Down & Dirty (6 page)

The phone lines are all jammed. LePore learns that Democratic voters are being hepped up, told by a phone bank to call her
to complain if they think they may have screwed up the ballot. The lines are being blocked from voters at the polls right
now, she thinks.

LePore asks Burton what he thinks. Was the ballot illegal? He gets a book of election law, reads the statute. It’s clearly
OK. The section of law the Democrats are referring to—101.151 (3) (a)—applies only to paper ballots, not ones for punch-card
voting.

“I don’t really think it’s illegal,” he tells LePore. “But whatever.”

It’s not “whatever” for LePore. She feels like her world is crashing down around her.

At 5:30
P.M
., Lieberman calls Rhodes in a previously arranged “Get Out the Vote” interview.

“You’ve got a very confusing ballot in Florida, have you heard?” Rhodes asks Lieberman.

“I just heard as I was listening and waiting to come on,” Lieberman says, “and that’s the first I heard about it.”

“We have a serious problem,” Rhodes says. “And in fact, for those who found the ballot confusing, we have an attorney at one
of our big law firms” asking us to “please file an affidavit.” The Democrats have already set up a phone number and retained
an attorney to hear voters’ complaints. “I’m not sure if I voted for you and Al Gore, or Pat Buchanan and Ezola Foster,” Rhodes
adds.

“Wow!” Lieberman responds. “Now, there’s a big difference. You’ve got to be careful. The affidavit idea is very important.
Because if the election is close, there’s going to be contests all over America.”

At that moment, Mitchell Berger is preparing for such an event.

Berger has known Al Gore since the early 1980s, when he was helping his dad’s flailing mall development/management business
in Chattanooga and Gore was a young congressman. Berger was interested in environmental issues, new economy issues, things
that few politicians were discussing except for young Congressman Gore. They further bonded after Berger moved to Florida—where
he built a successful law practice with offices in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Tallahassee—and Gore ran for president in 1988
with few other contacts in the Sunshine State.

Berger’s respect for Gore knows no bounds. If you give Berger a minute, he’ll spend five telling you how Gore’s 1988 presidential
run paved the way for Clinton’s successful bid four years later. How New Democrat Gore was distancing himself from Jesse Jackson
during the 1988 New York primary, thus allowing Clinton to do the same to rapper Sister Souljah four years later. He thinks
that one of the most unreported stories about Al Gore is how Gore essentially ran the country while Clinton was stuck in the
impeachment quagmire but had to keep such a fact quiet for the country’s sake. And Berger has disdain for the reporters who
covered the Clinton administration so aggressively, necessitating his giving Gore advice during some of the veep’s own fund-raising
scandals.

In frequent contact with Brochin and Palm Beach County Democratic chieftain Monte Friedkin, Berger’s alarmed. He tells Brochin
and lawyers in his firm, mainly Leonard Samuels, to get ready to litigate. He doesn’t know who’s going to litigate, he doesn’t
know how, but he wants to be prepared.

At 7
P.M
., Berger’s at the Miami airport, on the phone with Gore attorneys Joe Sandler and Lynn Utrecht and Gore’s chief of staff,
Charles Burson. He’s getting ready to hop onto a 7:15 Southwest Airlines flight to Nashville, hopefully for the Gore celebration,
but he’s not so sure that he should go.

“Should I stay in Florida?” he asks the Gore attorneys. “’Cause there’s a lot of bad things that went on here today.” Some
in Nashville were under the impression that Berger was ready to file a lawsuit against the butterfly ballot at that very moment.

Come to Nashville, Sandler says. There’s nothing you can do. The polls are about to close. And hopefully everything will be
the way it’s supposed to be.

So Berger gets on the plane.

H
e’s fucked!” Mark Fabiani, Gore’s communications director, cackles.

I just told Fabiani that Bush is huddling back at the mansion instead of at the Four Seasons, where he was originally scheduled
to watch the election returns.

“He’s in retreat!” Fabiani says. “He’s running home!”

It’s Tuesday, November 7, 2000, around 9
P.M
. And at this particular point in the evening, it doesn’t look good for Bush. I do, in fact, picture Bush clutching his pilly,
curled up in the fetal position, holding on to his daddy’s leg. The exit polls have been coming in all day, and they’ve been
bad. Bush, not surprisingly, is glum. His chief strategist, Karl Rove, had been telling him that it was going to be a Reaganesque
landslide. Not quite.

