Rip Their Lungs Out: Gore Wants It at Any Cost

History will record that the 2000 presidential election was decided by the vote of a single man: Bill Daley.

When Daley appeared on a stage at Nashville's eerie War Memorial Plaza early last Wednesday morning, explaining to a jubilant crowd that Gore had retracted his concession to George W. Bush, his key words were, "Our campaign goes on!" That seemed odd to those citizens who were still following the surreal election on television, since all the votes had already been cast.

What no one has adequately explained is this: When 98 percent of the ballots were counted in Florida, Bush was leading by 50,000 votes; after 99.5 percent were tallied, that advantage had shrunk to 500. Perhaps it's possible that Gore could gain votes that rapidly with 1.5 percent more of the precincts reporting, even though that defies statistical probability, especially at that late hour. More likely, I believe, is that an avalanche of Gore votes were suddenly "discovered" (translated: several poll workers raced against time to concoct new ballots), and that closed the gap. The official explanation would be that "urban" areas always are the latest to trickle in.

But in retrospect, anyone who believed Bush could prevail against the shoot-to-kill tactics of Daley and Gore was hopelessly naive. And that group included the media, Bush and his advisers, and any person in the United States who thought that his or her voted actually counted.

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As this column is being written, the results of the election are still officially in doubt. But a federal judge in Miami has just denied the Bush campaign's appeal for an injunction against the ongoing hand recount. Make no mistake about it: Gore is on the brink of hijacking the presidency. It's true that Florida's secretary of state declared on Monday that all recounts must be certified by the original Nov. 14 deadline?which would exclude three of the contested Democratic counties?but what's the ruling of a mere local official compared to the Gore/Daley machinery?

Whether the presidency is now a prize worth winning remains to be seen. The polarization not only between the slim GOP congressional majorities and Democratic minorities, but also between the two Americas (the two coasts and "flyover country"), is an obstacle that an egomaniacal partisan like Gore isn't likely to overcome. In addition, the next president will inherit an economy that's heading south; a foreign policy that Bill Clinton's made a hash of; and the sour legacy of eight years of Oval Office rule that prefers litigation to honesty, a permanent political campaign instead of governance and, to invoke one of the most famous slogans of the Clinton years, "The politics of personal destruction."

Since I believe that Daley and Gore are currently the most despicable men in public life (Clinton's aw-shucks philandering, nonstop hypocrisy and acts of perjury seem almost quaint now), men who have made a mockery of this country's democracy, I can only hope that the soon-to-be 43rd president suffers an administration that will make Jimmy Carter's look like that of FDR or Ronald Reagan.

But the evidence is clear that Gore's team of Daley, Warren Christopher, Mark Fabiani and any number of Florida Democratic hacks simply arrived at the scene of the battle sooner than their Bush counterparts. By the time James Baker held a press conference on Saturday morning, announcing that the Bush campaign was filing an injunction to stop the outrageous hand-counting of ballots in a limited number of Florida counties?all Gore strongholds?the damage had been done.

The absurd distraction over the "butterfly" ballot that confused some voters in Palm Beach County, leading them to possibly vote for Pat Buchanan instead of Gore, garnered a lot of media coverage, but in reality it was a shrewd Daley bluff. The ballot was designed by a Democrat and approved in advance of the election. Samples of it were sent out by mail; the vast majority of voters had no problem deciphering it. The Gore team knew the lawsuits filed by allegedly "real people" were nonstarters, red herrings all, but were all too happy to have Jesse Jackson fomenting dissent in Florida for the tv cameras. When will Jackson retire? His "It's Selma all over again" routine is more tired at this point than yet another Eagles reunion tour.

