Down & Dirty (21 page)

Ed Pozzuoli, chairman of the Broward County Republican Party, is hardly delighted with Samuels’s picks. “It is not about fairness,”
he says. “They’re looking for more Democratic votes.”

Lee agrees that the precincts they picked are skewed, but that’s the law. “I think we’re setting a bad precedent,” Carroll
says. The canvassing board, she says, has no business deciding “whether a voter really intended to vote it…. That’s the reason
that I’ve not been in favor of this sort of thing before.”

In fact, Broward County hasn’t conducted a hand recount since March of ’96, for the Lauderdale-by-the-Sea mayoral race, where
Anna Mae
French lost to Thomas D. McKane III by 1 vote. And that hand recount just confirmed that French had, indeed, lost by 1 vote.

Not that Carroll likes punch cards. She’s been trying to get the county commission to pony up for better machines for some
time now. In 1993, she wrote a memo criticizing the commission’s wait-and-see attitude on voter technology. “If the theory
of waiting to see what will come along in the future had been employed, we would still be on a manual registration system
and hand-counting paper ballots brought in by horse-drawn carriages,” she wrote. Still, Carroll’s mind is made up against
a hand count. So is Gunzburger’s, in the opposite direction.“We always say one vote makes a difference,” she says. “Well,
we’re looking at the next leader of our democracy, the forty-third president.”

Both Lee and Gunzburger support the 1 percent hand recount; Carroll opposes.

Carroll agrees to return by Monday early afternoon. The hand recount of the three precincts will commence then.

It’s weird that they keep bumping into other players in this drama, Daley thinks. Small town. Last night, he, Chris, and Klain
went out to dinner at a local restaurant, Cypress, where who should come over to say hi but Katherine Harris. She was perfectly
nice, perfectly lovely. Her cousin is chef and co-owner. Still, it was weird.

Now Friday morning, at the Doubletree, Daley and Chris run into Baker and his gang—Allbaugh, Zoellick, Tutweiler. They’d had
a nice meeting yesterday afternoon, Daley thinks, why not go over there and say hello?

“Hey, Jim, I got a proposition for ya,” Daley jokes. “How about we give you Oregon and Iowa in exchange for Florida?”

Baker doesn’t seem to find this funny. Daley’s greeted by four stone faces; you can almost hear the distant sound of crickets.
Something’s changed, Daley thinks. These guys are in a different mode than they were yesterday. They’re in full battle gear,
he thinks. Daley awkwardly exits.

“I think he’s really pissed off,” Daley says to Christopher.

The fact that Bill Daley is the son of former Chicago mayor Richard Daley, who helped steal Illinois for JFK in 1960, is not
the reason why Fabiani thinks he shouldn’t be so out in front on all of this. Though it doesn’t help. Daley’s gene pool is
an irony not lost on us in the media, and it becomes a major talking point of the GOP. Which is too bad, because Daley—who
was twelve in November 1960—has worked hard his entire
life to embody the positive aspects of his father’s politics and to shun the corruption.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning
Chicago Tribune
investigation into the Daley machine in 1972 detailed the myriad ways Daley’s machine ensured victory: dead people voted;
other mystery voters had official addresses that didn’t exist. The names of bums were copied from guest registers in skid
row motels, and somehow they voted, too. Many Republican judges were kept from supervising, while others worked with their
Democratic counterparts for Daley. Poll workers walked into the voting booths to “help” senior citizens pull the straight
Democratic lever.
¹

And it worked. In 1960, Kennedy beat Nixon nationally with a hair-thin margin, 49.7 percent of the popular vote to Nixon’s
49.6. Kennedy won Illinois by 8,858 votes—out of a total 4,657,394 cast. And while it’s true that there were credible allegations
of vote fraud in downstate Republican areas of the Land of Lincoln, it was Mayor Daley’s Chicago where Kennedy won 89.3 percent
of the vote—456,312 votes—which carried him over the top. And though Kennedy’s electoral-vote margin of victory was large
enough that he could have lost Illinois and still won, it was not large enough that he could have lost Illinois and Texas—another
state where there were rampant allegations of vote fraud—and still won.

Already Republicans like Baker are pressuring Gore to concede, regurgitating the historical falsehood that Nixon conceded
Election Night for the good of the country. In fact, Nixon didn’t even formally concede until November 11, three days after
the election, and he did so, by his own admission, with thoughts that a recount would take up to half a year, and with consideration
of his future political viability paramount in his mind. And even after the concession announcement—made by his press secretary,
not the candidate himself—the Republican Party began investigating allegations about Daley’s machine. RNC chairman Sen. Thurston
Morton of Kentucky flew to Chicago and announced the formation of the National Recount and Fair Elections Committee. Recounts
and recanvasses were ordered. One precinct’s recount tally went from Kennedy having 323 votes to Nixon’s 78 to a much closer
count: 237 to 162.
²

Investigations were launched in Texas, too. In fact, that month in Chicago a first-year Kirkland & Ellis associate attorney
named Fred Bartlit—who forty years later would emerge as a Bush lawyer in this dispute—was hired by the Republican Party to
investigate vote fraud in Texas. Only six or so weeks on the job, Bartlit concluded that there was plenty of evidence of electoral
shenanigans in Starr and Duval Counties in
South Texas, where the votes were still controlled by the same team—led by George Parr,“the Duke of Duval County”—who stole
a Senate election for LBJ in 1948.
^*
Some historical accounts have GOP chieftains concluding that they just didn’t have enough hard evidence to mount the challenge.
For whatever reasons, the Republican Party decided not to contest the results. But little, if any, of it was rooted in Nixon’s
magnanimity.

