TIME EUROPE
December 4, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 23
Bush's Contested Lead
Now it goes to the courts as Gore challenges Sunday night's Florida tally
By NANCY GIBBS
Twas election night all over again. The halls were decked, the pundits were
quacking, Democrats said Florida was still too close to call. By the Sunday 5
p.m. deadline, the counting still wasn't done, but in a dramatic signing
ceremony at 7:30, secretary of state Katherine Harris certified George W.
Bush the winner by 537 votes — enough for him to claim victory a third
time. But even as Republicans planned their celebrations, the Democratic
faithful were primed to fight on — especially after Harris decided to leave
out the results of the hand count Palm Beach canvassers stayed up all night
to produce. "George Bush can have as many balloon drops as he wants," said
Al Gore's lieutenant Ron Klain, "but there's no one in this country who
believes the election is over before the votes are counted." But Republicans
disagreed. "The American people's tolerance is about to vanish," said
Representative J.C. Watts Jr. "The Democrats keep trying to hijack the
result, but Governor Bush is still the winner. I hope Al Gore will have the
integrity to put the country first and lose graciously."
The Sunday deadline had lost some of its magic power to conjure a
President, because by that time both sides had loosed upon the world
armies that were hard to call back. It was eye for an eye, lawsuit for lawsuit;
the candidates were fighting on every front because at different times
during the week each found his back against the wall. Optimists in both
camps still talked about how they would reach out to the other side when it
was all over, like the World War I infantrymen who played soccer on
Christmas Day before going back to their trenches to try to kill each other
again. But neither side had any idea how to reach an armistice.
As for the rest of us, Americans had been patient, understanding that a close
race may take time to sort out. But by last week the conduct had become so
reckless that patience required some courage and faith; reasoned arguments
about fairness were drowned out by angry mobs charging that Gore was "the
Commander in Thief," a "chad molester," even as Democrats charged that
Bush would burn down the White House before he'd let Gore live in it. The
uniform code of conduct in a democracy — the assumption of good faith
that allows politicians to quarrel one day and compromise the next — was
sacrificed to the reality that only one of these men can be President, that
there is no middle ground. Each man was so sure he was right that he had a
duty to try to win at all costs. And so the costs kept rising.
The Bush team in all its public comments did not even leave open the
possibility that machines might have missed legitimate votes, only that Gore
was determined to keep counting until he got a result he liked. Gore's
Democrats were, for the first time in a long campaign, united behind their
leader last week, if only out of shared disgust at his enemies. Democrats
kept finding new fuel for their indignation: when Trent Lott denounced the
Florida Supreme Court's "unelected judges" for usurping the rights of the
people by letting the recounts continue; when Florida Republicans
threatened to name their own set of electors to send to the Electoral College
and count on House Republican strongman Tom DeLay to make sure they
get seated; when an angry mob showed up to pound on the doors of the
offices where Miami-Dade canvassers were meeting; when a brick flew
through a Democratic Party office window in Broward County with a note
warning, "We will not tolerate any illegal government." Prospects that were
unimaginable one day become probable the next: it will go to the House, no,
to the Senate; Gore will cast the tie-break vote; Could Strom Thurmond end
up President? Dick Cheney's fourth heart attack fit the script for a week of
jumpy tempers and raw nerves.
So it came as some strange comfort on Friday when the U.S. Supreme Court
surprised just about every legal scholar on the planet and said it would hear
the Bush petition that these ongoing recounts were unconstitutional. The
search for wise elders with a good sense of direction had so far been in vain;
judges farther down the food chain had had their fairness challenged, even
as they ruled for the Democrats one day, the Republicans the next. Maybe
the nation's highest court would be able to guide us home. "The Supreme
Court is the only decent way out," said a Democrat who has worked for
three Presidents in as many decades. "That would at least give the next
President some legitimacy."
