Down & Dirty (22 page)

Yeah, that’s what Daley wants to tell Weldon. But Weldon doesn’t return the call. So the next day, Daley has another call
placed to Weldon’s office. Still no return call. Then another. Then another. For eleven days in a row, Daley will call Weldon,
and the bombastic Weldon will never take the call, nor will he even return it. “Chickenshit,” Daley thinks.

The heft of Daley’s ire will be reserved for Dole, however.

On Sunday, November 12, Sam Donaldson asks Dole, “If people’s votes weren’t counted fairly, you certainly wouldn’t argue that
they shouldn’t be counted.”

“Oh, I don’t—I don’t argue that, but where does it stop?” Dole says. “Are they going to—why don’t they do all fifty states
then? Why don’t they go to Chicago, where they invented irregularities. You know, Bill Daley’s an expert on irregularities.”

As Daley watches this, one of his colleagues sneers and calls the World War II combat veteran and Viagra pitchman a “one-armed,
limp-dicked motherfucker.”

“You shouldn’t attack somebody’s war wound,” Daley says.

“How about ‘limp-dicked motherfucker’?” the colleague asks.

“That’s different,” Daley says. He himself refers to Dole as a “limp-dicked motherfucker” from then on. “We all knew he was
dysfunctional from the waist down,” Daley says, “now we know he’s dysfunctional from the shoulders up, too.”

But at least one of Daley’s colleagues at the helm of the Gore recount effort notices something odd about Daley’s reaction.
After Daley’s fury subsides, he gets more passive. He seems gun-shy. The Bush hardball tactics arouse in him a flash of anger,
but then he retreats. Instead of fighting back even harder, he thinks, Daley pulls back. “It’s like they threw a couple hard
fast pitches at the head of our team captain, and he got less aggressive,” the Gore chieftain will later say. In other words,
according to this colleague and admirer of Daley, the GOP tactics worked.

Another close associate of Daley’s will dispute this, saying that irrespective of his hot November 9 comments, Daley just
tried to keep a cool head about both the ups and downs in the next month’s battle. However, this associate adds, “Those people
who went after his dad—he knows who every single one of them is.”

Tucker Eskew arrives in Miami Friday, to work with Mindy Tucker in the Bush communications department, along with Scott McClellan
and Ken Lisaius.

Eskew’s presence is more telling than the others’, however. He’s kept relatively low-profile since he helmed the communications
for Bush’s nasty South Carolina primary campaign. And because when he flies in from Austin, he joins the three other chief
Southern strategists who helped Bush score his ugly South Carolina primary win against McCain.

They are Bush’s South Carolina clan: chief strategist Warren Tompkins, strategist Neal Rhoades, state director Heath Thompson,
and Eskew—three of whom were thanked personally by Bush in his South Carolina victory speech. Each is a veteran of the hardscrabble
ways of Southern politics, raised at the knee of legendary scumbag Lee Atwater. Which is a nice way of saying that there’s
little that they wouldn’t do to get a candidate elected, especially when it comes to—at the very least—turning a blind eye
to allied political mercenaries in the hinterlands who race-bait, slander, and dance around election law. After all, in the
weeks leading up to the South Carolina primary on February 19, McCain suffered one of the dirtiest personal smear campaigns
in modern American political history.

“We play it different down here,” Tompkins once told reporters. “We’re not dainty, if you get my drift. We’re used to playin’
rough.”

Indeed. Push polls attacked McCain’s personal life, exaggerated his role in the Keating savings-and-loan scandal, and disputed
his war heroism. Leaflets slammed his wife, Cindy, for her past addiction to painkillers; Bush allies told South Carolinians
that she had V.D., thanks to her husband. An e-mail from a Bob Jones University professor accused McCain of fathering children
out of wedlock. A mysterious public action committee in favor of the Confederate flag—called “Keep It Flying”—sprang up overnight
and slammed McCain in 250,000 leaflets. Phone calls and radio talk shows repeated that McCain had a black baby, had been driven
insane while in a Vietnamese POW camp, was a lying, cheating whore.

Were there layers of people separating Bush from this scum? Of course; there always are. But Bush never ordered it stopped—why
would he? It was working. Bush engaged in his own delightful activities, appearing at Bob Jones and telling a Christian radio
station, “An openly known homosexual is somebody who probably wouldn’t share my philosophy.” He literally embraced a fringe
Vietnam veteran activist who erroneously slammed McCain for doing nothing for veterans. He sank lower in the mud than any
major presidential candidate in more than a generation.

“When the going gets tough for Governor Bush, he turns to the darker side of our party,” a senior McCain adviser tells me,
after I phone up and report that the four Palmetto State pols are now in Florida. “We saw that in South Carolina, and we see
that today.”

