Down & Dirty (74 page)

• One event focusing on offensive message against opposition (voter intimidation)

• One event demonstrating Democratic solidarity

• Gore lunch with Larry Summers

• Gore statement in front of his house. Message: Gore has instructed his legal team to file a schedule with the court that would
allow his challenge to be decided in advance of the December 12th deadline

• Gore interview with Today Show

• Pretaped today for airing Wednesday morning

• Claire Shipman

• Walking around NAVOBS with Mrs. Gore

• Ten minutes

• Gore meeting with Roy Neel
^*

• Gore statement in front of his house, or in front of the White House, articulating the message of the day.

• Gore network interviews, taped Wednesday for airing Wednesday night, with all three network anchors and CNN.

• Ted Koppel/Nightline day in the life, taped Thursday for airing Thursday night

• Gore availability, if necessary

• Gore White House meetings

• Gore public statement on the message of the day

• Barbara Walters interview, taped Friday for airing on Friday night’s 20/20 broadcast

• Supreme Court argument

• Instead of the Nightline/Walters combination, Gore could do 60 Minutes with Leslie Stahl on Sunday

Fabiani thinks that there are just two targets for presidential communications: the front page of the
New York Times,
and NBC’s
Today
show. Both
dictate to every other reporter what is “important.” If
Today
producer Jeff Zucker gives you time on his show, Fabiani thinks, then every other TV producer throughout the land notices.
Thus, the taped interview with Claire Shipman.

“Did you win this election?” she asks.

“I—I certainly believe that I did,” he says. “I—I—I understand that there is considerable doubt about that, and that’s why
this…”

“Do you think you should be president-elect right now?” she asks. “Do you?”

“Well—well, look, no, because I—I—the votes haven’t been counted. I think that a clear majority of the people who went to
the polling places and tried to—to vote, did vote for—for Joe Lieberman and me. That happened in the country as a whole. I
think it happened in Florida. But, the votes have not all been counted yet.”

Shipman points out that there are 1.2 million undervotes across the country. Gore dodges the question. When asked how he’s
dealing with it all, he says, “I sleep like a baby. I’ve been getting seven, eight hours of sleep a night. And I’m—I am not
tortured over what-ifs at all. And, in fact, I—I believe we’re going to win this election.”

In Tallahassee, Dorrance Smith, a freelance TV producer in town to help the Republicans coordinate media—he was President
Bush’s assistant for media affairs from 1991 to 1993—watches Gore being interviewed by Shipman. Not a bad media hit, he thinks.
But what greater indication is there that Monday night’s speech—CLICKCLICKCLICK—was a disaster than the fact that here’s Gore
again, still pushing the issue, still trying to seal the deal?

In the Bush Building, producers start calling Smith. Gore has put out the word that he’s willing to sit for an interview with
almost anyone—ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC. Who does Smith have to offer, they ask. Can we get Bush?

Smith talks it over with Bush’s Austin triangle—Karen Hughes, Karl Rove, and Don Evans. They agree: Gore can go door-to-door
trying to sell his case, but that doesn’t mean they have to follow suit. Christopher has disappeared, Daley’s in D.C., Boies
is buried in legal work when he’s not doing TV. They decide to let Cheney go out there, bop Gore on the head a few times,
but they’re not going to try to compete with Gore on his media plan.

Watching Gore’s interviews bears this out.

“I’ve never used the phrase ‘steal the election,’” he tells CNN’s John King. “I think that’s an intemperate phrase.”

“Mr. Vice President, if the U.S. Supreme Court rules against you on Friday, will you then give it up?” CBS’s Dan Rather asks.

“Mr. Vice President, there are another one hundred and sixty thousand of those ballots in the state of Florida, and you’re
not asking for them to be recounted,” says NBC’s Tom Brokaw.

This is going great, Smith thinks. They’re kicking the shit out of him. The clincher is Peter Jennings on ABC. “You have not,
sir, been completely clear or consistent about a date certain on which you will no longer continue the legal challenge,” Jennings
says. “Do you believe that date is December the twelfth?”

“I think this is going to be over with by the middle of December,” Gore replies.

“The twelfth of December is indeed the middle of December,” says Jennings, perhaps a bit irritated.

Jeez Louise, Smith thinks. Gore’s like Captain Queeg on the deck of the
Caine
. When your principal becomes your surrogate, you’ve lost.

He brings a tape of the Jennings interview to Baker.

“I want you to watch this,” says Smith. “It helps our case. It shows you how desperate they really are.”

Baker soon stops by Smith’s desk.

“Yeah, that was tough,” he agrees.

That night, Wendy Walker Whitworth, senior executive producer for CNN’s
Larry King Live,
calls Smith.

“Who do you have for us tomorrow?” Whitworth asks the Republican.

“We have Gore!” Smith laughs.

