Down & Dirty (19 page)

Rogow agrees, figuring that Berger and the Gore team—which apparently Berger’s on—would rather be in state court than federal,
since the former is generally more sympathetic to Democrats, the latter to Republicans. He also figures that the Dems are
probably afraid of this chaotic litigation. Additionally, others in the legal community observe, Ryskamp is probably not the
most sympathetic ear for Jews and African-Americans complaining about ballot woes. Nominated to the Eleventh U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals by then-president Bush in 1990, Ryskamp had his nomination rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee in
1991. It wasn’t just that Ryskamp belonged to a Coral Gables country club that didn’t have any Jewish or African-American
members, though that rubbed some people the wrong way. It was more the substantive complaints about his alleged hostility
to plaintiffs with age, gender, and race discrimination complaints, whom he ruled against almost nine out of ten times, often
exhibiting—as the
St. Petersburg Times
wrote—“an insensitivity sometimes bordering on the Neanderthal.”

Berger, meanwhile, tells an attorney, Dawn Myers, to go to federal court and squash the suit. He has an idea for how the butterfly
ballot case can be won, but these guys are putting the cart before the horse, asking for a remedy
— a revote—before the ballot’s even been proved to have been illegal. That’s more appropriate litigation for the “contest”
phase of an election challenge, not the “protest” phase. Berger and his team want to do everything they can to get the uncounted
votes included in the tally before Gore breaks any new ground by contesting an official election result.

Berger thinks that he could possibly argue for some sort of remedy—an allocation of ill-cast votes isn’t entirely unprecedented.
He can sure meet one of the two criteria, showing that there was significant confusion. And in a Palm Beach County court case,
after witness after witness after witness, perhaps the momentum would be with him. Then he could jump the second hurdle in
proving the illegality of a ballot, convincing the judge to see the conflicting measures of ballot law the way he would present
them.

But Navarro won’t back off until he has a private phone conversation with Daley himself. So Daley calls him. Afterward, Navarro
explains to reporters why his client brought, and is now withdrawing, his suit.

“Al Gore’s going to step up and fight this battle.”

As the masses of election protesters accumulate outside the Palm Beach elections office, the Rev. Thomas Masters, pastor at
the New Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, looks out contentedly at his handiwork.

Masters, the brother-in-law of former former D.C. mayor Marion Barry, is the local go-to man for civil rights causes, especially
when televised. Not all of Masters’s causes have necessarily been embraced by the community as a whole—not his March and April
tirades against the Domino’s, Pizza Hut, and Papa John’s deliverymen who didn’t bring their pies to black neighborhoods, for
instance, though eventually the chains capitulated. And certainly not his June demonstration outside the state attorney’s
office after prosecutors decided to try as an adult a thirteen-year-old who killed his teacher. Didn’t matter. What Masters
saw as an injustice, he spoke out against. Considering the charge, he barely even blinked after a jury ruled in favor of a
seventeen-year-old retarded kid who’d accused
Masters
of rape, awarding his family $2.45 million in damages from Masters and his church—which a judge was nice enough to reduce
to just $1.3 million only from Masters.

As with Barry, Masters knew the Rev. Jesse Jackson a bit, had enlisted Jackson in a 1996 demonstration against a local supermarket
where a thirty-three-year-old—suspected of shoplifting a toothbrush and toothpaste—died of asphyxiation after eight employees
pinned him down. Yesterday, after hearing about the voter problems, he worked with a few
others—including Representative Wexler, who specifically focused on getting Jews to participate—to organize this march. He
told them he’d get Jackson there.

And sure enough, at around 1:30
P.M
., the Rev. Jesse Jackson arrives in West Palm Beach. “In Selma, it was about the right to vote,” Jackson says. “Today, it’s
about making votes count.

“While there is—over and over again—a call for a recount, in West Palm there must be a first count,” Jackson says. “We find
around the state various irregularities that undercut the credibility of a great election, a great campaign by two worthy
opponents. In democracy, everybody counts. Every vote must count.

“This ballot”—Jackson says, awkwardly holding up the butterfly ballot—“is fuzzy,” alluding to Bush’s campaign slam that Gore
used “fuzzy math.”

Fabiani cringes. Jackson is not helping.

Their challenge is to create for the public the impression that this can all be resolved quickly and fairly and it’s not going
to be dragged down to a destabilizing situation. Anything that strays from that message will hurt—and Jackson leading rallies
and calling for a revote certainly falls into that category. It’s not that Gore doesn’t care that people didn’t get to vote
because polling places were moved at the last minute, or about other problems, but a revote is never going to happen.