As Bush saw it, the only reason he was not happily vetting Cabinet members
was because the Democrats wanted to change the rules for deciding
elections, and the Florida Supreme Court decided to let them. When the
justices ruled Tuesday night that the hand counts could proceed, provided
they were finished by 5 p.m. Sunday, the Bush camp for the first time felt
some genuine dread. "I guess the rules aren't the rules anymore," said an
ally bitterly. Didn't it mean anything that the votes had been counted and
counted again; the state legislature had set a one-week deadline for the
counties to certify their results; and the secretary of state had affirmed it?
Now the state supreme court was throwing that deadline out and making a
new one all its own. That wasn't interpreting the law, it was inventing it.
"Make no mistake," Bush said the next morning. "The court rewrote the
laws. It changed the rules, and it did so after the election was over." The
only way to respond, Bush's aides agreed, was to launch an all-out war on
the Florida Supreme Court. "We had to send a clear message that we saw the
ruling as completely illegitimate," insisted a senior aide. "We couldn't mince
words." Concerns about attacking the legitimacy of an institution of
government were brushed aside. "The court couldn't have done any worse
by us," he said. Were they really supposed to stand by and leave it up to
Democratic officials to decide what voters intended?
The television audience got to watch it all live: the cross-eyed canvassers
holding ballots up to the light under the big round magnifying glass,
searching for signs of intent. Callers to conservative talk-radio shows made
an issue of the fact that it was an openly gay judge, Broward County
canvasser Judge Robert W. Lee, who was accepting ballots that were merely
indented, not fully punched through. "They're casting votes, not counting
votes," Bob Dole told reporters Friday, part of the Republican swat team of
celebrity poll watchers. When Lee's team finally finished around midnight
Saturday, he dispatched a lawyer to Tallahassee to physically hand the
results over to Katherine Harris, since he had heard that her fax lines might
be conveniently tied up all afternoon.
Through it all, Bush himself was strangely absent, even when he was in full
view. He came before the cameras Wednesday morning to say how great
Dick Cheney sounded on the phone, that his hospitalization was just a
precaution; he hadn't had a heart attack, even though his own aides knew
Cheney had actually had a stent placed in his artery and neglected to
mention it. Asked about his next legal move, Bush referred to his legal
eagles — "Jim Baker is in charge of the team in Florida, and he's doing a
really good job down there" — as though he had no idea he was about to take
the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Gore, for his part, grew only more determined to fight as the week wore on.
He believes, according to people who talked to him late last week, that if all
the votes had been fairly counted, he would have won Florida by more than
30,000 votes. In his view, the fact that he won the national popular vote
gives him license to prove he would have won Florida as well, were it not for
badly designed ballots and faulty voting machines. The state court was
reconciling conflicting statutes when it extended the deadline for
completing the hand counts that Florida law permits; it was not usurping the
legislature's role.
Gore is also convinced that his team may have found the reason so many
Palm Beach ballots were clearly punched through in all the boxes except the
presidential one. The canvassers were judging that oversight to be a sign of
voter indecision and rejecting those ballots; but why would Palm Beach
have five times as many such ambiguous ballots as counties that used
different measures? Because worn equipment made it harder to punch that
particular hole cleanly through, Gore supporters argued, which provided
more grounds to challenge the outcome. Democrats have collected 10,000
affidavits from voters who said they were confused by the ballot's design,
had trouble punching the hole they wanted or were refused assistance or
given wrong instructions by poll workers. Said a senior Gore legal adviser:
"Even the man who invented the machine says these votes need to be
looked at."
No sooner had Gore won the right to a recount than the Republican
counteroffensive began — even though many states, including Texas,
consider hand counts to be reliable. The judges who endorsed the recounts
were denounced as biased; the exhausted counters were accused of
attempting an in-broad-daylight theft of the presidency — even though
Palm Beach County turned up far fewer extra Gore votes than anyone
expected because of their stricter rules about counting dimpled ballots.
