Exactly one year ago, in the corridors of a county office
building in downtown Miami, a gang
of imported Republican operatives tried to shove history toward George W. Bush.
On the day before Thanksgiving 2000, the event described approvingly by the
gentleman who now oversees the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal
as a “bourgeois riot” stopped the recount of disputed ballots in Florida’s
biggest county. Organized at the behest of former Secretary of State James
Baker by a consultant whose reputation for dirty tricks dates back to the Nixon
era, the “Brooks Brothers mob” embodied the iron will of the Bush campaign to
win.
As we now know, the 10,750
ballots that the G.O.P. goon squad sought to suppress would probably not have
done damage to their cause. So concluded the newspaper consortium that reported
the results of its lengthy, million-dollar examination of all the Florida Presidential ballots. According to their
analysis, a hand recount by the four counties that were the locus of the Gore
campaign’s legal strategy would still have yielded an exceedingly narrow
victory for the Bush-Cheney ticket.
And that is how-amid war in Afghanistan
and overwhelming approval ratings for the Commander in Chief-the media
consortium played their findings. But the National
Opinion Research
Center recount, which proved beyond
any hint of doubt that thousands more Florida
voters intended to elect Al Gore, has meaning only in a context ignored by
those tardy accounting adjustments.
Context is amply provided,
along with clarity and color, by Jeffrey Toobin’s Too Close to Call, a book that deserves study by anyone who
professes to care about American democracy. As Mr. Toobin explains, that nasty
fracas on Thanksgiving eve was only the most violent expression of the Bush
campaign’s thorough manipulation of the post-election process. Striving for
fairness, Mr. Toobin doesn’t hesitate to draw attention to the grievous
shortcomings of the Democratic campaign and its candidate. Mr. Gore comes off
as a sincere but hapless figure, in thrall to the opinions of newspaper editors
who never cared for him.
Yet whenever Mr. Toobin takes his readers inside the back rooms,
it is the ruthless character of modern Republicanism that stands out.
Seizing upon their home-court advantage, the Republicans
controlling the process in the Sunshine
State cheated and lied. As Florida’s
Secretary of State, Katherine Harris was required by law to ensure a full
automatic recount of every ballot in every county, because the margin
separating the candidates was less than one-half of 1 percent. Both Mr. Bush
and Mr. Baker continuously pointed to this statutory recount as proof that all
the votes had been “counted and recounted.”
In fact, as Mr. Toobin reveals, some 1.58 million votes cast in
18 counties were never recounted as the law prescribed-an extraordinary
violation that Ms. Harris and her aides knew but never mentioned, let alone
remedied. If the mandated recount had been completed in a timely and lawful
fashion, Mr. Gore might well have pulled ahead by a few votes in the first
week, changing the entire complexion of the post-election struggle.
“This subterranean story of the automatic recount,” writes Mr.
Toobin, “marked just the first time that Harris’s office performed heroic, if
necessarily unsung, service to the Bush campaign.”
Sworn to uphold the law and conduct a fair election despite her
allegiance to Mr. Bush and his brother Jeb, the Florida
governor, Ms. Harris did the opposite. According to Mr. Toobin, her strings
were pulled by Mac Stipanovich, the sharp corporate lobbyist placed in her
office by the Bush campaign within two days after the election to be her
“minder.” A former Republican staffer and campaign manager, Mr. Stipanovich
personified the formidable forces behind Mr. Bush, which have enjoyed the
spoils of his triumph ever since. Following the 1999 legislative session in Tallahassee,
Mr. Stipanovich told a local reporter, “I got everything. I don’t know what the
poor people got, but the rich people are happy, and I’m ready to go home.”
There is much more in Too
Close to Call that should embarrass Bush partisans, if they were capable of
that healthy emotion. Indeed, there is much here to embarrass all of us, as our
brave brothers and sisters again venture out under arms in the name of
democracy.
We’re apparently beyond such embarrassment now, living in a media
environment where a questionable Presidential election generates about as much
current buzz as the fate of Chandra Levy. The story of the 2000 election
remains as salient today as it was a year ago, however, regardless of what the
conventional idiocy may say. It tells us that our fundamental right to
self-government has been corrupted and still awaits restoration. And it tells
us something we need to remember about a President whose enthusiasm for
government secrecy, military tribunals and other such constitutional affronts
was foreshadowed in his leap to the White House.