The New York Post's Jack Newfield, presumably still in denial that his scrappy, working-class New York Mets failed to defeat the Yanks in the World Series, took the bait. On Nov. 10, Newfield called for a new election only in Palm Beach County. Follow this logic if you dare: "This election is not tainted just by what happened in Palm Beach County. But if Jesse Jackson is right, it was also tainted by the way black and Haitian immigrant voters were disenfranchised at the Florida polls across the state. The 50 million Americans who voted for Al Gore should feel cheated. They are the majority. Let's think about what is fair, and what is practical, and what is democratic. I think that it's an honest second vote in one county, limited to only those who voted on Tuesday?conducted on voting machines, without that cockamamie ballot that would have bewildered me."

But it's doubtful that Newfield believes a new election should be held in Milwaukee, where a Manhattan millionaire was caught by a local tv station distributing packs of cigarettes to homeless people in an attempt to gain their votes for Gore. The millionaire, Connie Milstein, said only, "My actions were those of a private, concerned citizen." According to the Nov. 7 New York Post, Milstein has contributed $402,000 to Democrats in this election cycle, and also hosted a fundraiser for Gore at her Park Ave. apartment. The Democratic National Committee immediately disavowed any association with Milstein's illegal electioneering, but that rings about as hollow as Christopher's claim that the lawsuits in Florida were filed without any encouragement from the Gore campaign. Irony is lost on the sullied (likely) president-elect, but how fitting that one of his supporters used tobacco as an inducement to vote. I guess Gore must believe that the homeless are so far gone that a dose of lung cancer won't harm them.

In addition, CNN reported on Nov. 10 that "Republican state Rep. Scott Walker listed a half-dozen possible cases in Milwaukee County and across the state he said required investigation from the district attorney's office. In one incident, videotape from a television news crew showed people voting after a poll worker announced the polls were closing. The tape has been subpoenaed, Walker said. In another incident, a voter complained that a polling place displayed campaign posters for the Gore-Lieberman ticket and other Democratic candidates. The location was understaffed, and several voters reported easy access to the ballots. Another voter complained that he was mistakenly given two ballots when he went to vote. The man 'notified the poll worker that he was given two ballots,' Walker said. 'The poll worker said "Go ahead and vote." He asked a second time, and the poll worker still identified to him to go ahead and vote.'

"[Republican state chairman Rick] Graber said he had received more than 600 phone calls about the improper handling of marked ballots; about voters being give multiple ballots; and 'improper registration procedures that may have allowed some voters to vote multiple times and in multiple locations.'"

In Friday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a list of GOP complaints about fraud and "voter irregularity" was printed. It included: Marquette students seen picking up 10 or more ballots at a time; a polling place that had a "help yourself" stack of ballots for the taking; non-registered voters not being asked for identification at a 6th District polling location; and poll workers who told a voter to "vote Democrat."

And Monday's New York Post had a beaut of an anecdote from Milwaukee: "Janet Riordan, 39, said that when she went to vote wearing a Bush-Cheney button, an election inspector asked, 'Why would a young woman like you want to vote for George Bush?'"

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Baker was eloquent in his Saturday statement: "The vote in Florida has been counted, and the vote in Florida has been recounted. Governor George W. Bush was the winner of the vote, and he was also the winner of the recount. Based on these results, we urge the Gore campaign to accept the finality of the election, subject, of course, to the counting of the overseas absentee ballots, in accordance with [the] law. They obviously have decided instead to proceed with yet a third count of votes in a number of predominately Democratic counties. This course of action is regrettable.

"I said yesterday that we would vigorously oppose the Gore campaign's efforts to keep recounting until it likes the result... The manual vote count sought by the Gore campaign would not be more accurate than an automated count. Indeed, it would be less fair and less accurate. Human error, individual subjectivity, and decisions to, quote, 'determine the voters' intent,' close quote, would replace precision machinery in tabulating millions of small marks and hole punches. There would be countless opportunities for the ballots to be subject to a whole host of risks. The potential for mischief would exist to a far greater degree than in the automated count and recount that these very ballots have already been subjected to."

