-Caveat Lector-
Part 1 of a 5 part series
Candidates Sensed Defeat � Then Mobilized for Recount
By David Von Drehle, Dan Balz, Ellen Nakashima and Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 28, 2001 ; Page A01
George W. Bush was headed for a workout at the University of
Texas gym in the early afternoon of Election Day when his phone
rang. Karl Rove, his chief election strategist, had the first
wave of exit polls in hand. The news, stunningly, was that Bush
might lose.
"I got the smell," Bush recalled, the smell of defeat. Rove was
full of "all the cautionary notes" about margins of error and
possibilities. But Bush instantly knew "it could be trouble."
His workout mates – Brad Freeman, Craig Stapleton, a cousin
by marriage, and Stapleton's son, Walker – noticed that Bush
had become suddenly distracted. Bush finished exercising and
stayed quiet on the ride back. At the mansion, he didn't bother
to ask his friends to stay for lunch. "Thanks for coming" was
all he said before retreating upstairs to the private residence.
There he told his wife, Laura, what the exit polls showed.
Together husband and wife replayed the race. In Bush's mind, he
had done everything he could, given that he was running into the
headwinds of a strong economy and contented electorate. He
believed he had targeted the right states. He sensed great
intensity among his own troops on the campaign trail. Now he
realized that Vice President Gore had done perhaps an even better
job of targeting states and firing up his forces.
Bush told his daughters Jenna and Barbara: "Girls, it could be a
long night. Your dad may lose the presidency and the numbers
don't look so good now."
On the way to a family dinner at the Shoreline Grill in Austin,
he told his parents, "It could be a long night." At the
restaurant, after the networks gave first Florida to Gore and
then Pennsylvania and Michigan, Bush turned to his father and
whispered in his ear, "I'm not going to stay around, I want to go
back to the mansion."
When communications director Karen P. Hughes joined him there a
half hour later, Hughes found Bush standing in front of a
television, his father seated on a couch nearby. "How are you,
Mr. President?" Hughes asked the elder Bush. Not so good right
now, the former president replied.
"Defeat," said Bush, "was settling in."
�
Half a dozen hours later, in a seventh-floor suite at the Loew's
Hotel in Nashville, Al Gore decided that he had lost. He had
watched with his family and closest aides as his victory in
Florida was pulled off the board by the television networks,
which were now calling the state and the election for Bush in one
of the most stunning turnarounds in American history.
"No," said his daughter Kristin as Bush was declared the winner.
"That's not right. That's not what happened."
But at 2:30 a.m., Gore's campaign chairman, William Daley,
telephoned Bush campaign chairman Donald L. Evans to alert him
that the vice president would soon concede. Evans wanted to know
how quickly Gore would make a public statement.
"Don, it's probably going to take half an hour," said Daley, the
Gore campaign chairman. "His kids are getting dressed, they're
all crying."
"A half an hour?" Evans seemed incredulous, as Daley recalled it.
"Yes," Daley replied. "We have to travel up there, but we're
getting there as fast as we can."
Gore's decision to end it had been quick and businesslike. He
had retreated with Daley and senior adviser Carter Eskew into an
aide's bedroom, and they had concluded that with the grand prize
of Florida now in Bush's column, his lead was insurmountable.
It was time to surrender.
After conferring with Daley, Gore ran into Eli Attie, the young
writer who drafted the candidate's speeches. "Do you have an
alternate statement?" Gore asked. Meaning, an alternate to the
victory speech.
Attie nodded. He had found some down time a few days earlier to
prepare a concession speech. Someone had told him once that the
way to guarantee victory is to prepare for defeat.
"Why don't you meet me in my room?" the candidate said, moving
toward the elevators. Attie walked to the speech prep room,
where his laptop was humming lightly on a corner table. He
pulled up the concession speech and hit the print button, then
went to Gore's room.
"Is this the number?" Gore asked Daley, waving a slip of paper.
