Down & Dirty (56 page)

If you pay for it, they will come. And here they are.

Like Marjorie Strayer, who tells reporters she’s just a Virginian on vacation in Miami. It turns out she’s an aide to Rep.
Heather Wilson, Republican of New Mexico.

They’re obnoxious, they’re hateful, they inject venom and volatility into an already edgy situation. Thank you, Governor Bush,
the uniter not the divider.

When Congressman Deutsch tries to talk to a CNN interviewer, the crowd’s boos prevent him from doing so. “This is the new
Republican Party, sir!” Blakeman bellows on a bullhorn. “We’re not going to take it anymore!” Deutsch can be so obnoxious
and toxic it’s almost just. But leave it to the Bushies to make you feel sorry for a guy like Deutsch. Almost.

On Wednesday, the protests take on a more legitimate feel when they are joined by maybe a hundred local Cuban-Americans, some
of whom heard interviews on the local Spanish radio station, Radio Mambi, with Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen,
who slammed the canvassing board. The reporter who calls in the interviews for Radio Mambi, Evilio Cepero, plays another role
at the protests, wandering around with a megaphone yelling,“Denounce the recount!” and “Stop the injustice!”

The crowd swells as recorded phone messages in Spanish, sent out by who knows who, are made, alerting local Cubanos that they’re
needed at the government center.

On his way back from a TV interview, Sweeney gets a phone call from two GOP observers at the Miami-Dade count—Martin Torrey,
one of his aides, and Brendan Quinn, executive director of the New York GOP. They tell Sweeney that the canvassing board is
moving behind closed doors! That they’re just going to do a partial count!

“Shut it down!” Sweeney orders.

Quinn tells two dozen or so of the Republican operatives to storm the nineteenth floor. Emotional and angry, they immediately
make their way outside the larger room in which the tabulating room is contained.

The mass of “angry voters” on the nineteenth floor swells to maybe eighty people. It includes:

• Matt Schlapp, a Bush staffer in from Austin;
  
• Thomas Pyle, a policy analyst for House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas;
  
• Michael Murphy, a DeLay fund-raiser;
  
• Roger Morse, an aide to Rep. Van Hilleary, Republican of Tennessee;
  
• Duane Gibson, an aide to Chairman Don Young, Republican of Alaska;
  
• Doug Heye, a spokesman for Rep. Richard Pombo, Republican of California;
  
• Jim Wilkinson, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee;
  
• Rory Cooper, political staffer at the NRCC;
  
• Garry Malphrus, majority chief counsel and staff director for the House Judiciary Subcommittee on criminal justice;
  
• Chuck Royal, legislative assistant for Rep. Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina;
  
• Kevin Smith, a former GOP House staffer;
  
• Steven Brophy, a former aide to Sen. Fred Thompson, Republican of Tennessee; and
  
• Layna McConkey, a former legislative assistant to ex-Rep. Jim Ross Lightfoot, Republican of Iowa, now an employee for a GOP
  fund-raiser.
  

“Let us in!” they yell. “Let us in! Let us in!”

They bang on the doors.

They bang on the walls.

They chant.

“
LET US IN! LET US IN! LET US IN!
”

It feeds on itself.

Individually, these are not intimidating guys, not tough fellas you’d be afraid of in a bar. They’re wimps and fatties, largely;
poorly dressed Washington, D.C., geeks. Gibson, in particular, a tall bespectacled dork, is freakishly agitated, frenzied,
odd. In a bar, Gibson would get the shit kicked out of him by an anorexic junior high school girl. But here he—like his socially
wanting peers—clearly feels emboldened. Physically weak, here they feel mighty. And however wanting their upper-body strength
may be in real life, right now they’re running on adrenaline and anger.

“
LET US IN! LET US IN! LET US IN!
”

Inside the tabulating room, Leahy and the others can hear the protests, loud and clear.

GOP observer Neal Conolly says that the Bushies feel “that the accommodations on the eighteenth floor, where there was more
room for people to observe, were more conducive and in compliance with the open-meeting law. And I would request that the
board consider that.

“I don’t know who the people are that are outside shouting and making noise,” Conolly says. “But I think that they probably
result from the fact that there’s some concern of the people on the outside that what we’re doing in here is limiting access
to the openness of the proceeding, and I think that that perception is important.”

“It is really a logistical problem at this point,” Leahy explains.