Baker continued with his genteel comments, notably saying that "Machines are neither Republicans nor Democrats, and therefore can be neither consciously nor unconsciously biased."

He's correct, but considering the opposition, Baker would've been well-advised to use the language that was splashed on the front page of Sunday's New York Post, in reference to the request for an injunction: "Stop, Thief!" Given Daley's Vietcong shots from the trees (the stiff Christopher's role has been simply to add "gravitas" window dressing), Baker, although armed with the truth, was simply outmaneuvered.

Now the Bush team, if denied in Florida, must take this inexcusable travesty to the Supreme Court, no matter what pressure is put upon them by the partisan media or even fellow Republicans who don't have the guts to fight Daley on a thermonuclear level.

As George Will wrote last Sunday in The Washington Post, Gore will stop at nothing to win this election. (Will thinks Bush might still win Florida come this Friday; talk about seeing a glass as half-full.) He concluded: "All that remains to complete the squalor of Gore's attempted coup d'etat is some improvisation by Janet Reno, whose last Florida intervention involved a lawless SWAT team seizing a 6-year-old. She says there is no federal role, but watch for a 'civil rights' claim on behalf of some protected minority or some other conjured pretext. Remember, Reno is, strictly speaking, unbelievable, and these things will continue until these people are gone."

Even on the first day of the hand-count, it was clear the exercise was a farce. In the Palm Beach County effort, tempers flared throughout Saturday's work. In a Sunday Washington Post article, headlined "In Recount, Confusion Is Winner," the paper's reporters described the chaos that ensued, citing a shift of standards employed to divine the intent of the voter, and the obvious reluctance of dog-tired workers to keep tabulating votes. The Post's Sue Anne Pressley and George Lardner Jr. wrote: "As the day progressed, testy exchanges became more frequent... The counters were also growing tired. At one point Charles Burton, a Palm Beach county criminal court judge who heads the canvassing board, yawned several times saying 'I'm losing it, I tell you.' There were also flashes of partisan wrangling. [Marc] Wallace, the Republican, said he felt that canvassing board members were favoring the Democrats. 'I'm feeling ganged-up on,' he said."

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In addition, the Bush team simply wasn't up to the public relations war that Daley and Gore waged after Americans voted last Tuesday. Instead of instantly realizing that his presidency was at stake, Bush tried to project an image of confidence and leadership, while Daley amped up the rhetoric. Why his closest advisers?Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and Don Evans?allowed a photo-op of Bush having lunch with potential cabinet members is beyond me: the impression of the Governor's arrogance and cocky demeanor was only exacerbated by the media's willful presentation of the gentlemanly scene at his Austin mansion. (Although the band-aid for the boil on Bush's face was a nice touch.)

It made no difference that both Bush and Gore had been making transition plans before the election in hope of victory. Any candidate who doesn't, by the way, is a fool. That's one reason why Clinton's first term started out so rocky: he was so wiped out after a brilliantly managed campaign that he wanted to bask in the country's adulation for as long as possible. As a result, he paid almost no attention to the job he'd assume on Jan. 20, 1993.

While Daley and Christopher did the dirty work in the Florida trenches, Gore was photographed playing touch football with his family on Friday, a disgusting, but successful, attempt to project Kennedy-like charisma to the public. What was even more offensive was the Associated Press story on Saturday that described the Gores and Liebermans escaping the tension by taking in a movie; ironically, their choice was the Robert De Niro hit Men of Honor. The AP report read: "After viewing the movie, the Gores and Liebermans posed for photographs outside before a crowd of about 100 cheering well-wishers. Gore declined to answer the questions of an Associated Press reporter, saying: 'We're not giving interviews. We're just on a double date.'"

