Down & Dirty (47 page)

Now the Bushies can contrast the Herron memo not only with what Lieberman said, but with Butterworth.

There go the Dems, like ships from a sinking rat.

On Tuesday, Kerrey holds a press conference.

“Having been in the military, one of the things that was driven into me when I was in the United States Navy is that failure
to get the word is no excuse,” Kerrey says. “Everybody that’s in the military understands that. And we should not be playing
politics with our military as a consequence of that standard being in place every single day for our fighting men and women.
If they have a legal ballot, it should be counted. If it’s not a legal ballot, it should not be counted. Men and women in
the military should not expect and do not expect to be treated in some fashion that has them
being a pawn in a political argument that’s very tense and very passionate here in Florida.

“In the military we accept responsibility for our mistakes, we don’t blame it on somebody else. And if I’m not prepared and
I didn’t get the word and I come to my commanding officer and say, ‘Gee, I’m sorry, Captain, I didn’t get the word,’ my commanding
officer will say, ‘Lieutenant, failure to get the word is no excuse.’”

The ballots that have been tossed for technicalities are being done so because of a lack of postmark, Kerrey says. “And the
day after these accusations are made, what we’re discovering is signatures are not there, voter IDs are not there, addresses
are not there, witnesses aren’t there….And we’re discovering that the number of people who were thrown out this time around
are no greater or no less than what happened in 1996.”

There are three lessons Kerrey learns in Florida.

One, the Republicans are just all-out lying about the hand recounts being chaotic. He tells reporters this at one press conference,
but they basically ignore him. Chaos is always a better story than calm.

Two, he thinks, the Democratic Party of Palm Beach County committed campaign malpractice by not noticing and filing a protest
against the butterfly ballot before the election. An old woman approaches him to tell him how she’s voted ten times in Palm
Beach. She knows the rules, she tells him, she knows that the presidential candidate who’s the same party as the sitting governor
is listed first and the other party’s candidate is listed second—so she punched the second hole, mistakenly thinking that
it was for Gore. The idea that she voted for a man who denies the horror that she lived through during World War II appalls
her. The woman, who has a concentration camp number tattooed on her arm, is crying; Kerrey is very moved.

Three, Kerrey sees firsthand that some of the ballots the Democrats want to be counted as votes—the dimples, specifically—simply
cannot be called that. In Palm Beach County, he’s shown a disputed ballot, and he thinks, “Oh my God, you can’t assert that
this is a vote.” He says as much.

“Of course you can, you can see it right there,” a Democratic lawyer asserts.

Kerrey still can’t see it.

Some of the marks that the Democratic lawyers are calling “dimples” that show “intent” don’t look like marks to him. But then
again, that’s a testament to the Democratic Party’s strength and weakness, he thinks—we
care about fairness. The Republicans simply don’t, he thinks. Not in this battle, anyway.

He’ll come to think that the Democrats’ dimple lust will help the Bush people paint the entire recount as illegitimate. And
he’ll know, even as he flies back to Washington, D.C., that the Republicans used the overseas-ballot issue very effectively,
they drove it home, and—despite his best efforts—the Gore campaign buckled and lost. It didn’t matter what the truth was,
it didn’t matter that Racicot and Dole and Sen. Alan Simpson said what Kerrey considered to be out-and-out lies, the media
was letting them get away with it, and there was nothing he could do. He tried.

In retrospect, Kerrey will come to see the dispute about overseas absentee ballots as the moment when the Bushies turned the
corner and started to put this thing away.

Though no one knew it for sure at the time, there was a good reason for the Herron memo. Before the election, 23,246 overseas
ballots were mailed out from the state of Florida, and more than half of them—14,415—had come in by Election Day. As of Monday,
November 13, Florida’s sixty-seven counties had received 446 military overseas ballots since November 8.

By Thursday afternoon, that number had swelled to 2,575. By Friday, it was 3,733.

Democrats like Nick Baldick were suspicious: Where did this sudden surge of overseas ballots come from, more than a week after
the election? Military mail is often far more efficient than regular post office mail.

Baldick’s suspicions were well founded. According to a knowledgeable Republican operative, on either November 10 or 11, after
Warren Tompkins was assigned by the Bush campaign inner circle to be in charge of absentee ballots, there was a sixty- to
ninety-minute conference call for political operatives scattered throughout the state. Tompkins was on the call.

Many matters were attended to. They talked about finding people to be observers. They talked about drumming up protesters.
They talked about assigning operatives to different clerks’ offices to wait for the overseas absentee ballots, and to report
on what the Democratic operatives were up to.