Attie realized: The number! It must be the direct line to Bush.
The number to call to concede.
After Gore made the call to Bush – brief, gracious, to the
point – the candidate and his wife climbed into a limousine
for the motorcade to the War Memorial, where a large but subdued
crowd stood waiting in the pouring rain.
In the boiler room, the cramped space at campaign headquarters
nearby where the Gore field operations were based, Michael
Whouley, who had pushed Gore to make a fight in Florida and
focused on it with single-minded purpose, was shouting urgently
across a phone line to his lieutenants in the state. None of
them had any idea why the networks were saying Bush had won
Florida. The race was too close to call, they insisted.
Whouley sent an urgent page to Gore aide Michael Feldman in the
motorcade. When Feldman called back, he patched in Daley, who
crouched low in his seat with his head in his hands, straining to
hear. "What's up, Mike?" he asked.
"This thing's going to automatic recount."
"Oh, [expletive]," Daley said.
He listened as Whouley spelled out the details – the
ever-shifting numbers, the tight margin. The motorcade was now
pulling into a basement garage near the rally site. Daley said
he would call back.
"Don't let him go out. Grab him!" Daley barked when he reached
the garage a few moments behind Gore. The candidate stayed put.
Out on the rain-soaked stage stood the twin transparent panels of
the TelePrompTer, where Attie's concession speech was already
loaded and ready to roll. "Democracy may not always give us the
outcome we want. But the United States of America is the best
country ever created – still, as ever, the hope of
humankind. We all share in the privilege and challenge of
building a more perfect union. . . . And I can't promise it
won't be a long and winding road. But this I know in my heart"
– and here Gore planned to end with his signature campaign
line – "you ain't seen nothing yet."
But now in the stark basement holding room, the Gore camp talked
frantically about whether the speech should be delivered at all.
As the motorcade dumped more passengers, the room increasingly
buzzed with news from scores of phone calls.
Attie found Gore standing, strangely alone, in the center of the
room. "We've got to change some of the language in the speech,"
Attie said, "because with 99.9 percent of the votes in, you're
only 600 votes behind." The candidate looked a bit surprised.
Daley told Gore he regretted he hadn't stopped him from
conceding. "I don't think I served you well there," he said.
Come on, Gore replied, these things happen. "Don't feel badly
about it."
Daley placed another call to Evans, asking for more time. "Don,
we've got a little problem here. Don't let your guy go out." As
Daley recalled it, Evans asked, "Well, what's the problem?"
"Well, I'm going to get back to you," Daley replied. Then he
added, "Where is the governor? Because the vice president may
want to talk to him."
"About what?" Evans asked.
"Just, I'll get back to you," Daley said.
When Evans hung up, he knew what the problem was. He just didn't
know what Gore was going to do about it.
Daley pulled Gore into another room. If Florida was really too
close to call, and if state law mandated a recount, Gore's
counselors asked, what was the point of giving up? Daley and
Gore both knew that recounts almost never change an election's
outcome. But it seemed only sensible to wait a while.
Gore picked up the phone for one of the strangest calls in
American political history. He told his Republican rival that he
was withdrawing his concession.
Back at headquarters, the Gore high command gathered –
Daley, Eskew, campaign consultant Robert Shrum; Donna Brazile,
the campaign manager; Gore's brother-in-law and best friend,
Frank Hunger; political strategist Tad Devine, tactician Monica
Dixon. They were all around the table pressing Joseph E.
Sandler, the Democratic Party's chief lawyer, and John Hardin
Young, an election law expert, to explain what they knew of
Florida's law.
Any race that ended with a margin closer than one-half of one
percent required an automatic recount, Young and Sandler
explained. It would take a couple of days to run the ballots back
through the machines. Then the trailing candidate could protest
the vote count. Eventually, the whole thing could end up in front
of the Florida Supreme Court, which would have extensive power to
decide disputes.