But of course, Gore has spent most of his time since the election plotting the endgame in Florida. According to Sunday's Washington Post, the Vice President spent five hours in discussions with Daley and Christopher discussing their multitude of options to finish off Bush. Post reporter Ceci Connolly: "With his wife, Tipper and running mate Joseph I. Lieberman at his side, the man who still believes he will win last Tuesday's election discussed formation of a legal team to appear on his behalf in a Florida courtroom Monday. The group also spoke about options beyond a recount, said Christopher... Gore's image advisers said they were intent on projecting a 'relaxed, calm, confident' demeanor in contrast to what they characterized as an unseemly eagerness on Bush's part to assume the presidency. They ridiculed a photo of Bush appearing in Saturday newspapers seated in a room that looked remarkably like the Oval Office. On the other hand, Daley emphasized that Gore 'has been prepared to transition, on an emergency basis, obviously, for eight years into the presidency.'"

That's a lot of hooey, since Gore will certainly choose a cabinet and White House staff that has no resemblance to Clinton's. It wouldn't surprise me if the photo of his boss, the scoundrel he famously described two years ago as one of the greatest presidents in American history, is put in storage. Remember, Gore is his "own man."

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One of the strangest results of this bizarre election is that the still-unresolved confusion about who won the presidency has made mere footnotes of everything that happened during the campaign before Nov. 7. After the all-night melodrama of Tuesday, and the bitterness, lawsuits, deceptive p.r. spin and focus on Florida, who can even recall what happened in the past three months, let alone the primary fights Bush and Gore waged, respectively, with John McCain and Bill Bradley? Bush's garbled syntax? History. Gore blowing his lead during the first debate when he sighed, huffed and puffed while looking like a cheap drag queen with his makeup and effeminate demeanor? History. Karl Rove bragging to reporters that Bush had the presidency in the bag, auditioning for the role of 2001's James Carville? History.

Take your pick of analogies. Has the last week been an extended drunk, the euphoria of which comes from the opportunity to witness the closest election in more than 100 years, a fascinating bit of history, but that ultimately terminates in a killer hangover and the realization that politics is even sleazier than you thought? A rollercoaster ride that's thrilling until you get off and deposit that ice cream cone in a nearby toilet? An acid trip in which time is suspended, and you're focused solely on a psychedelic vision of corruption as theater, only to "come down" and be faced with the sordid reality of Bill Daley still fouling the airwaves?

The time warp has been so severe that I haven't been able even to growl about the awful results of New York's U.S. Senate election. Right now, it seems like hobgoblin Hillary Clinton's already been in office for two years. The content of Lloyd Grove's Washington Post column "The Reliable Source" on Nov. 9, though, was so repellent that it actually made it through the fog. Grove was at an election-night party at the Clintons' hotel suite, along with Tina Brown, Harvey Weinstein and other shameless entertainment hags, when the jubilant, booze-fueled chatter turned to Ralph Nader's siphoning off votes from Gore. Grove: "After President Clinton ticked off the states, including Florida, where Nader was hurting Gore, Brown's husband, Harry Evans, exclaimed: 'I want to kill Nader!'

"'That's not a bad idea!' Sen.-elect Clinton replied with a big grin?immediately followed by a collective cry of 'That's off the record.'"

On the subject of witless celebrities for Gore, Martin Sheen told people at a treatment center in California that Bush is a "white-knuckle drunk." Sheen said Bush is "still in denial about it," even though the Governor, unlike Sheen, kicked his drinking habit without benefit of a rehab program.

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I don't like to see friends of mine slimed in the filthy pages of The New York Times. In a front-page story on Nov. 13, Richard Berke, the Times' "star" political reporter who's really acted as nothing more than a batboy for Gore, wrote a postmortem on Bush's candidacy headlined "GOP Questioning Bush's Campaign." If you've followed Berke's reporting, you know he's a weasel who distorts the information he gathers to suit his own purposes. Like his colleague Adam Clymer, he's a "major-league asshole."

In this story, Berke spoke extensively to Bush's first cousin, John Ellis, about the race. Ellis, a former columnist for The Boston Globe, has written for New York Press and currently has a monthly column in Fast Company. He also consults for Fox News.