Florida, a state Bush wanted to win, needed to win—little brother, Jeb, is the governor there, after all—is called for Gore
at 7:48
P.M
. EST. And with that, Bush’s odds of becoming president have plummeted.

Jeb—an acronym for his full name, John Ellis Bush—calls his first cousin John Ellis in New York City. As luck and the fabled
“vast right-wing conspiracy” would have it, Ellis helms Fox News Channel’s election decision
team, which means he’s in charge of calling states.
^*
Ellis has already spoken to George W. twice earlier in the day, reassuring the candidate not to “worry about your early numbers,”
since “your dad had bad early numbers in ’eighty-eight, and he wound up winning by seven. So who knows?”
¹

But now the news he has for Jeb is far more pessimistic.

“Are you sure?”
²
Jeb asks Ellis, after Fox News calls Florida for Gore, at 7:52
P.M
., after three other networks have done so.

“We’re looking at a screen full of Gore,” Ellis replies.

“But the polls haven’t closed in the Panhandle,” Jeb says.

“It’s not going to help,” Ellis says. “I’m sorry.”

So in a sudden turnabout, the normally cocky Bush abandons plans to watch the returns from a suite at the Austin Four Seasons
and instead opts to run for the cover of the governor’s mansion.

An election that his advisers had been predicting he’d win by 7 percentage points and 50 electoral votes is actually turning
out to be too close to call.

At the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, President Clinton is like a voracious animal, and what he wants is information about the
election. In her quest for the U.S. Senate seat from New York, Hillary cruised to an easy victory, so the president’s mind
is focused on his no. 2. In his suite, each time a state pops up on the TV in front of him (ABC News) or to his right (MSNBC),
he commands one of the aides around him to get more information. More, more, he’s still not satisfied!

Earlier, when Florida was still in play, he had his former senior aide, Jonathan Prince, call Nick Baldick, Gore’s man on
the ground in Tallahassee. When Gore is trailing in Arkansas, Clinton called up his fellow Arkansan Secretary of Transportation
Rodney Slater to see what he knew.

Gore’s not down by so much, he tells Slater. “We’ve seen that turn around before.”

Nevada comes on the screen.

“Where’s Brian Greenspun?” Clinton asks, referring to the publisher of the
Las Vegas Sun
and a former classmate from Georgetown. “Get Brian Greenspun on the phone!” Clinton tells his aide, Doug Band.

“He’s down the hall” at one of the First Lady’s many receptions, Band says.

“Go get him!” Clinton says.

West Virginia comes on the screen. A state that has gone for Republican presidential candidates only three times in eighty
years—all three times when the Republican in question was the incumbent president—is a solid Bush win.

“That’s my fault,” Clinton says, turning to chief of staff John Podesta. The environmentally friendly strip-mining policies
Clinton pushed fostered resentment for Gore among the coal-mining community. “That policy screwed him,” Clinton says.

It’s a small crowd in the room, which consists primarily of Clinton, Podesta, Prince, Band, pollster Mark Penn, deputy chief
of staff Steve Richetti, and Joel Johnson, senior adviser to the president for policy and communications. But even with such
a small group, there’s a hell of a lot of frustration and disdain toward Gore’s consultants—Carter Eskew, Bob Shrum, and Tad
Devine. The consensus seems to be that they ran a shitty campaign for Gore, that they never really cared about him the way
James Carville cared about Clinton in ’92, or Dick Morris did in ’96. Devine’s the guy who—when Clinton’s speech at the Democratic
convention in 1988 went more than a little long—supposedly turned the lights down on him, and Clinton’s never forgiven him
for that. Eskew and Shrum are seen as just part-of-the-problem Washington guys who could envision losing, guys for whom Gore
was just another client.

Then there’s the campaign they waged, the running away from Clinton, from the unprecedented peace and prosperity. They barely
used the president, since their poll numbers showed that post-Lewinsky he hurt them with swing voters. But to not even get
him to Arkansas until that last week?! Even worse, Shrum and pollster Stan Greenberg concocted this pose for Gore that was
a total diversion from the New Democrat thing he and Clinton had sold so well to the public.

Clinton has a term for it tonight. He calls it “consultant populist bullshit.”