Democratic observer Steve Kaufman asks how it will be possible to get other observers in and out of the room with the crowd
so frenzied.

“I can’t help it,” Leahy says. “Hopefully the mood out front will settle down.”

Congressman Diaz-Balart holds a press conference with De Grandy. They turn up the burner from simmer to boil.

“What happened was that the way they were going about it, where they were counting all votes with significant numbers of observers
in a large room, opened to you, the press, and open to observers at each table, that wasn’t going the way that the Gore campaign
had hoped,” Diaz-Balart says. “And so, now, they’ve decided to leave that room, to leave the sunshine of a place where you,
the press, and observers can be at every table, and to go back into a room, separated from the press, where they will count
only the votes where the voters of this county decided that they would not vote for president. That, I think, is an outrage,
and I think that all Americans
should know what is going on at this very moment in Miami-Dade County.

“If it were not so tragic, if we would not be witnessing, in effect, the stealing of a presidential election, it would be
laughable,” the congressman adds.

De Grandy takes the mike to pour fuel on the fire.

“We have an even greater concern, as Hispanics in this community, in terms of our voting rights being violated at this point
by illegal procedures that are being implemented by this canvassing board,” the lawyer says. “There were votes that were counted
in the sample recount that occurred last week. Those votes were not in precincts that were Hispanic communities.”

He’s right that it’s a mess; the canvassing board is starting the count from scratch and ignoring its last few days’ worth
of work. Unlike Martinez, De Grandy is only too happy to prod Miami’s racial sores.

Villafana heads out to where the two dozen or so Republicans are aggressively chanting and banging on walls. He’s trying to
help get the media set up—a bunch of reporters are in the crowd, too—but the protesters make his job impossible. Every time
Villafana opens the door to help the media set up inside, the thug-wannabes rush the doors in a very intimidating manner,
he thinks. Observers can’t get in, either. When the sheriff’s deputies open the doors, the GOP protesters grab the door, don’t
allow them to close it again, and block the observers from coming in.

Villafana steps in to try to close the door.

“Don’t hit me! Don’t hit me!” one of the observers cries, all the while furiously kicking Villafana, out of camera view, since
the lenses are focused on their faces, not the floor. Other observers push Villafana, shove him—below the waist.“Don’t hit
me! Don’t hit me!” the protester keeps shouting. But the only person getting banged up in this case is Villafana.

Having been through Elián protests that got way ugly, Villafana and chief of security Hollander feel that this one has potential
to turn into a more violent confrontation at any time. “We’re going to have to keep the doors closed, and call for backup,”
one of the sheriff’s deputies says.

Villafana and Hollander instruct the police officers to guard the doors and to allow the protesters to take control of the
lobby area. The cops have other duties—guarding the ballots, maintaining the sanctity of the elections process. They don’t
have the time or the inclination to deal with these Republican rabble-rousers.

So the doors stay closed. And because of this decision, members of the media, and many observers, don’t get to enter the area.
And the system shuts down. And the hand recount can’t continue

The members of the canvassing board discuss returning to the eighteenth floor to stop the insanity. The protest is loud but
not nearly as ugly as it is up close, separated as they are by walls and distance and space. But they’re completely aware
of what’s going on, completely aware that the process can’t continue with things as they are—they just can’t get the process
flowing with the protesters being so hostile and aggressive.

“We could run this anytime,” Leahy says of sorting out the remaining undervotes.“We don’t have to do it today.We want to get
this process started.”

They agree to do so, to get to work on counting the undervotes that have already been sorted out.

Leahy is more concerned about the angry reporters than the obnoxious Republicans. He doesn’t want the process, the deliberations,
the counting to be perceived by the news media as not being open or public. Throughout, everything they’ve done has been nothing
but out in the open. “It would really bother me if it were to be reported that we’re in a closed-door, smoke-filled room for
these deliberations,” he thinks to himself.

“Let the news media know we are going to move downstairs because of the concerns about the board, that the people are not
able to view the process,” Leahy says to Villafana.

“You are going to give us time to work some issues out?” Villafana asks. “There is a full protest going on out in the lobby,
and we cannot bring people in or out. We have people attempting to get into a fight with officers or with members of the media.”

Villafana isn’t sure if it’s the Democrats or the Republicans outside. But whoever it is, they want a confrontation. He asks
Young and Conolly if they can tell the protesters to go back downstairs.

“Agreed,” Young says. “On behalf of the Democrats, agreed.”