Democrats were also stunned by Nassau County, a g.o.p. stronghold, which
decided on Friday to use its initial election-night vote count rather than the
mandatory machine recount performed several days later. That recount
had yielded 52 more votes for Gore and had already been certified by the
county. "If I can't win that argument," said Gore attorney David Boies, "I'm
going to give up the practice of law."
But nothing made Gore and his allies dig in as much as the roving
"rent-a-rioters," some of them Bush campaign operatives, who were
controlled by radio from a mobile home. "If that occurred in another
country," said Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, "people would be taking
the floor of the Senate and bemoaning thuggism." Klain called it a
"crystallizing moment: the idea that the Republicans, having been rejected
by the courts in their efforts to shut down the hand counts, would resort to
these sorts of tactics to stop the counting of ballots. It made it really clear to
our supporters around the country what we're fighting for here."
Republicans said they were just borrowing tactics that Jesse Jackson and
the Democrats perfected years ago and had imported to Florida
immediately after the vote, but Jesse's operation was never like this.
Organizers with headsets and microphones moved the protesters about,
here for a cnn live shot, there to confront a Democratic Congressman,
louder here, softer over there, conducting the crowd like a roving
symphony orchestra. "The election may have ended, but the campaign
hasn't," said New York lawyer Brad Blakeman, a top Bush campaign
advanceman now moonlighting as a freedom fighter. "It would be
disingenuous to say this isn't part of the campaign. When Bill Clinton came
to office, he instituted the never-ending campaign, and this is the next
logical step in that progression."
After some mixed messages, Miami-Dade officials ultimately insisted that
the rioters had not scared them into calling off their recount the day after
the supreme court had said to go ahead; there just wasn't enough time to
count 654,000 votes by hand before Sunday, they said. But Democrats
were convinced the protests provided them their opening to revisit
Miami-Dade's decision. A recount of about one-sixth of the ballots had
found 156 new votes for Gore, and if the county would just finish the job,
Gore believed, it could provide him the margin he needed. Gore planned to
contest the county's decision and told people he would accept a bipartisan
"master" to oversee a recount; but that would involve days and days of
counting and a new deadline for a final tally. "The tragedy is we have truth
on our side," said a top Gore adviser, "but time isn't."
And what about the military ballots, rejected by the hundreds for technical
reasons? That had been a p.r. disaster for Gore, but Democrats denied any
sneaky campaign to disenfranchise soldiers. Many of the counties throwing
out large numbers of absentee votes were controlled by Republicans.
Republicans withdrew one lawsuit on Saturday after many of the counties
voluntarily decided to reconsider the military ballots, but g.o.p. lawyers
turned up the heat later in the day by filing individual suits in at least five
counties that continued to resist.
Democrats countered with attacks on Seminole County, where the registrar
allowed fellow Republicans to sit in her office for 10 days, correcting
requests for absentee ballots that were missing their voter ID numbers.
"We're going to argue that all of the absentee ballots cast in Seminole
County have been tainted," attorney Gerald Richman said Saturday. "Our
position is, the ballots have to be thrown out."
And so the legal battle looked to move ahead on multiple tracks: the Gore
camp's contest of the results in the state courts, and the Bush camp's appeal
to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court does not traditionally like to
muck around in state matters, much less presidential elections. But at least
the necessary four Justices decided there were grounds to weigh in on fairly
narrow legal questions: Did the Florida Supreme Court usurp the power of
the state legislature by allowing hand counts to continue past the legal
deadline? Did it violate a federal law that requires that electors be selected
according to rules set before the voting takes place? And most interesting,
the Justices asked the Gore and Bush teams, What would be the effect on
this whole showdown if they were to overturn the Florida court's ruling?
The U.S. Supreme Court decision to take the case looked like a huge Bush
win: no matter what the final hand counts revealed, there was now a chance
they'd be tossed out. But some Democrats saw it as a lifeline: it was a chance
to fight on at least another week and, if the Justices ruled their way, to gain
the ultimate legitimization of the manual recounts. "I don't think Gore can
walk away," said Louisiana Senator John Breaux, widely considered the
most agnostic about new legal challenges to the election. "As long as
something is pending in court, it would be difficult for Gore to fold his tent."
