Down & Dirty (70 page)

From: Bush communications team

Talking Points for Monday, November 27, 2000

• Rather than give the American people the finality that they deserve, Al Gore has chosen to take the extraordinary step of
  contesting the presidential election in Florida, the first in the history of our nation. Gore should reconsider, do the right
  thing and respect the outcome of this election.
  
• Gore says he is contesting this election because every vote should be counted. But every vote has been counted, and recounted.
  And some votes have been selectively counted three and four times. As Governor Bush said last night, the votes have been counted,
  now it is time for the votes to count.
  
• Al Gore is not interested in counting every vote, he’s simply interested in selectively recounting the votes he thinks will
  help him overturn the results of this election.
  
• Gore wrongly claims that 10,000 ballots weren’t counted in Miami-Dade County. These ballots were counted and recounted, as
  required under Florida law. The voters who cast those ballots did not cast votes for President, so now Gore is seeking permission
  to have those selected ballots “interpreted.”
  
• Thousands of these “undervote” ballots exist in other counties in Florida and in other jurisdictions around the nation. Yet
  Gore is not
  interested in those ballots, he’s only interested in “interpreting” the selective ballots that he thinks can overturn this
  election.
  
• If Gore truly believes that every vote must be counted, then he shouldn’t be actively pursuing cases to have legitimate votes
  thrown out. In Nassau County, Gore is trying to get 218 valid ballots thrown out. In Seminole County, Democrats
  ^*
  have filed a lawsuit to have thousands of valid absentee ballots thrown out….
  
• Opening more ballots up for more interpretation by Democratic canvassing boards would simply open up this process to more
  human error and mischief….
  
• Every campaign must have a conclusion. After the votes in Florida were counted, Governor Bush was declared the winner. After
  they were recounted, Governor Bush was declared the winner. And after some Democratic counties performed manual recounts,
  Governor Bush was again declared the winner.
  
• Elections should be decided in voting booths, not in courtrooms. It is time for the lawyers to go home. The people of Florida
  have voted, and deserve to have some finality.
  

Thing is, there are Gore lieutenants who—if not agreeing in full to the more-than-a-little disingenuous and hypocritical Bush
talking points—concur with at least one cutting observation: Whatever happened to “count every vote”?!

Tonight, Gore lieutenants are disappointed that the contest isn’t statewide, as they’d been led to believe it would be. Some
of the middle-tier politicos who had told ground soldiers like Jack Young to focus on the four Democratic counties did so
with the understanding that sooner or later all 175,000 ballots as yet unrecorded would be checked by hand. The decision came
down from above, however, by those whom the lieutenants would refer to during the campaign as “The Matrix,” in reference to
the superb 1999 sci-fi thriller about an evil artificial-intelligence computer power that controls the world autocratically.
And in this case, The Matrix—Klain, Whouley, Shrum, Eskew, Daley, Christopher, Lieberman, and Gore—is disillusioning some
of its deputies who actually thought there was meaning behind the empty rhetoric.

A
l Gore thought that this would be over by now.

“The Friday after Thanksgiving at midnight we all turn into pumpkins,” Gore said to a friend on the night of Wednesday, November
15—after he’d made his first, half-hearted offer to abide by a state recount if Bush wanted one.

But that was centuries ago, it now seems, and throughout Thanksgiving weekend it became clear to all involved that Gore was
going to go through with the contest. The morning of Monday, November 27, the last and final pre-contest conference call finally
comes.

Gore, Lieberman, Daley, and others are in D.C., Christopher is in L.A, the legal team of Boies Klain is in Tallahassee.

What to contest? A few things are no-brainers: the Miami-Dade undervotes, the Palm Beach late returns, and 846 dimpled net
Gore votes, according to the Boston Boys, that the Palm Beach canvassing board deemed to not be votes. There are the 51 net
Gore votes from Nassau County that Boies is hyperbolically betting his law license on.

