West Palm Beach, Florida
Pushing up I-95 from Miami to West Palm Beach, along the Gold Coast of the state on which hinges the nation’s presidential destiny, one puzzles over the citizenry’s mental state. To survey the A.M. call-in shows is to be treated to hot blasts of dark plots and cockeyed logic.
Callers are irate that George W. Bush “stole” the election. According to them, evidence of his character deficiencies and chicanery abounds. One caller soberly speculates that Bush will bring a 12-pack of Heineken to his Inaugural Ball (Gore, by contrast, can “hold his liquor”). Another charges it was incumbent upon the police in Palm Beach, where many voters seemed confused by the now infamous “butterfly ballot,” to escort elderly voters into the booths to help them execute their vote. Legions of callers suggest the election was fixed by Bush’s brother and their governor, Jeb. After all, says one, Jeb owed his brother — for not ratting him out when he was caught in the top rack of their bunkbed with a black girl. If the election is allowed to stand, many promise, there will be consequences. “My people will not accept [an Electoral College victory],” says one Hispanic caller, “We will revolt and go to the mountains.”
As I wheel into West Palm Beach — which Republican wags simply call “Pat Buchanan country” — I have no way of knowing the radio callers’ comments will be among the more measured I’ll hear all day. Outside the pastel, palm-accented Governmental Services Building, which houses the Supervisor of Elections’ office, ground zero in the post-election war, pro-Gore protesters clog the streets in anticipation of a noon rally featuring Jesse Jackson. The reverend has come to town to agitate against minority voter suppression and confusing ballots (many Gore supporters who failed to follow the ballot instructions say they incorrectly registered their votes by punching Pat Buchanan’s hole). Jackson’s son, just reelected to Congress, saw a similar ballot used in his Illinois district. But the reverend so hastily beat a path to Florida that he forgot to bring something important with him: evidence of any kind of voter fraud.
Killing time before the rally, a bearded cab driver stands on a corner screaming “Re-Vote!” at commuters. When asked what was wrong with the elections process, he claims it was “intimidating” because a sign at his polling station indicated voters had five minutes to complete their ballots. It’s not exactly flaming-tire necklaces in Haiti, but with such a tight election, it’s a good enough reason for a Palm Beach County voter to scream himself hoarse. On a nearby curb, Jan Price, a 64-year-old pro-Bush interior decorator wearing a Stars and Stripes scarf, jockeys for space with a flamboyant Gore supporter in a Rent T-shirt. “Go ahead, hit me! Hit me!” he chides. When I ask the gentleman why he’s baiting the grandmotherly Price, he turns into a playground tattletale, telling me and a nearby cop that she tried to strike him with her sign. I ask whether she connected. “No!” he exclaims. “I said she tried. T-R-I-E-D! You, sir, are stupid!”
The crowd grows restless waiting for Jackson’s arrival. And as one doesn’t usually see scores of black people on this side of town, every time a minority ministerial type arrives on the scene, confused white people surge around him in a scrum. The convocation starts to feel like an Altamont in the making, though nobody is worried about catching baton shorts in the skull as the place is too packed for most of us to lift our arms. On a flagpole platform, several black ministers, along with yarmulke-sporting rabbis, ascend to call the day to order. “The whole world is watching,” intones the Rev. Griffin Davis. Perhaps so, but only the first three rows are listening, as nobody can hear the speakers through their low-wattage bullhorns.
Jackson has yet to get here, so the crowd entertain themselves with botched call-and-responses, their signs bearing messages like “Keep Out Da Bushes” and “Bush-it.” Meanwhile, L. E. Buie, the 87-year-old “Rosa Parks of Palm Beach,” is introduced. None of the black voters I’m standing with can hear a word she says, nor can they tell me the nature of her civil rights distinction (refusing to give up her seat at the nearby sushi bar?). After Buie concludes, Jackson arrives in the courtyard behind the building, which has actual microphones. Sister Buie gingerly steps off the platform without breaking any of her brittle vitals. I dutifully body block for her as our tight herd of 2,000 or so tromps over flower-bed monkey-grass to flood the courtyard where alarmed secretaries from the Hunting and Fishing Licenses Office quickly conclude their tossed-salad lunches.
Safety-conscious state representative Lois Frankel implores us, “Take one step back and hold your breath.” (If these protests go on much longer, Altoids may want to consider a corporate sponsorship.) Jackson takes the podium with all manner of local heat-seeking public officials fanning out behind him. There’s Irv Slosberg, the just-elected Democratic state representative who campaigned by passing out corned beef sandwiches to voters. And arriving late is Boca Raton’s Democratic congressman, Robert Wexler, whom impeachment enthusiasts remember as his party’s most shamelessly omnipresent publicity barnacle. Wexler hasn’t lost a step, as he literally elbows his way past other officials to stand next to Jackson.
Jackson dazzles the crowd with boilerplate couplets (“Don’t get bitter, get better,” “It’s not about black and white, it’s about wrong and right”) while liberally overreaching, comparing this year’s contested presidential vote count to yesteryear’s civil rights struggles (never mind that Palm Beach County has only a 4 percent black electorate, and if elderly Jewish voters were done wrong — and nothing suggests they were — it happened in a county where two-thirds of the election officials are Democrats). On balance, it’s a lackluster performance for Jackson, though he does manage the impossible by keeping Wexler away from an open microphone.