Daley was skeptical. His instincts told him that if you
recounted votes, both candidates would gain some and lose some,
and ultimately nothing much would change. He hammered the
lawyers with questions.
"Mr. Daley," Sandler finally said, "the recount procedures in
Florida are designed to resolve contests in sheriff's races and
county commissioner races. They never contemplated something the
size of this." In challenging a statewide, presidential count,
Gore's team would be traveling through unmapped territory.
Daley considered this for a moment. If he pursued the recount
aggressively, he would be sending a small army into Florida on a
vague mission, part political, part legal. The stakes were the
presidency.
They decided to go – Florida law, after all, dictated the
automatic recount.
"This thing isn't over yet!" Tad Devine told perhaps 150 Gore
staffers who gathered around him at 4:20 a.m.
Then Donnie Fowler, Gore's field director, climbed onto a table
and shouted out the details. "Pack your bags for two or three
days – but I can't promise you anything. You may be there
for two weeks."
Two hours later, there were at least 85 people ready to go, and
more who had gathered with nothing but the wrinkled clothes they
were wearing. The plane had 72 seats. When the vans roared off
to the airport, people left behind were in tears – that's
how thrilling the cause seemed in those early morning hours.
The jet took off without the passengers knowing, exactly, where
it was headed.
Portrait of a War
It was not just the Gore campaign staff that set out that morning
on an uncertain journey. So did the country.
The election dispute in Florida went on for 36 days – a
whirlwind of more than 50 lawsuits, and appeals to every possible
court, news conferences, protests, speeches, public hearings,
private strategies and televised ballot-counting sessions. It
was an all-out war involving America's canniest political
soldiers and some of its best legal minds.
Now, in the aftermath, it's possible to start sorting out the
threads and peering behind the scenes. It's possible to see more
clearly how the candidates reacted and endured. To see George W.
Bush, steeled for a long fight, hunkering down at his ranch with
friends, furious when they tuned in "Saturday Night Live" with
its savage satires. To see Al Gore, intimately managing his
recount effort while seething to friends about the enemies he
believed were betraying him. He spent part of one fateful
afternoon on the phone trying to find out if the mayor of
Miami-Dade County had sold him down the river.
And while Gore remained doggedly optimistic, many of his most
experienced advisers, including those with the greatest knowledge
of recounts, were clear-eyed realists, knowing just how hard it
is for any candidate to reverse the results after Election Day.
Nearly four days before Gore decided to surrender, his campaign
chairman told him: "Forget it."
It's possible to see the key role Gore played in shaping the
perception that he had lost a race that was, in fact, a virtual
tie. On election night, after the networks declared Bush the
winner, Gore cemented that impression by congratulating his
opponent – without ever speaking to his own grass-roots
operatives, who could have warned him that the race was actually
too close to call.
It's possible to trace the long arc of the Bush strategy, which
was based on the assumption that Gore's chief weapon was the
Florida Supreme Court. From the first days, the Bush forces
began moving to bring the state legislature and the federal
courts – especially the U.S. Supreme Court – into
position to thwart that advantage. The role of Katherine Harris,
Florida's Republican secretary of state – and her key
adviser, placed at her side by the Bush team – comes into
focus. While Harris brooded over the parallels of her ordeal to
that of the biblical Queen Esther, she stalled the
ballot-counting so critical to Gore's hopes.
The key contribution of Bush's brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush,
can also be seen: His legal staff, in the first hours after
Election Day, moved to keep the state's biggest law firms off
Gore's team.
It's possible to understand the pivotal decisions, on both sides,
not to pursue an unprecedented – and legally unfounded
– statewide hand count of all ballots. And to realize the
importance of the Gore team's mishandling of the issue of
overseas absentee ballots – a mistake that was exacerbated
when Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman abandoned his ground forces on
this issue, without warning, on national television. The
resulting disarray allowed the Bush team to demand hurried
recounts, thus padding their lead. They called this the
"Thanksgiving Stuffing."