Donna Brazile is asked to talk to Jackson, to tell him what the campaign’s thinking and how he can help, and how he can be
unhelpful if he so chooses. Whether Brazile ever truly conveys that is another question.

Warren Christopher is pissed at Jim Baker. On Wednesday, Baker told reporters that he’d tried to call his fellow former secretary
of state but had not heard back from him. Truth is, Christopher had been traveling all day, and he had tried to get back to
Baker, but he was hard to reach, too. But Baker had made it sound like Christopher wasn’t returning his phone calls, and that
angered him. In any case, Christopher and Baker finally do connect, and they decide to all meet Thursday afternoon.

It’s pretty friendly, considering. Baker comes to the Governor’s Inn, where Daley and Chris—the name Christopher’s close friends
call him by—are staying, and he brings with him Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh and Baker’s protégé Bob Zoellick. No agreements
or anything are reached of course—they quickly realize that they’re going to disagree,
but they concur that this should be done in a respectful way. They bullshit a little—
How ya doin’? Isn’t this crazy?
—and then they say their farewells. The whole thing takes maybe six minutes.

That evening, Barry Richard returns from visiting his pop in Miami and, in jeans, heads straight to the Bush Building, where
he meets Baker and Ginsberg. Wiry and intense, Richard fields their questions, about Florida election law, the Florida courts,
about strategy.

What do you think about the butterfly ballot case? he’s asked.

Not much, Richard says. Not knowing anything more about it than what he’d seen on TV and in the newspapers, Richard doesn’t
think the case has a great deal of substance. It can be won, he says.

Baker listens a lot, Richard notices, supervising but not really running anything. Baker’s Bush’s eyes and ears here, Richard
thinks, while Ginsberg’s the one actually in charge of the legal team. It’s like Baker’s the general manager, Ginsberg the
coach.

In that metaphor, Richard can be seen as the quintessential yeoman player, hopping team to team with each trade. His father,
Melvin Richard, served for twenty-two years on the city council and one term as the mayor of Miami Beach, bringing Jackie
Gleason’s TV show to town. After getting his J.D. from the University of Miami Law School, Richard served for the navy’s judge
advocate general during the Vietnam War, stationed at a Northern California naval hospital.

There he was thrust into a position of being indispensable to everyone, including those at the local army and air force hospitals,
which didn’t have attorneys. He advised the admiral on discipline and court-martials, taught doctors about medical law that
he himself had to learn, answered questions from patients and staffers about problems with their mortgages and marriages,
having to rapidly determine the law in each of their hometowns. “It was like getting thrown overboard,” he would later say.
“You need to learn to swim pretty quickly.”

Then it was back to Coral Gables, where he practiced law with his dad and then served as a clerk in the Dade County attorney’s
office. He moved up the ladder pretty damn quick: there he was, a young man in his thirties, assistant attorney general for
Miami arguing a search-and-seizure case before the U.S. Supreme Court, then moving to Tallahassee to serve as deputy attorney
general from ’72 to ’74.

After that he ran and won as state representative. In ’78 he ran for attorney general but lost to Jim Smith in the primary.
Soon he started a small
law firm that grew and grew and eventually merged with Greenberg Traurig in ’91. He’s known for his silver tongue and his
silver bouffant and a pretty decent command of the law.

The butterfly ballot confusion was a shame, Richard thinks, but it wasn’t much more than that: a shame.

By Thursday, Bushies have set up their basic shop, which is almost entirely headquartered in the Tallahassee Bush Building.

Baker is in charge, assisted as he always is by Margaret Tutweiler, who has served him throughout his career in a variety
of positions, perhaps most notably as State Department spokeswoman. Zoellick is on board as well, as is Bush domestic policy
adviser Josh Bolten.

If Baker’s the CEO, Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh is chief operating officer, running the day-to-day, ensuring that there
are no gaps in communication, making sure the trains run on time. Ginsberg heads up legal, helped by George H. W. Bush administration
deputy attorney general George Terwilliger, now a senior partner at White & Case, Kirk Van Tine from the D.C. office of Baker
Botts, an elite firm formed by an ancestor of Jim Baker. Eventually, the Bush legal effort will draw from a cast of hundreds
from the best firms in the nation. Terwilliger, called and drafted by Evans in the midst of an interview on Fox News Channel,
is picked up at the Tallahassee airport by his fellow White & Case-ians Tim Flanigan and Bob Bittman—the latter of whom had
been a key aide to Ken Starr in his pursuit of President Clinton.