Hours after Berke's story came out, Ellis e-mailed me the following statement:

"In today's New York Times, Richard Berke quotes me at some length concerning how the Bush campaign approached the final six days of the campaign. I do not take issue with any of the direct quotes, but I do take exception with the characterization of what I told Mr. Berke and the context in which those quotes appear.

"As I repeatedly explained to Mr. Berke, the principal reason for the Bush campaign's confidence going into the final weekend was that polls of 'likely voters' conducted by the Bush campaign and major news organizations showed Bush doing well nationally, well enough in swing states and surprisingly well in a large number of traditionally Democratic states. As I also explained repeatedly to Mr. Berke, the reason for this was that both campaign and news media polling organizations were employing 'likely voter' screens that were too tight and therefore undercounted Democratic strength.

"I never said to Mr. Berke that the Bush campaign did not 'have to worry much' about Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Iowa. Indeed, Gov. Bush campaigned in two Pennsylvania media markets during the final weekend of the campaign. Pennsylvania is a swing state which the people I talked with in the Bush campaign believed it might win. Wisconsin and Iowa were traditionally Democratic states where the Bush campaign and local polling showed GWB running surprisingly well.

"When I spoke to Mr. Berke on Sunday afternoon, I never imagined that I would appear under a jump-page headline that said 'Allies Fault Bush Campaign's Endgame.' This leaves the distinct impression that I fault the Bush campaign for its endgame strategy. I did not, do not, will not. Indeed, based on the data available at the time, I agreed with the Bush campaign team's assessment of the race.

"Had I known that Mr. Berke would use me to further an analysis which I believe is inaccurate, I would never have agreed to speak with him."

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Don't expect any apologies from the media for its abysmal coverage of the election and its aftermath. ABC's preening Peter Jennings, whose scant talents as a newsreader make a viewer wince, had the gall last Wednesday night to say, "We are not certain what effect, if any, our mistaken projections in Florida had." Consider this, Pierre: While ABC, and your competitors, held back projections of certain Bush wins in states like Georgia and Ohio, Florida was called before the polls had even closed in that state. I don't suppose it's a coincidence that the western region of Florida, in a different time zone, is Bush country, and that the "mistaken projection" might have discouraged GOP voters there from bothering to cast a ballot.

CBS' Dan Rather was only slightly more contrite. Appearing on CNN's Reliable Sources last Saturday, Rather told host Howard Kurtz: "[W]e were wrong the other night. And we take the responsibility for it. We are accountable for it. We know how it happened. And we're taking steps to make sure it happens as little as possible in the future. But it will happen. The answer to all this, see, I hate these things. And I would rather walk through a furnace in a gasoline suit than be inaccurate about anything."

It's just a hunch, but I'd wager there are about 1000 people in Austin right now, just to pick a city, who'd gladly supply the gasoline to the withered old Rather.

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There are any number of candidates who'd be elected to the Media Hall of Shame for their past week's drivel, but I'll limit my selection, for now, to just one: Jonathan Alter, of Newsweek and MSNBC. In his excellent "TRB" column for the current New Republic, Andrew Sullivan was dead-on about the journalist who's been so blatant in his high regard for Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Sullivan writes in an Election Night hour-by-hour diary: "4:35 a.m. It's getting even weirder. What is Jonathan Alter talking about? He's almost inciting a coup! He just laid out a scenario in which Gore wins the national vote; loses Florida by a whisker, even after a recount; and then challenges W. to stand down! He wants civil war! The liberal chattering elites may be petit bourgeois Poujadists after all! I sure hope Gore has more class than they do."

Sullivan was downright Panglossian about Gore's upcoming behavior, but he nailed the Newsweek propagandist. Yet Alter himself did even a better job of disgracing himself in his Nov. 20 column "Between the Lines." The subhed of the essay directs the reader precisely to Alter's frivolous take on the election: "This isn't a real crisis (yet), so let's relish the absurdity?and revel in the civics lesson."