According to a knowledgeable Republican operative, in the course of that conversation they discussed having political operatives
abroad and near military bases encourage certain soldiers who had registered to vote—but hadn’t yet done so—to fill out their
ballots and send them in.
Voter registration ID made it so they could identify not only which soldiers, sailors, and airmen were Democrat and which
were Republican, but which were black and which were white. They would target the right ones.

We’ll get them to send them in, and we’ll argue about the postmarks later, one of the operatives said, according to this source.
We’re gonna raise a stink and force them to count these ballots. We don’t know how they’re gonna come in, but we need every
vote we can get.

If this idea was carried out, then the Bush political operatives involved were committing a serious crime. But barring a major
law-enforcement investigation into the matter—where phone records can be subpoenaed, and operatives can be threatened with
perjury charges if they fail to tell the whole truth, two powers I simply do not have—the world may never know if this plan
was carried out, and if so, how it was carried out and how many votes Bush may have gained as a result. (Neither Tompkins
nor Mehlman returned calls for comment.)

I
n Tallahassee, the Florida State Seminoles—ranked no. 3 in the country, with a 10-and-1 record—are a religion. Same in Gainesville,
where the 9-and-1 Florida Gators are ranked no. 4. So on Saturday, November 18, Gore v. Bush is pushed aside for a more important
contest: Florida v. Florida State. A bunch of us—lawyers, reporters, pols—get tossed from our hotel rooms to make way for
alumni and fans that had their rooms booked up to a year in advance of today’s game.

Even the august Mr. Baker gets booted by the Doubletree Hotel; he moves to a rental apartment where he’ll remain ’til the
bitter end. Curiously, despite the fact that, when all is said and done, the Democrats will have been outplayed and overrun
by the Republicans, Christopher successfully negotiates to keep his room at the Governor’s Inn. Perhaps there’s some deeper
meaning in this. In any case, I’m not sure how well he slept—outside his window, bars were packed, bass pumping, co-eds losing
themselves in pursuits Christopher probably hasn’t thought about since the Carter administration.

It’s cold—something like 40 degrees, in the 30s with the windchill, we’re told—but that doesn’t stop FSU’s Doak Campbell Stadium
from quickly being packed with 83,042 fans, some with faces painted, others more than a tad boozy. FSU sticker–adorned cars
in the parking lot have alligator dolls hanging from the trunks.

Some of the fans’ hand-painted signs, of course, allude to the other war being waged in town. A big theme revolves around
comparing visor-clad
Gators coach Steve Spurrier—who led his team to a Sugar Bowl win in ’96 but can’t buy a victory in Tallahassee, where he has
a record of 0–4–1—to Al Gore. “Who’s A Bigger Crybaby? Spurrier or Gore?” taunts one sign. “Visor Boy, your chads are dangling,”
reads another. Forgoing any football connection whatsoever, state GOP chair Al Cardenas and Insurance Commissionerelect Tom
Gallagher hand out “Sore-Loserman” campaign signs.

The hot ticket today is FSU president Sandy D’Alemberte’s skybox, where you can find Florida Supreme Court justices Major
Harding and Leander Shaw, as well as Governor Jeb Bush. Soon, none other than Katherine Harris arrives with her husband, and
two bodyguards. She looks lovely, gray sweater hanging from her trim frame like a queen’s robe. Harris has more than a passing
interest in this game; the University of Florida football stadium, called “The Swamp,” is officially named after Harris’s
citrus mogul grandfather, Ben Hill Griffin, a powerful Floridian worth $390 million in 1990.

Everyone in the box is sporting name tags.

“If anyone does not need a name tag, it is you,” one reporter says to her.

“Really?” she asks. “I guess you’re right. I went to the supermarket today. And a woman said to me, ‘You shop?’ I said, ‘Duh,
yeah.’”

“You know what I dreamed of today?” she says to another reporter. “That I would ride into this stadium, carrying the FSU flag
in one hand and the certification in the other to cheers of all those around me.”
¹

Joseph she ain’t. She says she cannot get over her newfound celebrity. “I cannot believe this, I watch Leno, and he’s making
jokes about me,” she says. “You know, what joke I loved the best is, ‘If Katherine Harris was a sportscaster of this game,
she would call the winner in the third quarter.’”

How are you holding up? she’s asked.

She giggles. “What do you think?” she says. “How do I look?”

“I love this game,” she adds, motioning toward the field. “We will have a winner at the end.”