Down & Dirty (94 page)

The Bush protesters erupt with boisterous cheers. “It’s time for Gore to go! It’s time for Gore to go!” they cry.

“This is good,” Tom Rush, a Leon County Republican official, says softly to a woman next to him, motioning at the excited,
somewhat angry, Bush mass. “It’s my job to harness this and keep it going.”

A Republican observer is running around, telling reporters that Bush was up a net 42 votes in the library when Lewis called
them and put an end to it all.

Judges start leaving the building, escorted by sheriff’s deputies. Reporters and cameramen chase them. One camera nearly falls,
catching on a POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS yellow tape that has separated Gore protesters from Bush protesters. Someone else pulls
up the tape to make his way through, and it catches a young African-American man, John Campbell of Lakeland, Florida, under
the neck, nearly strangling him for a second.

Deputy clerks spill out into the parking lot, holding shoe boxes. Inside are supplies, we’re told, not ballots—the ballots
are being returned under armed guard to the Leon County circuit courthouse.

“We tried,” says a deputy clerk as she gets into her friend’s powder blue GMC Sonoma. “We had a good system going. I’m a little
disappointed. We came to do a job, and we didn’t really get to do it.”

Outside the library, protesters and reporters and sheriff’s deputies mill about. What do we do now? Where do we go? What’s
going to happen next?

County clerk David Lang comes out of the building.

“We’re all in a state of suspended animation, just like you are,” Lang says to a mass of reporters. “When the British surrendered
at Old Yorktown, they marched to the tune of ‘The World Turned Upside Down.’ I’m going to go try to find a copy of that.”

At 3:11, Gore sends Lehane an e-mail on his portable Blackberry.

“Please make sure that no one trashes the Supreme Court,” it says.

Beck is sleeping when Bartlit calls him from his Colorado office.

“Did you hear what happened?”

“No,” Beck says, still asleep.

“The U.S. Supreme Court stayed the recount!”

Beck’s first reaction: he has to go back to court. He’s convinced that some
counties are going to refuse to stop counting. At the Bush Building, his fears are confirmed. He runs over to the circuit
courthouse, finds someone in the administrative office, and explains to the clerk that some counties are continuing, despite
the SCOTUS order.

The clerk calls all four of them. Members of the Okaloosa County canvassing board report their plans: they’re going to continue
the counting but seal the results. If you do that, you won’t only be held in contempt of the U.S. Supreme Court, but also
Judge Lewis will hold you in contempt, they’re told.

Another county wants to continue sorting, but they promise not to count. Better not, says the clerk. Within an hour, all four
counties have been persuaded to stop.

In Austin,
Time
reporter John Dickerson sits shotgun in Bush’s immense gray Chevy Suburban. Managing editor Walter Isaacson sits in the back
with Bush aide Gordon Johndroe, and Isaacson’s wife, Kathy, sits in the way back, as Bush drives them around his 1,600-acre
ranch in preparation for their “Person of the Year” issue.

Bush sure seems chill. As they tour the land, Bush jokes about a bull whom they stumble upon mid-mating.“Puttin’ on a show,”
he jokes. In the kitchen at lunch, he chastises Spot.“What is it you tracked in here?” he asks him. Back outside, at a stream,
Isaacson cups his hands to the water and asks, “Can you drink this?”

“Sure,” Bush says, as Isaacson lifts the water to his mouth.“Except for the cow shit.”

Dickerson is trying to figure out if Bush is really this serene, or if it’s an act. They’ve been here since 10
A.M.
—five hours now—and still no sign of artifice. It seems legit. Especially when they enter an enclosed wood.

“It does just all fall away,” Bush says to the group. “I could give a damn about the Supreme Court. Well, of course I do care,
but you forget.”
¹

He doesn’t need to care. And Isaacson—who has an appointment with Gore for next week, too, just in case
he
ends up meriting the “Person of the Year” honor—need not fly into D.C.

A call from Don Evans will make that appointment eminently cancelable.

“That’s great news. Terrific,” Bush says to Evans on his cell phone. “That is good news,” he says. He goes to call Baker,
but only after he’s driven Dickerson and the Isaacsons to their car.

“I have just spoken to Governor Bush,” Baker tells us in the state senate hearing room, “and of course we are pleased by the
United States Supreme Court decision this afternoon to stay the mandate of the Florida Supreme Court and to grant our petition.”

Is it over?

“Of course not,” Baker says, rather unconvincingly. “They haven’t ruled on the merits. This is a stay.”

What’s it been like for Bush these past twenty-four or forty-eight hours?

“It has not been just these past twenty-four or forty-eight hours,” Baker says. “It’s been ever since we began this process,
this odyssey, on November the eighth. It changes from day to day. It’s one day—one day you’re up, one day you’re down.”

As Ron Klain walks into the hearing room, he’s on the phone with DNC spokeswoman Jenny Backus, and she’s giving him a number:
58.

“Okay, thanks,” he says, hanging up the phone, as he and Boies step up to the microphones. Klain has heard about the Bushies’
spreading it around that the counts weren’t going so well for Gore, and he wants to nip that in the bud. They don’t want Sunday
newspapers and Sunday talking-head shows regurgitating this notion that no matter what the Supreme Court rules, Gore’s a dead
man regardless.

Klain announces that his team was “quite pleased with the progress being made at the counts under way here in a number of
counties. Our latest information shows that thirteen counties had completely or partially completed their recounts, and in
those counties, Vice President Gore and Senator Lieberman had gained a net of fifty-eight votes.”

What’s more, Klain says, “five of those counties were heavily Republican counties. So we believe that the progress made in
the count thus far indicated that we were clearly on a path for Vice President Gore and Senator Lieberman to make up the difference
and to pull ahead, had the count been fully completed.”

Boies is asked if the Gore legal team plans on using the 58 votes in its SCOTUS arguments on Monday.

“Well, I don’t think the fifty-eight votes has anything to do with what the Supreme Court decides, or at least directly,”
Boies says. “I think the fifty-eight votes indicate that if this count continues to go forward, it looks like right now, although
nobody can be absolutely certain, that Vice President Gore and Senator Lieberman would win the popular vote in Florida, just
as they won the popular vote outside of Florida.”

What about the December 12 deadline? Arguments are set for Monday, December 11. Is there going to be enough time?

“I think the timing issue is probably the single most disappointing thing about what the Supreme Court has done,” Boies says.
He, of course, agreed to the December 12 deadline way back during that first Florida Supreme Court argument.

Boies now says, “I think there’s no doubt that December eighteenth is the final deadline. We’ve all been trying to get it
done by December twelfth. I think that in the last week, everybody has recognized that at least, under certain scenarios,
it would not be done by December twelfth. For example, the legislature said that if it acted, it probably wasn’t going to
act until December thirteenth, and that the December twelfth deadline was not any magical end date.”

Speculation, and common sense, designate that Kennedy and O’Connor are the justices to watch, the moderate conservatives whose
shifts hand victories to one side or the other. On a single Wednesday last June, O’Connor leaned left—with Breyer, Ginsburg,
Souter, and Stevens—in overturning a Nebraska law banning late-term abortions, and then went with Rehnquist, Kennedy, Scalia,
and Thomas on allowing the Boy Scouts to ban gays.

Boies is asked what arguments he hopes will take hold with either of the two swingers. He lays out a few arguments, saying,
“I’m not sure which one’s the best, and I probably won’t be arguing it. And that person will have to decide what the best
argument is.”