Alter, ignoring the growing unrest in the country, is content to sit at his word processor and contemplate the exciting, and affluent, life he leads. He begins by explaining that once a generation or so there's an all-consuming "drama" in American politics, such as Joseph McCarthy's rise and fall, FDR's attempt to pack the Supreme Court, and Watergate. You get the feeling that he'd like to add World War II, and what a thrill it'd be to report on the Holocaust, but I guess he felt obligated to hold back on those hot knishes.

He writes: "Now we've experienced two such dramas in two consecutive years. The first, the Clinton impeachment trial, left everyone feeling cheap. Not this time. The closest American presidential election ever is unnerving but genuinely exciting?for anyone who covers politics, as good as it gets."

Pardon me, Jon old chum, but since when do you speak for the nation? The impeachment trial didn't make everyone "feel cheap." Maybe your buddies in the Beltway media who play hearts with Clinton on Air Force One; but a significant number of citizens were angry about that miscarriage of justice.

And while Election Night was exciting, the days that've followed have left me with no appetite, despondent, cranky and blind with rage. Maybe Alter believes that the tumble of the stock markets is a thrilling story to write about as well. Yes, I'd like Bush to win, but even more than that, it's not "as good as it gets" to see firsthand how thoroughly corrupt our electoral process is.

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All the self-righteous blather about campaign finance reform that we've heard from earnest journalists and editorialists at The New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, Slate, Time and NPR, just to name the obvious, completely misses the point. Most Americans don't care about the influence of money in politics. Otherwise, Clinton and Gore, up to their ears in fundraising scandals, wouldn't have been reelected in '96. Jon Corzine, who blew some $60 million for the luxury of serving with Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle and Teddy Kennedy in the U.S. Senate, wouldn't have been elected in New Jersey.

It's now clear that the country's most pressing political issue is electoral overhaul. How can it be that in the high-tech era, voters still make their choices by paper ballots or with antiquated machines? Why is it that?especially in dense urban areas?fraud is so commonplace that bags of ballots mysteriously appear and disappear, that citizens brag of voting twice, once at their primary residences, another time at the precincts near their country houses? Rudy Giuliani, in a Nov. 9 Daily News article, blasted New York's New Deal-era voting difficulties. After complaining about a 35-40 minute wait at the polls, he said: "The system is wrong. A system in which the Democratic and Republican county leaders determine the Board of Elections means a system in which you're never going to see modernization, you're never going to see efficiencies."

Now that the brutal truth of voter manipulation is out in the open, expect to hear stories every day for the next month. One of my favorites concerns a student at Washington University in St. Louis. This young woman (who's a friend of a young woman I know) reports that on Election Day a Democratic worker came to her dorm and offered everyone there "temporary" changes of address, so that they could immediately vote in Missouri. She also had two write-in ballots, with slightly different names, mailed to her house.

Another student I know attends college in Philadelphia, but is registered to vote in another state. Nonetheless, he went into a local polling place, gave his name and address and cast a ballot. No questions asked. In Baltimore, several people reported to me that when they went to vote no identification was asked for; conceivably, these residents could have made the rounds of polling spots, as if they were trick-or-treating, and voted as many times as they desired.

Even The New York Times, which overwhelmingly favors Democrats who are boosted by fraud, admitted the electoral problem. A Nov. 11 editorial began: "What has become embarrassingly clear over the last few anxious days is that the world's most powerful democracy needs to figure out a better way to vote for president."

It's safe to assume, however, that the Times prefers to delay such reforms until after Gore is awarded the presidency by a team of workers who will decide how Florida residents intended to vote in the election. As for those absentee ballots that must be received by Friday in Florida? I wonder how many got "lost" in the mail.

But I'll bet that when and if Gore makes it to the White House, election modernization will be his 114th "first priority."

NOVEMBER 13

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