florida Supreme Court, which has already ruled that acceptance of “dimpled chad” ballots is at the
   discretion of local canvassing boards, will direct Palm Beach to change their standards.
   
3. These ballots must contain enough votes for Gore—combined with the 215, 157, and 51 votes gleaned in the sequence outlined
   above—for him to overcome Bush’s certified 537-vote margin of victory.
   
4. SCOTUS
   must not rule that the Florida Supreme Court overstepped its bounds in extending the deadline for ballots to be received
   by the secretary of state’s office.
   
5. The GOP-controlled Florida legislature must decide not to assign its own electors if the above hasn’t been decided by December
   12, as seems likely.
   

Other long-long-long shot alternatives: The Florida Supreme Court could rule that Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballot was
an illegal ballot and demand a revote. Ain’t gonna happen. Or a judge could toss out Seminole County’s 15,000 absentee ballots
or Martin County’s 10,000. Also, ain’t gonna happen.

On Tuesday, the desperation comes from Gore via the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Accompanied by members of the Congressional Black Caucus—Democratic representative Charles Rangel of New York, Rep. Eddie
Bernice Johnson of Texas, and Rep. John Conyers of Michigan—Jackson calls for Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate his
charge of a clear conspiracy to suppress black turnout. “It is far too widespread for it to be accidental,” pronounces Jackson,
providing no affidavits, no names, not any backup information at all for his claims, even after being asked.“That Bush, Cheney,
Trent Lott, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Orrin Hatch, Tom DeLay, Bob Barr, plus the Supreme Court of Clarence Thomas, Scalia,
and Trent Lott
[sic]
”are on the opposing side, Jackson says, is no surprise. “We can afford to lose an election, but not our franchise,” he declares.
Bush “can’t look at voters who were stopped by police and asked for their driver’s license and their ID badges in a hostile
way [and say],‘Your pain, my gain, I’m your leader.’”

After the press conference—which steps on a previously scheduled conference by the Gore recount team in which further voting
“victims” were trotted out—Jackson et al. hold a sparsely attended afternoon rally outside the state supreme court.

“Who can vote a butterfly ballot anyway?!” asks Conyers, apparently unaware that more than 93 percent of the voters of Palm
Beach County figured out how to use the ballot correctly. Of the Justice Department, Conyers, the ranking member of the House
Judiciary Committee, said, “They’re asking us to send them the evidence. Well, you come down here and find the evidence! Then
we’ll have a fair vote.” Rabbi Jacobs of Los Angeles adds that one woman who felt that her ballot wasn’t counted correctly
“said that it reminded her of standing in line at the concentration camp, waiting for a piece of bread.”

Perhaps the Democratic zeitgeist is best summed up by the raspy-voiced Rangel. Asked about the approaching December 12 deadline,
Rangel says, “Those of us who fought so hard for Al Gore to become the president of the United States, we still want to believe
that there is plenty of time for the judges and the courts” to complete the process. “What could we do in the Congress? As
a member, I think the first thing I would do is apply for my
pistol.” Yowza! Hard to imagine a conservative congressman getting away with such a comment.

Almost every single Republican governor has been in Florida arguing Bush’s case. Wednesday morning the Dems send four of their
own before the media (one of whom—Pedro Rosello of Puerto Rico—isn’t even from a state). They wander into the state senate
hearing room to tell the media that they, too, support Gore’s latest legal gambit.

“We’re here in support of Vice President Gore’s very principled position that all the votes legally cast in the Florida presidential
race should be counted,” says Gov. Paul Patton of Kentucky, president of the Democratic Governors’ Association. Using the
Gore recount team’s latest in a series of coulda-woulda-shoulda vote calculations, Patton says that if the votes from Palm
Beach and Miami-Dade Counties had been counted, it would have left Bush with a “one-hundred-fifteen-vote margin.” With such
a slim margin, Patton argues, who knows what would happen when and if the court counted the 10,750 Miami-Dade ballots that
haven’t registered a presidential choice.

Both Iowa (which went for Gore) and New Hampshire (which voted for Bush) reportedly registered more than 10,000 undervotes
in this election, and their two governors, Tom Vilsack of Iowa and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, are half of the Democratic
gubernatorial force here on Wednesday. Both of those masses of ballots could have swung either state the other way. So I ask
Vilsack and Shaheen: Are you as concerned about those ten-thousand-ballot chunks as you are about the mass from Miami?