That said, before Bill Daley, the mayor’s youngest son of four, turned thirty, he had seen his dad both disgraced during the
1968 Democratic convention and buried in 1976. He and his older brother Richie Daley had to struggle to be taken seriously,
to be seen as anything other than anachronisms, relics from a corrupt and ugly era. Legendary
Tribune
columnist Mike Royko once famously described the two as “too dumb to tie their shoes.”

The oldest of the Daley sons, Richie, won his dad’s state senate seat in 1973 to little aplomb and even lower expectations.
But working with his brother Bill, the two fashioned together a coalition of liberal Democrats, minorities, and—yes—good-government
types, which elected Richie mayor in 1989 and has kept him there ever since. Their father’s machine is dead, and they are
clean.
^†

Bill Daley, in fact, had built such a stellar reputation, and been such an asset to Bill Clinton in his clean victory in Illinois
in 1992, he was close to being named transportation secretary in early 1993. That is, until Clinton’s self-imposed “cabinet
that looks like America” quota led him to abandon Daley at the last minute in favor of Federico Peña.

Ever the loyal soldier, however, Daley agreed to come on board the Clinton administration during one of its hardest times—the
August 1993 budget fight—to take on an even harder-seeming task: heading up the administration’s then-floundering effort to
get the controversial North
American Free Trade Agreement passed. Three months after he took the job, it was hard to imagine that it had ever been so
questionable; thanks to Daley, NAFTA passed. Three years later, Clinton made him commerce secretary, where he earned marks
for running a clean, effective, and bipartisan shop. He helped Republicans when they called, eliminated dozens of political
appointee positions, cleaned up the trade mission shit and all that.

In June, Gore called Daley late one night to ask him to be his campaign chair—a job he’d turned down three times already.
The controversial former chairman, Tony Coehlo, had made the tough decisions to chuck the deadwood, but Coehlo was sick and
had to take leave. And, of course, Coehlo was doing a pretty crappy job. Daley got to work, to mixed reviews. Some thought
that Coehlo fostered better communication among the staff, but Daley was a better face for the campaign than Coehlo—who was
then under a criminal investigation run jointly by both the State Department inspector general and the Justice Department’s
public integrity section for financial dealings he’d made at the Expo ’98 world’s fair in Portugal.

Today it’s tough to imagine Daley being brought on board the Gore campaign because of his stellar reputation. Rush Limbaugh
calls him “Bugsy Daley,” but it’s not just talk radio that targets the man as dirty. On ABC’s
Good Morning America
that morning, Daley appears—his comments far more serene than yesterday’s—and is followed by former senator Bob Dole, the
Kansas Republican whose own presidential run, in 1996, was the lamest GOP effort since Barry Goldwater.

“It’s always good to hear from Bill Daley from Chicago, where even the dead vote on a regular basis for Democrats, and where
Gore carried Chicago nine-to-one,” Dole says. “Maybe we ought to take a look at Chicago, where the same ballots were used,
to see if people understood that.”

The ABC producer offers Daley the opportunity to return on air, to rebut the charge, but Daley demurs.

Still, he’s not happy. “That motherfucker,” Daley says. “That mother-fucker. Talking about my father.” His dad’s been dead
and buried for twenty-four years, for Chrissakes.

Daley hasn’t slept in days, and he gets the game, he understands that his Thursday statement was hot, as he was told to make
it, and he understands that he’s going to take a hit for it. But going after his father is below the belt, he thinks.

“If they want to point to something in my background that they want to criticize and say, this is bad, and this guy’s bad,
and yada yada yada, fine,” Daley thinks. “But all these people out there talking about Chicago and my
dad and all that shit—it’s some pretty chickenshit stuff.” His mom’s ninety-three years old, and she’s sitting in Chicago
watching this stuff on TV. “Don’t let it bother you!” Momma Daley admonishes her son, reminding him of all the good things
his father did. Still, Daley thinks, why does she have to deal with this thing?! Why does
she
need to hear this shit?

Oklahoma GOP governor Frank Keating
^*
comes on Fox News Channel, railing against “the twenty-seven-inch-neck crowd… from Chicago… Boss Daley’s boys” that he claims
are intimidating canvassing boards. What the hell’s Keating talking about?! “Twenty-seven-inch-neck crowd?!” What does that
even mean?!

The problem is, Daley thinks, he can’t respond without ratcheting it up. He’s not about to call people who have flowed in
from Oklahoma to help Bush, a bunch of Okies from a state that has nothing going on. And these are the same people who talk
about how the tone of politics has gotten really horrible, and we gotta change that! Unbelievable!

And what’s more, these guys are totally chickenshit, Daley thinks. Take Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, the loud-mouthed
former fire chief of Marcus Hook, who tells the
Washington Post,
“I will use every ounce of energy I have to deny the electors being seated if I believe the political will of the people
was thwarted by the son of Mayor Daley of Chicago.” After Daley sees this comment, he has an assistant call Weldon. All he
wants to say is, “Hey, lookit, I hope twenty-six years from now, if you’re dead and your kids are in this business, that somebody’s
not talking about you, and something you did or didn’t do.” He would be more than pleased to talk about the 1960 election,
about the fact that the Democratic Party of Cook County offered to pay for a statewide recount and the Republicans said, “No
way.” He’s prepared to tell Weldon that his dad was investigated for twenty-two years by every federal prosecutor that Republicans
could sic on him—and Clinton thinks
he’s
been investigated a lot?!—and no one could ever find anything on him.