Down & Dirty (59 page)

Rep. Harold Ford, Jr., Democrat of Tennessee, walks into the Miami-Dade government building right as the Republican punks
are storming it. There he meets up with state senator Kendrick Meek. A few hours later, after the recount is canceled, Meek
invites Ford to come with him to pay a visit on Penelas.

Penelas tells them that he’s as disappointed as anyone that the count isn’t going to continue. He indicates that he’s troubled
by the board’s decision and says he hopes they’ll reconsider. It’s not his decision, he stresses, but Penelas says that he’s
going to write a statement to that effect. He tells Ford and Meek that it will be completed in half an hour.

In a conversation with Gore around that same time, Penelas makes similar comments, leaving a similar impression. Though Penelas
has been AWOL from the Gore campaign—he had to distance himself from the Clinton administration’s Elián blunders—he’ll come
through on this, it seems to Gore.

Ford and Meek tell him that they’ll wait in a conference room. Penelas says he’ll have it done soon.

Twenty minutes or so later, Ford, Meek, and a bishop from Meek’s district tell Penelas that they’re going to return to the
lobby.

“No problem,” Penelas says. The statement will be done in a moment.

A few hours pass, and though Ford never sees the statement, he takes Penelas at his word that it is coming. “I had a meeting
with Mayor Penelas today, the mayor of Miami-Dade County,” Ford says via satellite on CNN’s
Crossfire
that night. “And he indicated that the county was prepared to put all the resources needed to ensure that Miami-Dade—the
canvassing board—be able to provide an accurate recount.”

That isn’t, of course, the message of the statement Penelas eventually issues, which merely states that he has “no jurisdiction
over that board’s decisions.”

“I don’t know him well enough to feel betrayed,” Ford says later.“But at a minimum, I wish he’d been more candid and more
truthful.”

Gutierrez, who worked for Penelas years ago but no longer does so, says that Penelas’s shift was just a manifestation of the
thirty-eight-year-old mayor’s personality. “Knowing him, he was probably trying to please everybody,” Gutierrez tells me.
But when other details about Penelas’s activities bubble up in the
New York Times,
thanks to Florida’s open-government laws, Democrats start thinking more was going on in Penelas’s world of conflicting pressures
than just a desire to please.

The day before the count was canceled, the
Times
story details, Penelas was in Tallahassee where he reportedly lunched at the Governor’s Club with Republican state representative
Mario Diaz-Balart and met with other Republican legislators. The legislature is charged with redistricting the state and adding
a congressional seat, Democrats whispered; Penelas is said to want to run for Congress. Calls were traded back and forth.
But it’s difficult to figure out what angles Penelas is playing. He phoned both the Republican cloakroom in the U.S. House
in Washington, D.C., as well as several advisers to Gore. Monday night, GOP state chair Cardenas spoke with Penelas’s no.
1 political adviser, Herman Echevarria.

“I don’t think they were asking about the weather,” Boies will later tell me.

I meet with Mayor Penelas in December. In the newspaper, his cutie face smiles as he bestows gifts upon Miami. At the Miami
International Airport, his soothing voice welcomes me, personally. In the conference room this afternoon, he’s ambition in
a suit. Cold, prickly, hostile. A jungle cat.

What about the
New York Times
story? I ask him. Any truth to any of it?

“I don’t know what the sources are,” he says with steely eyes. “I usually don’t respond to things that I don’t know the sources
to.”

He says that he never told Gore that he’d ask the canvassing board to recommence counting.

So what’s the deal with all the calls and meetings and conflicting stories?

“Someday I’ll write my book,” he says.

“I spoke to them a few times about the issue,” he says about the canvassing board, just “as the mayor, to find out what was
going on, because we were getting inundated with media calls about what was going on. I wanted to make sure that [Leahy] knew
that we would make available to him and the canvassing board whatever resources they needed to effectuate whatever decision
they made.”

So if that’s all, aren’t you upset about the
Times
story?

“I thought it was great,” he says unconvincingly. “I got my name in the first page of the
New York Times
.

“I get criticized every day here, that’s part of my job,” he explains.“If you take it too seriously, then you can’t handle
the job. When you get back in the car, turn on any one of the talk shows, and I’m getting blasted for everything that goes
wrong in this town. From everywhere.

“For other parts of the country, it may be unusual to deal with all this media and all the controversy, but I’ve dealt with
it all, y’know. I’ve dealt with international fugitives and five named hurricanes as mayor and, y’know, fires and a plane
crash and Elián González. It’s what makes this job fun.”

