Down & Dirty (30 page)

“THEY! HAVE! NO CLASS!” the woman continues.

It’s one of the few chants that doesn’t catch on here, on the corner of North Olive and Fourth Streets, on a lovely Sunday
afternoon.

The crowd that’s gathered isn’t one whose members, Bush backers or Gore backers, care much about class. This is a good guys/bad
guys deal. There aren’t many thoughtful debates about the nature of democracy or the hair-trigger media projections. No one’s
discussing why Bush signed his 1997 hand recount law for Texas but filed for a federal injunction yesterday to stop the same
from happening here. No one’s discussing the litigious nature of America, or why Gore ran such a piss-poor campaign—losing
his home state even!—that it’s even come down to dimples and such. No one’s quoting historian David McCullough.

“No hand jobs,” says one Bush backer’s T-shirt, hastily scrawled in pen on Fruit of the Loom cotton. Yes, definitely not David
McCullough.

“No More Lynching in America!” reads the sign of Jennifer Lowery-Bell, fifty-three, who drove down from Washington to join
the call for a revote. She’s drawn an African-American hanging from a noose.

How is this lynching? I ask.

“Anytime you have a violation and the people cannot do anything to help themselves, they go to extremes,” she says. She cites
the Palm Beachers confused by the butterfly ballot, the African-American voters who were supposedly intimidated from voting
throughout the state. “What is that except lynching? It’s just a different phrase for doing it,” she says.

But Lowery-Bell is in the distinct minority today; the Bush forces are out and energetic. When they cheer “Bush won twice!”—as
they do, quite often—she is relegated to standing on the curb and yelling “No!” after each line. She soon changes this to
a long “Oooohhhh nooooo!” during the Bushies’ cheer, which is at least competitive in its annoyance factor.

Maybe Lowery-Bell just chose the wrong day. A local merchant hawking “Re-Vote” T-shirts says he’s sold four hundred since
Friday, at $10 a pop. If he keeps it up, Bush’s tax-cut plan may start looking more attractive.

Between the Bush backers and bashers, cops, journalists, and bystanders, there are only two hundred or so of us here today.
But on TV it must look like many more, since anytime MSNBC’s Suzanne Malveaux goes live, she immediately becomes the most
popular kid in the playground. The crowd mobs her. As soon as the camera light goes off, the protesters quickly dissipate.

Otherwise, they don’t seem to know what to do. A few times, the Bush crowd marches halfway up the one block of Fourth Street
that has been cordoned off. Then they march back.

You get the feeling that they’re all kind of new at this. One guy is so eager to join the fun that he marches while still
in the midst of making his sign. He holds his posterboard awkwardly in front of him while he colors the block letters in the
words “NO CONTROLLING LEGAL AUTHORITY/ BUSH WINS” with a thick green Magic Marker.

“GORE = MILOSEVIC” reads a completed sign by Wade Whitaker, twenty-two, of Las Vegas.“It’s the same parallels,” Whitaker says
when I ask him about his sign. “When Milosevic was voted out of power, he wouldn’t leave, either.” Whitaker is here because,
hepped up about the presidential controversy, he jumped on a red-eye that arrived in Orlando at 5:00 Saturday morning. He
doesn’t know anyone in town and isn’t even sure where he’s staying tonight.

Make no mistake: These protests are not to be confused with those seen at recent anti-globalization protests in Seattle or,
to a lesser extent, in Washington. The local cops here in Palm Beach look bemused more than anything else. One tells me they
aren’t worried at all. “I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble,” says a member of the Sheriff’s Department. “Look at
the ages of the people here. Two fifty-year-olds tend not to get in fistfights.”

A local in an SUV keeps speeding by and riling up the crowd, yelling, “Bush is an alcoholic! No junkies in the White House!”

“Wexler’s people cannot read directions,” reads another sign, belonging to Carole Parsons, a fifty-five-year-old Palm Beach
housewife whose sign refers to Florida representative Bob Wexler.

Who are “Wexler’s people”? I ask, suspiciously.

“The people who elected him, who voted him into office,” she says.

And who would those “people” be?

She pauses for a moment.

“Liberal Democrats,” she finally says.

She later holds up a sign that says, “Wexler needs his Beano.”

Both groups are pretty entrenched—both the side decrying “Jeb Crow” and the others who are constantly cheering “Jesse Go Home,”
a reference to Jesse Jackson, who has yet another rally scheduled for tomorrow.

A dozen or so religious leaders walk in, dressed in their Sunday best. “We’re here to pray for peace,” says Marc Murray, a
local youth minister
with Trinity Church International. They stand in a circle and are noticed only for the space they take up.

Heated arguments pop up here and there. Four older pro-Bush Cuban-Americans pretend to cry, mocking a young pro-Gore white
girl. “Ayayay!” says one of the Cubanos, an older woman.

“You are not compassionate!” the young girl lectures. “Compassionate conservatives don’t make fun of people!”

“Go home and cry!” responds an older man.

Another sign: “If arrows confuse you, you shouldn’t be driving. Re-voke Palm Beach Dems driver’s licenses.”

Yet another: “Incompetents can’t vote.”

A few signs mention Elián González. Others mention Rush Limbaugh.