“This case has to move on a fast track. I think all parties have to agree to that,” Sauls says, as he takes up
Albert Gore Jr. v. Katherine Harris et al.

But for the Gorebies, it’s nowhere near fast enough.

The Gore legal team starts filing motions, pulling out stack after stack of papers like one of those term-paper factories
that advertises in the back of
Rolling Stone.
They want the trial put on the fastfastfast-track. They want the ballots brought up and counted. Yesterday.

On Monday, the Gorebies present Sauls with a proposed schedule that Zack has devised that can have it all done in time for
him to issue his order on December 9 at the latest. This they file, despite the fact that Sauls has already fashioned a schedule
of his own.

Joe Klock—still purportedly Harris’s attorney, though he might as well get a red phone to Austin—points out that the “Expedited
Trial Calendar” doesn’t give Harris enough time to respond under “minimal due process” requirements. Moreover, Klock rightly
points out in his brief, the Gorebies’
deadline problems “are entirely of the plaintiffs own making”—(well, theirs, and Harris’s zombielike obedience to whatever
is best for Bush)—“having demanded a greatly expanded protest period at the expense of the evidentiary contest period.”

’Tis true. The clock’s TICKTICKTICKing in the contest is precisely because the Gorebies deemed it so important—primarily for
PR reasons—that they fend off the certification date until they squeezed all the votes they could out of the southeastern
tip of the state.

On Tuesday Team Gore files to have the 10,750 Miami-Dade undervotes and the Palm Beach 3,300 disputed ballots brought up to
Tallahassee and counted immediately. They propose that the ballots be inspected and counted by the clerk of the circuit court,
or by the clerks from those two counties, or by “Special Masters” named by Sauls. But the Boies Klain team wants “the count
of the contested ballots (to) begin immediately by whichever of these procedures the court elects.”

Phil Beck and Barry Richard, of course, object to any of these ideas, arguing that no one’s proven that anything needs to
be looked at at all, much less counted.

Sauls is exasperated.“Have you attempted to confer, and have there been any matters at all, has anybody even been able to
agree on the time of day?” he asks Tuesday evening.

“Yes, sir!” Douglass says. “We agree that it’s twenty minutes ’til six.”

We know we’re filing a lot of papers, Boies says. But we need to get the ballots examined ASAP. “And to get that process started…
we have been pestering the court with as many papers as we have submitted.”

“A little bit like getting nibbled to death by a duck,” Sauls says.

Douglass points out that the Bushies are trying to stall, and every time Sauls rules with them, he’s standing in the way of
the process resolving itself. But Sauls says that “at this junction I have just about stripped the defendants down to the
bares of due process.” He doesn’t know how much more he can expedite this.

Murray Greenberg’s on the speakerphone, and Sauls asks him about transporting the ballots up. How long will it take?

“Is it supposed to come up regular mail, UPS, FedEx, security?” Greenberg asks. “We need to know that, please.” Sauls says
that whatever Leahy thinks is best is fine.

Richard still wonders why the ballots need to be brought up. Is Boies claiming that there was an abuse of discretion by the
Miami-Dade and Palm Beach canvassing boards?

Boies says no. “Our argument is that those ballots were voted for Vice President Gore and Joe Lieberman. We think the court
needs to look at those ballots—directly or indirectly—and conclude whether we’re right or wrong. It has nothing to do with
canvassing-board discretion.” Miami-Dade didn’t count, so there was no discretion exercised, Boies says. And with respect
to Palm Beach, “it’s a question of what are these votes.”

In the end, Sauls decides to split the difference. He’s going to order the undervotes shipped up, but he’s going to keep the
schedule the same. “I think that this is the best that I can fashion to at least be unfair to both sides—equally,” Sauls says.

Beck rises. He says that voting machines need to be brought up with ballots.

“Well, there’s my friend Mr. Greenberg to the rescue perhaps,” Sauls says about the accommodating assistant county attorney.
“Let’s find out.”

The courtroom explodes in laughter.

“Go ahead, Mr. Greenberg,” Sauls says.

Comes Greenberg’s nasally charm via speakerphone: “Your Honor, we will send up with our ballots, along with all the instructions
and a sample ballot,” he says.

“You know, I really like that guy,” Sauls says.

In Miami-Dade County, Leahy supervises the separation of undervotes. But a stocky GOP observer, Marc Lampkin, is in his face
all day, complaining. Having served as Bush’s deputy campaign manager during the GOP New Hampshire primary, a state Bush ended
up losing to McCain by 19 points, Lampkin is finally proving his worth here in Florida.

Lampkin never yells; his tone is even and measured. But he is relentless. He will not stop whining about this, about that.
There isn’t anything Leahy can do to satisfy him.

Eventually Leahy comes to a conclusion: this guy is here with the express order to irritate me. To get me to delay things.
And he is very good at it.