The McCain strategist sees where Tompkins, Eskew, Thompson, and Rhoades might be pushed into service. In Florida, as in South
Carolina, Bush stalwarts have an interest in devaluing traditional Democratic voters.
Jews and blacks in Palm Beach and Broward Counties, for instance, who have complained about various ballot and voting irregularities,
are dismissed by Bush surrogates and Baker every chance they get. Voters who misunderstood the butterfly ballot are called
“confused,” “stupid,” or worse. “I’m sure that those Dixiecrats in South Carolina can rest assured that [Bush’s South Carolina
team] care deeply about the Holocaust survivors who accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan, or the black voters who were turned
away at the polls,” the McCain adviser says. “They can rest assured that they’re being represented well.”

In consultation with Bush, Ginsberg, Terwilliger, and the rest of the legal team, Baker gives the go-ahead to file a federal
suit against the Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia County canvassing boards for going ahead with hand recounts.
After consulting with Ginsberg, Bush staffer Ted Cruz calls a former colleague, Michael Carvin, a Reagan administration Justice
Department official, and tells him to get down here ASAP.

They’re going to “go federal”—sue the canvassing boards in federal court. Screw the PR risks, they decide, characteristically.
They want the
federalis
to step into the pending chaos and nip it all in the bud.

It’s suggested that for jurisdictional reasons it makes more sense to have Florida voters suing the canvassing boards than
just the Bush campaign. In Broward County, they enlist a Jeb ally, Fort Lauderdale attorney Georgette Sosa Douglas, who led
that area’s “Get Out the Vote” push. In Palm Beach, they get Ned Siegel, a big donor and multimillionaire real-estate developer.
In Miami-Dade they snag Gonzalo Dorta, a Coral Gables lawyer who sits on the county judicial nominating commission, thus whispering
the names of his favorite judge candidates to Jeb. They call Jim S. Higgins, chairman of the Martin County Republican Executive
Committee. Hard to imagine Gore being able to network like this.

The other Floridians on the lawsuit constitute a somewhat motley crew. There’s Carretta King Butler from Daytona Beach, a
thrift-shop owner perhaps best known in the area for endorsing a city commissioner candidate who once was accused of trying
to run over her daughter. Butler, one of the few African-American delegates at the Republican convention, speaks often about
“the Holy Spirit” and maintains that she has a close relationship with the state party chairman, Al Cardenas, despite the
fact that she refers to him as “Al Cardison.”

There’s also Dalton Bray, a former aide to Republican congressman Cliff Stearns and a Clay County sheriff who lost his reelection
bid in 1992. And
there’s Roger Coverly from Seminole County, about whom the GOP lawyers know basically nothing. It doesn’t matter.

Ted Olson, the man putting the federal case together, is a beloved member of the Washington GOP establishment. Known for his
blond mane, his $1,500 Wilkes Bashford suits, and his pundit/author wife, Barbara, Olson plays an active role “at the heart”
of “the vast right-wing conspiracy”—as he once joked at a meeting of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization.

One of former independent counsel Ken Starr’s best friends, Olson helped ABC News negotiate an interview with Monica Lewinsky,
and ran the Arkansas Project—a multimillion-dollar investigation into the life of President Clinton funded by right-wing billionaire
Richard Mellon Scaife. Olson defended controversial Arkansas witness David Hale during the Senate hearings on Whitewater.
He has also taken on some landmark conservative causes, defending the Virginia Military Institute in its failed attempt to
remain all male and successfully representing four white students who sued the University of Texas Law School, claiming its
affirmative-action policy denied them their rightful acceptance.

I call around, and while Olson is no less beloved for taking on Bush’s fight, there are conservative lawyers in Washington
who think the premise of Olson’s fight—that the federal government should intrude on a local election—goes against conservative
legal opinion. So why would he even take this on? Isn’t it intellectually inconsistent? Does that even matter?

Olson’s close friend Daniel Troy, a former clerk for Judge Robert Bork, a constitutional lawyer and an associate scholar at
the American Enterprise Institute, explains it all. First, Olson is “sort of a lawyer of the right, clearly a Republican,”
not to mention one of the three co-chairmen of Lawyers for Bush-Cheney. Also, Troy says, Olson has “a very profound sense
of fair play… Ted is not as predictable as you might think. The left would caricature him as some true-blue conservative,
but in his personal style he’s more iconoclastic.” An example, Troy says, is Olson’s taking up the cause of fighting federal
sentencing guidelines in the case of Los Angeles police officer Stacey Koon, one of the cops convicted of violating Rodney
King’s civil rights by beating him in March 1991, an argument Olson won before the U.S. Supreme Court in June 1997. On one
level, defending a cop is almost always a conservative cause, and defending one of the guys who beat King isn’t exactly left-wing.
But federal sentencing guidelines have been a Republican charge for quite some time. So for Olson to have argued
that a federal judge was appropriate in deviating from federal sentencing guidelines could be seen as unusual, especially
for a lawyer considered by his peers to be a “Borkian originalist,” Troy says. Or it could be seen as defending a bullying
white cop who almost beat a black man to death. Depends.

Even more controversial—in GOP circles, at any rate—was Olson’s defense of
New York Newsday
reporter Tim Phelps against a special prosecutor hired by the Senate to investigate leaks during the confirmation hearings
for then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Phelps broke the story that Thomas had been accused of sexual harassment by
law professor Anita Hill.