Down & Dirty (9 page)

Gore takes Daley aside, asks him what he thinks.

“I think you oughta call them,” Daley says, meaning the Bushies, meaning concession.

Lieberman, who has a tight race in his political history, tries to talk him out of it. But Gore isn’t buying it.“I just want
to thank everybody for everything they did,” Gore says. He doesn’t want a prolonged, protracted, divisive fight. Gore’s kids
start to cry.

Daley hands him a slip of paper.

“Is this the number?” Gore asks. Daley says yes.

At around 2:40
A.M.
, Gore calls Bush to concede. Bush tells Gore that he’s a “good man.” He sends his best to Gore’s wife, Tipper. “I know this
is hard for you,” Bush says.

Soon after, Eskew and Daley come back down to the seventh floor. We’re going to the War Memorial to concede, they say.

In Austin, word of the concession reaches the networks, and the world waits for Gore to appear on the steps of the War Memorial
to announce that it’s all over. Journalists scamper from the press tent into the party area in front of the capital, which
has erupted in joyful cheers.

I run into Mark McKinnon, Bush’s media adviser, one of the only decent guys in the higher echelons of the governor’s staff.
He’s smiling, a little drunk, a few tequila shots under his belt. He’s wearing a black Kangol backward.

“A little drama for you,” he says to me, smiling, as he makes his way into the celebration held on the now-rain-soaked Congress
Street. “A little drama.”

McKinnon doesn’t know the half of it.

Just as, a week and a half ago, Gore had no idea how prescient he was being, in an aside he makes to me between two local
Charleston, West Virginia, TV interviews. Gore joked, “If it’s going to be a close race, it might as well be a historic one.”

It’s almost 3
A.M.
, and Gore is in his motorcade, making its way from the Loews Hotel to Nashville’s War Memorial Plaza.

Bearing Baldick’s words in mind, Whouley frantically tries to reach the team upstairs. He watches the last few numbers from
Florida as they come in. Suddenly that last-minute 50,000-vote bubble has popped. The lead is down to 6,000—way too close
to concede.

Whouley wants to confirm these numbers. Baldick says again that it’s too close to call. Within a thousand votes either way.

“Are you shu-ah?” he asks Baldick, in his thick Boston accent.

Baldick’s shuah.

Whouley checks the Florida secretary of state’s Web site. He asks his numbers guy, Ken Strasma, what he thinks. Strasma says
the numbers he’s been getting from Florida show that Gore could still win, and that at the very least it is too close.

“Are you shu-ah?” Whouley asks.

DNC spokeswoman Jenny Backus starts calling the networks to alert them that Florida is still too close to call. Meanwhile,
Whouley calls Monica Dixon, one of the “war room” rapid-response staffers. Her voice mail’s on; she’s already left. In a zone,
intensely concentrating on clearing it all up, Whouley and the rest in the boiler room haven’t talked to Gore and his senior
staff. They had assumed that Gore, Daley, et al. would call down before making any decisions. But that doesn’t seem to be
the case.

Whouley’s assistant, a young Harvard grad named Jeff Yarborough, has been working so closely with Whouley that he—like Radar
from
M*A*S*H
—often takes actions on his boss’s behalf just minutes before his boss thinks of them himself.

Yarborough frantically pages Gore’s traveling chief of staff, Mike Feldman.

“
CALL SWITCHBOARD. CALL HOLDING WITH MIKE WHOULEY. ASAP
,” reads the page.

“Wheah the fuck ahh these people?!” Whouley asks.

“I’m getting Feldman on through White House signal,”Yarborough says, referring to the White House paging system.

Feldman doesn’t know what to think. Whouley had been at campaign HQ on the speaker phone with the seventh floor, but after
the networks called the race for Bush, everyone kind of forgot about him. Feldman wonders if Whouley even knows that Gore
conceded. Feldman punches up the switchboard on his cell phone and is immediately connected to Whouley.

“Wheah ahh you guys?!” Whouley asks.

“About two blocks away from the memorial,” Feldman says.

“
WHY
?!” asks Whouley.

“Because Gore’s going to give a speech,” Feldman says.

“
Fuh WHAT
?!” Whouley asks. “It’s an automatic recount! This thing is only six thousand votes! Ahh you with Daley?”

“I better get him on the line right now,” Feldman says.