And even as Gore protested on television that his team had
nothing to do with lawsuits challenging thousands of ballots in
two Florida counties, his forces arranged behind the scenes for
organized labor to push the cases. Meanwhile, a major Gore donor
– a Silicon Valley billionaire – backed the effort with
huge cash donations and a chartered jet.
These are the sort of decisions, alliances, power plays, snap
judgments and personality flaws revealed when a flukishly close
election is played out for staggeringly high stakes. Both sides
were nimble and brilliant and occasionally shady; both sides were
also capable of miscalculations, divisions and blame. The best
and worst of politics were on display in those 36 days, and both
sides trafficked in each. This is how it happened.
The Gospel of Recounts
Go in. Keep quiet. Don't say who you work for. As the Spirit
Airlines DC-9 charter jet winged its way toward Florida, the Gore
operatives on board got a crash course in recount strategy from
the masters.
The campaign is over.
This is something else.
Information would win this thing. Data: Names of county election
supervisors. Vote totals. Hello, ma'am. Any irregularities you
might recall? Anything at all? Type of voting machines.
Ballot design. May I have a sample ballot, if it's not too much
trouble? Any ballots that the machines couldn't read? Oh, that
many? Why?
Fowler had two hours to come up with a jet. He found one with
GORE-LIEBERMAN painted on the side, not exactly stealth
transport.
Coming into Tallahassee, there was much to feel hopeful about.
Gore had won the popular vote. He was parked just three
electoral votes away from the White House. He was fewer than
2,000 votes behind in Florida. And Gore had the guys who wrote
the book on recounts – literally: "The Recount Primer," by
Timothy Downs, Chris Sautter and John Hardin Young. The authors
– three veteran Democratic trench fighters – tore pages
from their book and copied them using two airborne fax machines.
They lectured the dozing passengers in the science of election
challenges over the intercom.
Recount One, as the flight attendants referred to the plane,
touched down, rolled to a stop – and in came a spiffy
private jet 50 feet away. The steps went down on the smaller
plane. A big man with a boy's head of hair ducked his head as he
came blinking into the sunlight.
Jeb Bush.
The Republicans waved at the Democrats: Hi, fellas! So much for
low-key, thought Fowler.
That their rival's brother governed Florida loomed as one
obstacle to the Gore effort. But the biggest challenge Gore
faced was described right there in the opening pages of "The
Recount Primer." The maxims of any recount are always the same,
Gore's tacticians wrote: "If a candidate is ahead, the scope of
the recount should be as narrow as possible, and the rules and
procedures . . . should duplicate the procedures of election
night." Classic recount theory says: "When you've got a lead, you
sit on the ball," Young would explain later.
"If a candidate is behind," the book continues, "the scope should
be as broad as possible, and the rules should be different from
those used election night." In other words, Young said, "It's the
end of the fourth quarter. When you're behind, a recount is a
Hail Mary. The one who is behind has to gather votes."
How? Expand the universe of possible votes. Seek to examine all
the ballots rejected by the machines because no vote registered,
the "undervotes." All the paper ballots rejected because they
weren't filled out precisely right – look at those, too.
Ballots marked twice because they were confusing to some voters
– the "overvotes" – look at those. "You get 2,000
pitches, you get a better chance of having homers," Young
explained.
Anyone who read and heeded the booklet could predict how the two
sides would play America's closest presidential election –
at least in the broad outlines. Gore would gamble; Bush would
stall. Gore would preach a doctrine of uncounted ballots; Bush
would extol the dependability of machines. Gore needed more:
more counting, more examination, more weighing and pondering of
more ballots. Bush needed it over while he was still ahead.
Flip a few pages ahead in the primer. The trailing candidate can
only know where to expand the universe by learning everything
possible about the ballots – number, condition, status.
Knowledge is power, especially in the early hours. The county
election boards may never have done a recount before. Get there
first, and become their friendly experts. Figure out the
counting standards that will favor your candidate, then
generously apply them to every vote, no matter what.