Berger’s still all over the butterfly ballot. Donnie Fowler and Whouley’s shop in Palm Beach have ten thousand affidavits
on hand. There’s no question that voters were confused. And if they can’t get a revote, there are alternative solutions, Berger
says. Allocating some of Buchanan’s votes for Gore, for instance. The law can create a remedy. And being that the Gorebies
think of themselves as within 100 votes, any remedy could be significant.

But Gore, Klain, and Boies swat the butterfly ballot case. Bob Bauer’s firmly convinced that the case has no merit; Coffey’s
wishy-washy on it. And ultimately, they decide, there’s no time to try it.

Klain is more intrigued by the possibility of including the Seminole County case, and a similar lawsuit in Martin County,
in the contest. Not because he thinks they’re winners—actually, of all the lawyers, Klain is one of the most skeptical of
the legal merits of
both
cases. No, Klain wants to include Seminole and Martin for strategic reasons. He explains: Republicans have the luxury of
being able to make one set of arguments in the Seminole and Martin cases—the intent of the voter is ultimate, you can’t throw
out ballots because of hypertechnical adherence to the law—while they’re simultaneously making the opposite argument on the
Miami-Dade and Palm Beach ballots. Klain wants to set up a situation where the Gore team would say—publicly and to a court—“Look,
there are two ways to resolve this dispute. We can either say ‘count all the votes,’ in which case we’ll lose Seminole and
Martin but we should get our votes counted in these two southeastern counties.
Or
we should have really technical and rigid Florida compliance rules, in which case maybe we don’t get our votes counted in
the southeastern counties but the ballots should be tossed from Seminole and Martin.” The Republicans have been going on and
on about different standards. Well, two can play that game, Klain argues.

Boies isn’t sure what he thinks about this. Since Klain first mentioned it, he’s been exploring whether or not he could make
an understandable argument on the matter. But in the past few days, he’s been trying this spiel out on people, and he’s become
convinced that nobody understands it as anything other than a bartering chip, which doesn’t play very well.

And Christopher doesn’t think including Seminole and Martin is a good call. “For the sake of your own political viability,
we have to set a very high standard here,” he says to Gore. “We can’t have any tactical moves, there can’t be any long shots.
We have to have the highest standards when it comes to the merits of the cases.”

Gore finally rules.

“Chris, I agree with your comments—with one exception,” he says. “I don’t care about my political viability. Joe’s political
viability will take care of itself. But my political viability should be the least consideration here. I have much greater
competing obligations. I have an obligation to the Democratic Party. And I have an obligation to the fifty million Americans
who voted for me and Joe. And I have the highest obligation to the country and to the Constitution.

“I cannot imagine that there will ever be a revote in Palm Beach,” Gore says. “And I can’t imagine disenfranchising the people
in Seminole and Martin Counties.”

A number of the lawyers are quite taken aback. This isn’t the Al Gore they’ve known—the cold, calculating, Faustian, self-centered
s.o.b. who’s been running for president since 1993. They know it sounds hokey, they know that when they tell friends—especially
journalist friends—about it, it sounds like horseshit. But, they think, Al Gore’s become a different guy as this whole thing
has progressed. There’s something markedly different in the way Gore has been treating people, they think, in the way he thanks
them, in the way he seems, well, nice.

And yes, it’s true, he didn’t particularly seem all that nice before.

Klain has sure noticed it, talking to him two or three times a day, the most he’s talked to Gore since he was his chief of
staff. And Klain is frankly a little stunned to find Gore incredibly gracious, even sweet. He was grateful for everyone’s
hard work, and he expressed it constantly. He would ask Klain all the time—is there anyone on the team whom he should call
and thank? He would call their spouses. He called one lawyer’s mom who was on her deathbed. It was not a side of Gore people
had seen in a long time. If ever.

It kind of mystifies Klain, who’d been shut out of GoreLand so coldly just over a year ago. But he’s happy to see it, and
even more delighted to play a leading role in the crusade.