Daley’s in a different car, so Feldman conferences him in on the cell phone.

Whouley explains that this thing is still too close to call. Another Gore staffer, Charlie Koch, has called Florida attorney
general Bob Butterworth, the Gore campaign’s state chair, to find out the relevant law as it pertains to the Florida recount.
If the margin of victory is within one-half of 1 percent, there’s an automatic machine recount, Butterworth explains. Whouley
shares this with Daley.

“It’s too close to call,” Whouley says, giving Daley the details. “We still may win this thing. At a minimum, Billy, it’s
an automatic recount. We got TV cameras going to Bob Butterworth’s house right now! It’s an automatic recount!”

“Oh fuck,” Daley says. “Let’s go to hold when we get there. We’ll sort it out there. And we’ll call you back from a land line.”

Attie’s sitting with Daley and Eskew. He wonders why Daley’s head is down; he’s not exactly the kind of guy to get weepy.
Then he realizes Daley’s on the phone. He gets off the phone and turns to Eskew.

“With-ninety-nine-point-seven-percent-of-the-vote-counted-in-Florida-we’re-only-six-hundred-votes-behind, whadda-we-do?!!”
Daley asks.

Feldman calls David Morehouse, a Gore aide, and tells him to take Gore straight to the holding room when they arrive. Do not
let Gore hit the stage, Feldman says. They are only a block or so away from the War Memorial.

Daley phones Gore.

“Whatever you do, do not go out on the stage!” Daley bellows.

“What the fuck are they doing?” Whouley thinks. “You don’t leave to concede without checking with the boiler room first! We’re
busy workin’ to get Bush’s face off the TV, and they’re taking the networks’ word for it?! We’re hustling, and they’re conceding?!
What a fuck-up.”

A block later, Gore is down by maybe only 1,300 votes.

The motorcade stops. Someone tells Attie to get to the holding room in
the Memorial, so he begins clawing his way there. When he gets there, he sees Gore.

“With ninety-nine point seven percent of the vote counted, we’re only six hundred votes behind,” Attie tells him.“We need
to change the language in the speech, and Carter and Daley need to talk to you.”

Gore looks at him, taken aback. Hmm!

About ten minutes later, another aide, Greg Simon, says: “It’s down to five hundred votes in Florida.”

Lieberman tells Gore not to concede.

At 3:15
A.M.
, Daley calls his counterpart in Bush’s camp, Don Evans, to tell him about their concerns. “You need to give us a little more
time,” Daley says to Evans. “You need to let us work this out.”

Bush is not happy. Ellis has told him that Florida is, again, too close to call.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Bush says.

After calling back to Tallahassee, Jeb says the same thing. “I’m not seeing the same thing they’re seeing in the numbers,”
Jeb says.

When Gore calls him a few minutes later, Bush doesn’t let on that he knows that Florida is still in play. From this moment
on, Bush and his team will propagate a myth, repeating it over and over to the American people: he won, definitively, at the
moment that his cousin called the election for him for Fox News Channel.

“Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you,” Gore says to Bush. “The state of Florida is too close
to call.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Bush asks pointedly.“Let me make sure that I understand. You’re calling back
to retract that concession?”

“You don’t have to be snippy about it,” Gore responds.

Gore tries to explain: Florida is too close to call. If Bush wins it, Gore will concede again. But the reality is different
than the networks have reported it.

Bush tells Gore that the networks are right. Jeb’s right here, he says.

“Your
little brother
doesn’t get to make that call,” Gore says.

“Well, Mr. Vice President, you do what you have to do,” Bush says.
“Thanks for calling.”

“You’re welcome!” Gore says.

Inside the holding room at the War Memorial, Gore hangs up.

His staff cheers.

Except for Bill Daley, that is, his campaign chairman. He’s holding his bald head in his hands.

In the holding room, Daley took Gore aside and apologized for not having served him well, for having taken the TV networks’
word for it. Gore brushed it off, don’t worry about it, he said. But now Daley’s fretting again that Gore may have done the
wrong thing in retracting his concession. “What if we find out within the next few hours that what had caused us to hesitate
was some mistake, some problem with the secretary of state’s office?” he worries. “Then all of a sudden it’s Wednesday morning,
and we should have pretty obviously conceded the night before.” He’s trying to get a handle on the chaos; he doesn’t want
Gore to look like a jerk.