That's why the Gore team swept down in such force so quickly, and
why they hoped no one would notice.
There was one problem: The Republicans knew the gospel of the
"Primer," too. Before Nov. 8, 2000, perhaps the toughest
recount in recent history was a 1984 deadlock in Indiana's 8th
Congressional District. "The Bloody Eighth," as it came to be
known – a six-month ordeal involving three complete
recounts, the Antietam of recount lawyers.
The Democrats – Jack Young and Chris Sautter and others
winging their way to Florida that first day – finished a
fraction ahead in that race's initial count. Defending their
lead, they fought to keep the recount's scope narrow. And they
won.
One of the lawyers who lost that battle was on his way to
Florida, with every lesson of the Bloody Eighth well-learned.
He was Ben Ginsberg – Bush's campaign counsel.
The Lockup
Bush was with his father and Hughes when the second call came in
from Gore. He was incredulous, and when it ended, he told the
others still at the mansion – Laura, his parents, Richard
and Lynne Cheney, former senator Alan Simpson and his wife Ann,
Jeb – what had happened. "The vice president's changed,"
Bush told the group. "He's withdrawn [the concession]. Bush
asked Jeb to find out more about what was happening in Florida,
decided that Evans should go out and speak to supporters who were
still waiting outside. "Don went out," Bush remembers. "I went
to bed."
"Florida's wrong," Rove had insisted in a telephone call earlier
in the evening, when the networks had called the state for Gore.
Bush wanted to believe that, but was still grappling with the
possibility of defeat. "You've got to understand my frame of
mind at this point," Bush recalled. "You're like, you're spent,
you've run the race, it's out of your hands. It's been in your
hands for 18 months, starting [in June 1999] with getting on the
airplane in Austin, Texas, called 'Great Expectations.' I could
have fumbled. I could have cursed more often. Whatever."
But even after the networks put it back into play, Florida was
confounding. And when they called the state for Bush, the Austin
team was shocked. From their calculations, the race would end up
too close to call – and headed for a recount. At the
governor's mansion in Austin, Jeb Bush had the same reaction.
"I'm not seeing the same thing they're seeing in the numbers,"
Hughes recalls Jeb Bush saying when the networks projected Bush
as the 43rd president.
Back in Florida, Jeb Bush's team also was queasy. "I knew that
not all the precincts were in," recalled Frank Jimenez, the
governor's acting general counsel.
Jeb Bush's power and network of resources were to become of great
value in the first days – especially his staff of
politically expert lawyers. In his general counsel's office, Jeb
Bush had some of the sharpest, freshest lawyer-politicians in
Florida. They knew the law, the players and the terrain in a way
that the Democrats streaming in from Nashville could never match.
Jimenez became a key source of information for the Bush camp
about legal and procedural aspects of the recount. Around 3:30
a.m., he made the first of a number of calls to the Florida
Division of Elections, asking for the latest numbers.
Jimenez realized he didn't know much about recounts. Neither did
anyone else. CNN somehow reached a mid-level Division of
Elections employee at about 4 a.m. They put the man on live, and
started questioning him. Jimenez – watching the network from
Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan's house – froze. Somebody had to
get the guy off the air – he might say something that would
set a bad precedent.
Moments later, anchor Bernard Shaw got a slightly puzzled look on
his face. "Did we lose Ed Kast?" he asked.
"We may have," Judy Woodruff answered. They had.
Jimenez headed over to the Division of Elections, looking for
Clay Roberts, a Bush loyalist who was its director. "My purpose
in going was to confirm the results and to figure out what was
going to happen next," he said later. "That's when I learned the
governor had a role in the process."
Recount law placed the power to certify the winner – of
Florida, and therefore of the presidency – in the hands of
the state election canvassing commission, which had three
members: Secretary of State Katherine Harris, elections division
head Roberts and Gov. Bush.