Whouley has noticed it, too. Gore has gotten into what Whouley calls a “please-and-thank-you” routine. He would call the field
people, thank them, tell them he appreciated the sacrifice they were making. As Corrigan remarks to Whouley, “adversity does
that to people.”

Speaking of adversity, on Monday, November 27, the Gorebies’ fears about the effect of Bush being certified come true. On
that day, post-certification polls show that 60 percent of the American people are saying that this mess should end now and
Gore should just concede. This includes a quarter of Gore’s own supporters.

Behind closed doors, Gore might be rediscovering himself, might be—
might
be—learning that there are principles more important than just winning. But out in the real world, his act is wearing way
thin.

So the Gorebies decide that they need a full-frontal PR assault.

At around noon on Monday, leading congressional Democrats Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate minority leader, and
Rep. Dick
Gephardt of Missouri, the House minority leader, make a great public show of their support for Gore. You gotta wonder just
how sincere any of it is. Gore and Gephardt were once the bitterest of enemies; it isn’t overstating things to say that they
hated each other. At one debate during the contentious 1988 presidential primaries, Gephardt compared then-senator Al Gore
to Al Haig. Gore responded that in making that remark, Dick Gephardt sounded like Dick Nixon. And it’s safe to say they haven’t
gone on any fishing trips together ever since.

But Monday afternoon in the Florida state senate hearing room, Gephardt casts that baggage aside. With Daschle, he holds a
press conference—and then a totally staged conference call, with Gore and Lieberman in Washington, D.C.—just hours after Gore’s
legal team formally files its contest papers. In the face of this controversial and unprecedented legal action—and amid rumors
that certain Democratic members of the House and Senate are growing weary of Gore’s relentlessness—everyone holds hands and
puts on a happy face.

Behind closed doors, however, Gore lieutenants are under the impression that Gephardt and Daschle are not totally with the
program. They’re here today, they’ll defend Gore on the Sunday shows, but the message the Gorebies have discerned is that
the VP shouldn’t push it when it comes to their involvement.

This is a problem. Gore doesn’t have the level and quality and number of surrogates that Bush does. Kerrey was great, but
Butterworth and Sen. Bob Graham have basically been AWOL. When it comes to statesmen, the Democrats have a fairly weak bench.
And it’s not as if the rising stars of the party—Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina or Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, for instance—are
hopping up and down to make the case for Gore.

Whouley, too, is disappointed with his party. The girls and guys on the ground in Florida have been fuckin’ fantastic, he
thinks. But they still don’t have a guy like Baker to run the show, they don’t have a warrior. He’s trying to serve as a sort
of spiritual political leader of the operation—Baldick’s always referring to the ground troops drinking Whouley’s Kool-Aid—but
he’s a bit demoralized. Though he loves Gore these days, maybe like never before. He’s just become an even guy, and nice.
Really nice. One day he had Gore call a couple of his Boston Boys—Sullivan and Corrigan. No small thing to call Corrigan,
since he’d been Dukakis’s field director when Gore ran against him in ’88. But Gore was fuckin’ great. He thanked the guys.
Then he said to them, “Hey, when this is over, you can have whatever country you want.” The guys loved it. But it’s not enough.
They need to be tough. They
shouldn’ta backed off the absentee-ballot stuff, Whouley thinks. They need to be tough. They need to be brutal—just like the
Bush guys are being.

Oh, well.

He’s happy to see Gephardt and Daschle down here, though.

“We support the contest filed by the Gore campaign this morning, asking that these votes be duly counted and certified,” Gephardt
proclaims from behind the lectern in the Florida senate hearing room. “This is the right thing to do for the people of Florida,
for the people of America and our democracy,” Gephardt says. “Al Gore and Joe Lieberman won the popular vote by over three
hundred thousand votes
^*
in the country. And they have a lead—they are three votes shy of a majority—in the electoral college. We believe that a full,
fair, and accurate count will show that they won in Florida as well.”