“I can speak only, obviously, to the Iowa situation,” Vilsack says. “There is no accurate count of any undervote for the state
of Iowa. The figure that you’re quoting, I believe, is a guesstimate on the part of the Iowa state Republican Party….I’m not
certain, and I’ve not seen any specific definitive proof that indeed undervoting took place.”

There were, in fact, almost 13,000 undervotes in Iowa, a state that Gore won by 4,144 votes. And while Florida’s undervotes
amount to 2.86 percent of the total votes counted, Illinois, Idaho, and Wyoming had even higher percentages.

“The state Republican Party was invited if they felt that there was an inadequate vote count, or inadequate attention paid
to the voters in the state of Iowa, to have a recount,” Vilsack continues. “We were prepared to have a recount. They chose
not to have a recount. I think that’s a fundamental difference here.

“We do know, in the state of Florida, and in Miami-Dade, there are ten thousand seven hundred identified ballots that are
apparently on their way
to this very city that have not been counted,” he continues. “I think of the people that cast those votes. We don’t know who
they are. But there’s the possibility that a Congressional Medal of Honor winner could have cast one of those votes. Or a
mother with two children who took the day off from work just because she felt strongly about this election could have cast
that vote….Their vote does,in fact, matter.”

Yeesh. This is what it’s come down to. Hypothetical Congressional Medal of Honor winners.

Shaheen then steps up.

“I am in fact concerned that every vote in New Hampshire be counted,” she says. “We have a process to recount votes…. We’ve
had twenty-six recounts as a result of this election in the state, and we’ve just finished those up this week. That’s my concern
about what’s happening here in Florida. There has been a process to recount, and that’s been delayed, it’s been obstructed,
through partisan political maneuvering.”

Patton returns to the mike. “We’re here to support the principle that every vote counts,” he says.

Every vote in Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia Counties, that is. Not necessarily those in the other sixty-three
counties in the state. And the fact that this is their position allows the Bushies to slam it—again and again and again. As
Cheney tells Larry King on CNN,“every single vote in Florida has been counted. Every single vote in Florida has been recounted.
Now, there are some that were not marked for president, and therefore didn’t register on the machines, but that’s not at all
unusual in Florida. They’ve focused in on the ten thousand votes in Miami-Dade County that supposedly are unmarked. But there
are some thirty-four counties in Florida that have a larger percentage of unmarked ballots for president than those in Dade
County….

“What he wants to do now is go back in, in one heavily Democratic area—two counties—and direct these election supervisors,
most of whom are Democrats, who have already made their own independent decisions to redo the whole process in a manner that
will favor him. And that’s clearly inappropriate.”

Cheney’s comments that the 10,000 undervotes are just simply not votes isn’t true, and he must know that. But the fact that
the Gorebies still haven’t formally called for a statewide recount of the 175,000 unread ballots is now not only indicative
of the disingenuousness in their call to “count all the votes,” it is a major political miscalculation.

Sauls allows a few random citizens to intervene in the case on a limited basis. There’s Larry Klayman, of course, but there
are also random Bush-backing Floridians and their hack attorneys—the GOP equivalent of the myriad butterfly ballot citizens,
shysters, and suits. Which is maybe why no one pays much attention to any of them. Which may be too bad, in at least one case.

On Wednesday, November 29, Tallahassee attorneys R. Frank Myers and Lawrence Gonzalez—on behalf of Stephen and Teresa Cruce,
Terry Kelly, and Jeanette Seymour—make a motion that if the court orders any recount, they order a full statewide recount
of all the undervotes and OVERVOTEs. “In a statewide election with national implications,” they write, “it is self-apparent
that ‘the will of the people’ means the will
of all the people of the Great State of Florida,
not just those who happen to live in a particular county.” Myers and Gonzalez set forth a few ground rules, notably that
the court sets “the objective and uniform standards to be applied state-wide,” as well as a deadline. But the brief just joins
a stack of others like it in an endless room of papers no one reads.

From: Mark Fabiani

• Gore personal appearance for television to communicate his message of the day

• Move news about disenfranchised voters in FL

• Offensive move against opposition (beginning with voter intimidation off of today’s
Washington Post
story and tomorrow’s pending
New York Times
stories)

• Demonstrate Democratic solidarity

• One Gore statement for television, articulating the message of the day

• At least one major Gore sit-down television interview

• One event focusing on disenfranchised voters in FL