Because of the obvious potential for a conflict of interest, the
role of Jeb Bush and his general counsel would come under intense
inspection. Democrats and the media would ask pointed questions
about the barrage of calls Jimenez placed to the Division of
Elections in the early days of the disputed vote count. But in
his own mind, Jimenez, the son of Cuban exiles and a Bush aide
since 1994, later explained, it was all routine.
"There have been stories about how I called the division eight or
nine times in the first 48 hours . . . I think I only got
through to Clay [Roberts] a few times, and I was asking very
basic, fundamental questions."
In the first hours of deadlock, the Florida governor's staff did
ponder various moves to short-circuit the recount. They
considered arguing that Florida recount laws did not apply to
presidential elections. Or that the automatic recount provision
applied only to individual counties where the margin was closer
than one-half of one percent – eliminating all of Gore's
strongest counties.
But none of these ideas seemed plausible enough to act on.
Meanwhile, Jimenez and his staff moved swiftly to tie up the
state's biggest law firms. Their campaign began at 6:45 a.m.,
while the Gore team was mustering in Nashville.
Jimenez contacted Barry Richard of Greenberg Traurig, a
powerhouse outfit, among the best-wired in Florida. Richard was
a Democrat – he even hosted fundraisers for the opposition
– but Jeb and his staff all trusted him. Richard had
recently defended the governor against a lawsuit challenging the
use of state letterhead in an appeal to absentee voters. He won
the case. Jimenez didn't even bother checking with Austin before
signing him up.
Next, Jeb's team looked at Gray Harris & Robinson. A key aide of
Jeb Bush was married to a top lawyer there. Locked 'em up.
Then they turned to Fowler, White, Gillen, Boggs, Villareal &
Banker, a big Tallahassee lobbying firm. A senior Republican
strategist in Florida, Mac Stipanovich, worked there. They
weren't going to help Gore.
The big prize was Holland & Knight, the largest firm in Florida,
one of the 20 biggest in the world. The Bush team didn't have
much hope of hiring it because Holland & Knight's managing
partner, Bill McBride, was rumored to have ambitions of running
against Jeb Bush in 2002. But other partners had worked for Bush
and they argued that the firm had too many conflicts to work for
Gore.
McBride said the firm was ready to sign up with Gore as lead
counsel; Ron Klain, Gore's chief lawyer in Florida, said the firm
turned him down. The Gore forces did hire Florida lawyers –
Kendall Coffey, a former U.S. attorney in Miami, Dexter
Douglass, a former counsel to Gov. Lawton Chiles, and Mitchell
Berger, Gore's top Florida fundraiser. But Holland & Knight sat
out the recount.
In the coming weeks, Democrats would complain frequently about
the hidden hand of Jeb Bush, but his greatest influence was,
quite possibly, right there on the surface: For anyone doing
business in Florida, it was unnatural to cross the governor.
"The Republicans didn't have to hire the big firms, or tie them
up," a leading Gore strategist said later. "They scared them
[expletive]. Jeb Bush didn't need to send a note for them to
know."
That didn't mean the Gore forces had nothing. They had their own
man high up in Florida government. Bob Butterworth, the longtime
state attorney general and Gore's state chairman during the
election campaign.
Butterworth later said that his "number one" concern was "the
image of the state." But when Wednesday arrived with the race
unresolved, the attorney general argued forcefully within Gore's
camp for standing and fighting.
Gore's advisers urged Butterworth to go on television in the
pre-dawn hours Wednesday to frame the recount in a favorable
light. He was so aggressive about it that Frank Jimenez was
overheard muttering that Butterworth was trying to "hijack" the
election.
Jeb Bush decided that he should recuse himself from the statewide
canvassing commission; he called Austin to explain his view.
There was some dissent on his staff. When Jeb did finally recuse
himself, however, his lawyers immediately took brief leaves of
absence from their work in Florida's government so they could
continue working on the dispute without drawing a state salary.
Continued on Page Two
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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