The prospect of the Supremes getting involved brought both relief and risk
for all parties: for the Justices, they had watched Republicans attack the
Florida court as partisan because six of the seven judges were appointed by
Democrats; but seven of the nine Justices were appointed by Republican
Presidents, including two by Bush's dad. Would their sacred honor be
challenged as well? Gore had attacked Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence
Thomas during the campaign; would they hold a grudge? Bush had praised
them but now faces the possibility that their federalist, hands-off-the-states
philosophy makes them less likely to rule in his favor.
Gore, Joe Lieberman and campaign chairman William Daley spent Friday
working the phones, calling moderate Democratic House members and
Senators, shoring up support. But even Gore's legal team was aware of the
dangers. Imagine the perception, an adviser noted: "Al Gore lost the
election but won it back in a lawsuit." He added, "I don't think his support
will collapse immediately, but there's got to be some real concern about a
guy who lost the initial returns, the automatic recount, the first certification
and the second certification."
Congressional Democrats all had their own calculations to make, and the
math was not friendly to Gore. While g.o.p. lawmakers were united behind
Bush, knowing that their own fortunes depended on having a Republican
President to help get anything done, many Democrats privately thought
they would be better off if Gore lost. Even some liberal Democrats thought
Bush might in some ways be easier to work with in the White House, since
he would have a powerful incentive to reach out to them and make peace.
Although some congressional Democratic strategists are ambivalent about
Gore's legal crusade, for fear of a backlash in the 2002 elections, party
activists are so strongly behind Gore that it's not in the interest of
congressional leaders to be anything but fully supportive in public. "We'll
be with him all the way to the end," a Democratic strategist says. "Our base
is all jacked up about this."
— Reported by Timothy Roche and Cathy Booth Thomas / Tallahassee, Brad Liston / Fort Lauderdale, Kate
Kelly / Palm Beach, John F. Dickerson, Tamala M. Edwards, Viveca Novak, Karen Tumulty, Michael
Weisskopf / Washington and James Carney / Austin
This edition's table of contents
TIME Europe home
More stories from TIME Europe and related links
E-mail us at mail@timeatlantic.com
Like what you're reading?
Click here to try 4 FREE ISSUES of TIME
|
|
|
|
COVER STORY
Bush's Contested Lead
Now it goes to the courts as Gore challenges Sunday night's Florida tally
Heart Murmurs
Dick Cheney's brief but sudden hospitalization raises questions about fitness and truthfulness
Just How Bad Was It?
TIME's Christine Gorman on the vice-presidential candidate's diagnosis
Mob Scene In Miami
We look at the players behind the 'spontaneous' protest that preceded the shutdown of Miami-Dade's recount
Two-Headed Senate
With a potential Democratic victory in Washington State, the likelihood of gridlock and bickering looms large
EUROPE
Ready, Aim ... React
What can a Rapid Reaction Force from 14 E.U. countries do that NATO can't? Not much
In a Legend's Steps
Shackleton's brave Antarctic trip still awes the world. On his trail are three Britons
MIDDLE EAST
Into the War Zone
Palestinians are now directly attacking Israeli settlements. It's a new - and dangerous - tactic
THE ARTS
Full-Screen Press
French television program Arrêt sur Images entertains audiences by taking the media to task
Pictures From An Exhibitionist
Elton John has put together a big, brainy collection. Now Atlanta, his adopted city, is showing it off
The Vulnerable Woman
Jessica Lange tackles O'Neill's Long Day's Journey and shows she is more than just a great ape's date
Some More Good Men
The plot's predictable, the characters are clichés. Yet this naval drama sails through with flying colors
Fallen Angels
The stars of 'Charlie's Angels' try to soar, but the plot clips their wings
DEPARTMENTS
Techwatch
Worldwatch
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
E-mail us at mail@timeatlantic.com
|
|