As the rally concludes, journalists take shelter inside. There, they stay glued to CNN, make passes at the heavily guarded elections office where none of the employees has any comment, and make fawning overtures to presshound Jimmy Breslin, who looks as if he just emerged from an ashtray, and who pays them no mind as he tries to make sense of Florida’s election law minutiae. Outside, overheated factions line the sidewalks. On one side, emboldened Bush supporters hold up eye charts and make fun of Gore supporters’ ballot illiteracy. On the other, Gore supporters, confident their man will emerge victorious after next week’s scheduled recounts, chant “Nah, nah, good-bye,” as if they were tormenting their homecoming rivals.
I conduct an unscientific survey of Gore protesters, approaching the 10 most vociferously obnoxious (with so many present, it’s tough to whittle down the sample). Not a single one is certain of actually having mistakenly voted for Buchanan. In fact, four-fifths of them admit they’re certain they didn’t, though as one gentleman says, “I almost did — that’s bad enough.” Crowd psychology doesn’t permit consideration of nuances, and most in this throng seem lost to the fact that the ballot confusion wasn’t generated by Republican shenanigans. The butterfly ballot that has caused all the trouble was designed by Theresa LePore, who is the Democratic supervisor of elections and who, on October 10, sent copies of the ballot to the Palm Beach Democratic and Republican parties, asking them to register any objections. (Neither party did.) True, nearly 19,000 ballots were invalidated after confused voters selected two presidential candidates, but as Bushies are fond of pointing out, nobody knows how many of those votes would have gone to Gore, nor is that number far higher than county totals for invalidated ballots in the 1996 elections.
Mass hysteria, however, does not breed careful reflection — just more rallies. Though Jackson was scheduled to depart after the first rally, there are too many cameras in Palm Beach for him to actually board a plane. At a black church in Riviera Beach that evening, Jackson takes the pulpit with a visibly uncomfortable Robert Wexler by his side. It is unclear if Wexler is involuntarily twitching because he must stay silent in close proximity to Jackson’s microphone, or because he’s one of the few white people present (next to reporters and two rows of elderly Jews, bused in by Irv Slosberg, who promised them corned beef sandwiches).
As Jackson speaks, he is the very embodiment of moderation. He advocates cool-headed vote recounts, while only obliquely referring to Bush’s DUI arrest and racial hate crimes in Texas. Outside the church after the rally, he assumes his favorite position — at the center of a gaggle of cameras. A desperate Wexler squeezes up beside him, declining several print reporters’ questions as he sidles into the white lights’ glare. Wexler is impatiently holding a card containing his phone number which he wishes to give to Jackson, and he grows visibly irritated when a black voter asks if he can hand Jackson her number as well. “I don’t want him to get the numbers confused,” Wexler says.
Back at the Governmental Services Building, one skirmish begets another. Phil Vance, a record executive and unabashed Republican who is holding a pack of Marlboros and a Gatorade bottle, keeps waiting for the break in Gore supporters’ “Re-Vote!” chant so as to interject “George Bush.” As he and the Gore supporters try to outshout each other in a bizarre leg-chugging civil disobedience oom-pah, I compliment him on his musicality. He comes by it naturally, he says, since his father, Paul Vance, wrote the song “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” But Vance doesn’t have time to cover the rest of his father’s hit parade. Sign-bearing Gore supporters have angrily surrounded him, with one gentlelady telling him to “F — off!”
A few yards away, I encounter the angry face of the Palm Beach voter. It is not a pretty sight. Sandra Tannenbaum, who sports two pairs of glasses (one resting atop her head, the other perched on her nose), sticks her mug three inches from mine and in a sing-songy drone, repeatedly chants, “EWWWW! I smell an odor in here. It smells like Watergate here!” An accountant who claims to be poetry.com’s “millennial poet” for her award-winning composition entitled “Ice Cream Cake,” Tannenbaum abandons me to take up arms against Vance over health care concerns. Both of them advocate their candidates’ health care positions, as they try to outdo each other in the victimhood department.
Vance says he has hepatitis C, is on Interferon, and is enduring his first month of chemotherapy. “My white cell counts are like zero,” he says, “I’m lucky I’m even walking.” Tannenbaum complains that as a result of an auto accident, she has more “legbone in my neck than neckbone.” She also suffers from Epstein-Barr syndrome, has had her whole “musculoskeletal system compromised,” and must drag herself out of bed just so she can “feed my children and come down here.”
As one watches this dance of the low-sloping fore-heads, it is impossible not to consider the criticism of our Founding Fathers, pilloried lately for constructing the Electoral College. Perhaps the criticism is justified. Maybe they were nothing but stone-hearted elitists in search of a device to steer the nation clear of majoritarianism, condescendingly skeptical as they were of a dimwatt, venal electorate. But spend a day with the voters of West Palm Beach, and you’ll be left with a different, unpleasant suspicion: Just maybe our Founders were onto something.
BY MATT LABASH