He doesn’t look like he’s having much fun.

The Democrats allege that you have plans to reregister as a Republican and run for one of the new congressional districts,
after redistricting, I say. Any plans to reregister as a Republican?

“I have been fielding that question for thirteen years, my friend,” he replies. “And I’m still a registered Democrat. I got
my voting card right here,” he says, reaching for his wallet. “I’m not going to switch parties.

“I believe that more people went to vote in Florida with the intention of voting for Al Gore,” he adds.“But because of a series
of coincidental events, none of which I believe were intentional, Mr. Bush won the state. But I do think more people went
to vote for Gore with the intention of voting for Gore but were unable to execute for one reason or another, butterfly ballots
and dimpled chads and all these other things.”

Well, what do you even think about the whole idea of a recount? Should the undervotes and such be counted? Should the Republicans
have taken all the steps they did to stop the counting?

“I had very strong feelings about it,” he says.

Ummm… such as?

“That’s what they are: my feelings,” he says. “Like I said, maybe someday I’ll write my own book about this.”

C’mon
.

“I favor having every vote counted,” Penelas finally says.

And then he gets up and, like a tiger, skulks out of the room.

There’s so much unadulterated bullshit in here it almost pains me to reprint it, but here is what the Bushies put out for
their surrogates in the House and Senate to regurgitate.

Subject: Updated Talking Points on “GOP” Protests

Author: georgewbush.com at Internet

Date: 11/25/2000 1:37 PM

• The protests in Miami-Dade were a fitting, proper and instant reaction to a rash attempt by the canvassing board to count
ballots in secret. Imagine all those observers, in place for the purpose of monitoring the manual recount, being told there
was nothing to observe because the election board, which didn’t include a single Republican, decided instead to take 10,000
ballots to the 19th floor to count them in secret. That’s what the Board tried to do and the reaction was spontaneous and
inevitable, given the imprudent actions of the Board.

• The press also demanded access to the room where the Board intended to act in secret.

• Passions in Miami-Dade were rising because the Board also intended to count predominantly Democratic precincts, ignoring the
votes cast in overwhelmingly Cuban areas. Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart said the morning of the protest the Board’s action
was in apparent violation of the Voting Rights Act.

• The Board made a series of bad decisions and the reaction to it was inevitable and well justified.

• Finally, the Board’s ultimate decision not to proceed was based on the fact they couldn’t finish the manual recount by the
Sunday 5:00 deadline—not because of these well deserved protests.

• But how come Joe Lieberman is critical of this protest and not the protests led by Jesse Jackson on behalf of Democrats? Joe
Lieberman is less interested in right and wrong and more interested in silencing his opponents. This is the latest example
of Al Gore and his campaign saying one thing while doing another. The first amendment applies to both parties and to all Americans.

Mark Fabiani never wanted to stick around in D.C. for the recount; he has a wife and kids (including an eighteen-month-old)
in La Jolla, California, and he had to be begged by Gore to stick around after the election. Having directly arranged with
Gore a Thanksgiving break for himself, Fabiani takes off to see his family.

Daley is pissed, frustrated; he tries to reach Fabiani but has trouble doing so. Others on the ground in Tallahassee think
the communications team is rather wanting. Hattaway and Backus have been doing what they can, but lots of folks think Fabiani
is flaking and Lehane is slacking—though at least they do so alternatingly.
^*

To Daley it’s all just more of the same. The campaign he inherited late was fucked-up to begin with. He tried to do what he
could, but these consultants were a problem. Shrum, Eskew, Devine, Fabiani—all smart guys, all talented guys, but they leaked
like the fucking
Lusitania,
they went home on weekends, they were soft. Fabiani packed up the weekend before the election, didn’t come in to work that
Sunday. What kind of message did that send to the kids who were pulling all-nighters, unpaid? And now, post-election, Daley’s
having the same problems. He tries to get everyone to work out of the same conference room at the DNC, but that lasts like
all of two hours, whereupon they all scurry back to their cozy little offices. When Fabiani comes back to D.C., he’s even
managed to finagle a room at the Ritz, paid for by the recount committee! Christ!

In La Jolla, Fabiani is fretting about the fact that Gore is now going to be contesting this thing. From a PR standpoint,
Fabiani thinks, it’s devastating to have the election declared for Bush—which is what it looks like will happen come Sunday,
minus the Miami-Dade ballots.