Soon the crowd decides that its new mission is to score supportive honks from passing cars. They stand at the police barricade
and screech wildly every time a Grand Am toots. A woman powders her nose while a local idiot tries to hit on her. A guy with
a sign saying “God Made Bush President” appears. Another, hyping the Web site Newsmax.com, starts shouting out that “Peter
Jennings and Tom Brokaw have bald spots.”

This guy has a bald spot, too.

Two middle-aged white men start challenging the bona fides of an effeminate, fortyish Gore supporter. “Let’s see some ID!”
yells one of the Bushies. “You’re not from around here!” His chum joins in: “He’s an outof-town rabble-rouser! Just like Jesse
Jackson!”

The Gore guy says he isn’t about to show the two his driver’s license.“Are you a cop?” he asks. “No? Then fuck you!” He crosses
his arms defiantly. As the crowd converges on itself, a local teenager—Alex Baker, fourteen—jumps into the circle.

“Who wants water?” he asks at the top of his lungs. “We’re selling water here! Who wants some?”

The crowd laughs and dissolves.

Baker and his buddy, Tyler Virgadamo, thirteen, are selling water for $1.50 and soda for $1.

“All the yelling that they do, their throats are going to start hurting,” says Virgadamo of the crazy grown-ups all around
them.

They’ve made $150 today, Baker says.

The world will never fully know what role Jeb Bush plays in all of this. He largely stays hidden from view, though his operatives—Jimenez,
Harris,
Speaker of the State House Tom Feeney, who was his running mate in ’94—play leading roles. Because of the sunshine law, reporters
will be able to obtain records of phone calls made and received, but we will never know the content of those calls.

E-mail is different. Jeb is a wicked e-mailer, with at least three addresses.

The day after the election, Jeb spokeswoman Katie Baur sent an e-mail to Frank Jimenez, who took official leave that day to
help Jeb’s big brother. Jeb’s chief of staff, Sally Bradshaw, had asked her to send him a message.

“SALLY WANTED ME TO REMIND YOU TO TALK TO BEN GINSBURG
[sic]
PRIOR TO PRE-BRIEF,” she wrote. “SORRY FOR CAPS… DRAMATIC TIMES.”

Today, Monday, December 13, Jeb gets involved, too.

One woman writes Jeb: “Is there any way this can be stopped?” She keeps getting phone calls, she complains, telling her,“Your
vote along with nineteen thousand others was thrown out.”

Jeb forwards the note to Baur and Bradshaw, with a note: “This is a concerted effort to divide and destroy our state.”

“Ve have our vays also,” Baur—ever-sensitive to those Holocaust survivors of Palm Beach County—writes back. “I’m working on
this.”

Bradshaw writes: “This is obscene. I hope we are getting this to the press. Shouldn’t we give them a list of all the scare
tactics the Gore campaign is using?”

Three minutes later comes the note from Baur, whose boss has supposedly recused himself from it all: “That is what I am gathering.”

In Miami, the Rev. Jesse Jackson—the man who once referred to New York City as “Hymietown,” who once said that “Zionism is
a kind of poisonous weed that is choking Judaism,” who griped that he was “sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust”—is
standing in front of the congregation of Temple Israel of Greater Miami.

“It seems that in West Palm Beach, the African-Americans and the Jewish senior citizens were targeted,” Jackson says. “Something
systematic was at work here….It was large and systematic. Once again, sons and daughters of slavery and Holocaust survivors
are bound together with a shared agenda, bound by their hopes and their fears about national public policy.” He’s trying to
re-forge the brotherhood between Jews and blacks that was so important to the civil rights movement, a connection that Jackson
bears more than a small share of the blame in having helped fracture. News stories in the coming days will report that Jews
and blacks are working
together again, but these news stories are largely nonsense. Beyond a few rallies here and there, nothing really changes.
^*

Jackson’s pet rabbi, Stephen Jacobs, whom he had to bring with him from Los Angeles, steps up. “Now, we blacks and Jews find
ourselves fighting old battles we thought we had won,” he says. “We must stand together, or we will perish alone.”

The synagogue’s leader, Rabbi Jeffrey Kahn, agrees. “Some people say what is happening here in Florida is hysterical. It’s
not hysterical, it’s historical. And it’s especially historical for us Jews and blacks as we come back together.”

Time passes in Volusia.

What’s this?

In Volusia County, Young has discovered 320 votes not included in the count on Election Night.

Apparently, in precinct 305 in DeBary at 9
P.M.
Election Night, one machine stopped accepting ballots for some reason. After the elections tech-nerd didn’t show, the clerk
tried to fix it herself, turning the machine off and then on again. The machine flashed: “Prepare for election” which told
her that it was starting over again, so she secured the ballots and wrote a note to “check these.”

When he checks, Young notices that there are more ballots counted than were recorded in this precinct. Young wants this to
be a lock-down indisputable recount, unchallengeable. So even though he knows that DeBary leans Republican and that these
320 votes mean a net gain of 58 votes for Bush, Young’s not worried. Someone was going to discover this sooner or later, and
he doesn’t want a 58-vote difference to be the grounds for any GOP gripes about this being an inaccurate count. Young already
knows that he’ll be able to make up the 58 votes.