Katherine the Great

Opportunistic is about the only characterization of Harris that has not caught on in popular cliche. For good reason. It’s true that Harris had spoken aloud of wanting to be an ambassador someday. But if she was subordinating her principles to her hopes of a diplomatic career, the strategy of infuriating nine-tenths of the press and all the Democratic U.S. senators who will vote to confirm ambassadors was a mighty strange way of going about it. To describe Harris’s actions as careerist, in fact, was the most implausible slander since Ken Starr was accused of taking the independent counsel’s job as a means of angling for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Nor was excessive partisanship a failing anyone had remarked in Harris before the recount controversy. Her entire family are Democrats, most prominently her grandfather, the oranges-and-cattle magnate Ben Hill Griffin Jr., who served several terms in the Florida Senate. It was the late governor Lawton Chiles, one of the most partisan Democrats in recent Florida history, who nominated her to the board of Sarasota’s Ringling Museum of Art, thereby launching her political career. Harris, whose financial disclosure statements show her to be worth $ 6.5 million (her father was a bank president, and her husband, a Swedish entrepreneur who installs yacht fittings, is even richer), is a familiar sort of scarcely partisan affluent Republican. (The demographer Ruy Teixeira shows in the current issue of the American Prospect that the richest women — those who earn more than $ 75,000 a year — are now a Democratic constituency, and broke for Gore in this election.)

Harris is a creature of the art world who has spent much more time in the company of — and appears considerably more comfortable with — Democrats. When the controversy in Florida first broke after Election Day, the law firm to which she turned for legal advice was Steel, Hector & Davis, the heavily Democratic Tallahassee firm whose best-known former partner is Janet Reno. Early in the ballot ruckus, before partisanship drowned out comity, Democrats had little but good to say about her. Senator Bob Graham called her “a good person who is trying to carry out her job.” Democratic lobbyist Ron Book said she’d been “a diligent member of the Florida Senate.” Even Gore’s camp was chary of making a case they couldn’t prove: When Harris refused to extend the deadline for hand-counting ballots, Warren Christopher would describe her act only as “a move in the direction of partisan politics.”

It’s true that Harris was one of eight Florida co-chairs for Bush, and that she was a Bush delegate at the Philadelphia convention. But the Florida Republican establishment has always been distinctly uneasy with her, and opposed her successful run for the state Senate in 1994. When Harris challenged Jeb Bush’s protege (and scandal-tarred ex-running mate) Sandra Mortham for secretary of state in 1998, Bush (naturally) backed Mortham. Nor has Harris been much of a loyalist since she’s been in office. She was one of two state officials to publicly oppose Bush’s ban on allowing gambling cruise boats to dock at state facilities. Phone and e-mail records released November 17 in accordance with Florida’s liberal freedom of information laws showed no coordination with the Bush campaign. In fact, she appeared to have had scarcely any contact with Republicans at all. When state senator Tom Lee visited her eight days after the election, he was the first Republican to do so.

Then there’s the claim that Harris was corrupt. Much has been made of her acceptance, in 1998, of $ 20,600 from Riscorp, a Sarasota insurance company; it’s been less often noted that she was one of 96 candidates who accepted Riscorp money. It has been noted that her spending on international trade missions has been considerable — $ 106,000 thus far during her term in office, which is three times the governor’s expenses. But all these expenses have to be approved by the state Senate, and they’ve run roughly at the level of her predecessor Mortham’s spending. Much of this is simply yokel lack of perspective. The St. Petersburg Times reported that Harris had stayed in a $ 485 hotel room in Manhattan — perhaps not realizing that all that buys in New York is an average room — and that she stays in the Willard when in Washington, D.C., a nice hotel, to be sure, but hardly Washington’s most luxurious, and not so expensive as to be beyond the range of writers for the St. Petersburg Times.

This tough treatment might explain Harris’s cat-got-the-canary smirk and the unnecessary political pontificating with which she finally announced Florida’s certified results a couple hours after the state supreme court’s deadline on November 26. Has her demonization by Democrats and Gore supporters been so swift and disorienting that it turned her, overnight, into the radical of their wildest claims? Or is there a core of principle there? Probably the latter. Harris’s approach to the law, while arguable, has been rigorous, and always internally consistent.

The Florida constitution gives Harris a degree of discretion over whether to allow hand recounts or not. Democrats may not have liked her initial decision, but it was based on an understanding of law. By her reckoning, the Florida code calls for extensions, recounts, and acceptance of late returns in cases of certain “facts and circumstances”: (1) proven voter fraud, (2) “substantial noncompliance with statutory election procedures,” and (3) “extenuating circumstances,” such as natural disasters. Harris believed the grounds Democrats offered were “insufficient to warrant waiver of the unambiguous filing deadline.” The all-Democratic Florida Supreme Court disagreed with her reasoning, and granted Al Gore an extra 12 days to seek hand counts in counties of his choosing. But the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to review the state court’s ruling suggests that Harris’s reasoning was not specious.

One can find fault with Harris’s tone, but in remarks leading up to the final certification she laid her principles on the line and made clear that she did not believe the Florida Supreme Court had a better understanding of Florida law than she did. She certainly has exercised good judgement. It was the sotto voce opinion of many Republicans that Harris ought to have included Palm Beach’s partial recount, especially since the final count arrived only a couple hours after the 5 P.M. deadline set by the Florida Supreme Court. It would not have affected the final outcome, Republicans thought, and it would have been acting like a gracious winner.

Harris was almost alone in understanding that extending the deadline once more would have been a catastrophe that invited indefinite litigation. That’s because the Gore campaign has proved willing to appropriate its adversaries’ principles for its own courtroom uses. Gore counsel Teresa Roseborough, for instance, claimed on CNN last week that a Bush victory in the U.S. Supreme Court case would invalidate Bush’s certified victory at the polls, since it “would give Congress the opportunity to decide that they were not the properly seated set of electors.” In other words, if the extended deadline the Gore campaign sued for proves unconstitutional, Bush should be punished.

If Harris had allowed a partial recount of the Palm Beach votes, or if she had accepted the full recount two hours late, she would have undercut her previous rationale in arguing that the November 14 deadline for hand recounts was statutory and non-negotiable. Gore, in turn, would have claimed that she had failed to inform Dade County that partial counts were acceptable — making necessary a new hand count — and had effectively lied to Democrats about the actual deadline.

Ever since Newt Gingrich proved such a handy whipping boy for Democrats during the 104th Congress, the American Left has tried to create entertaining villain narratives around its political foes. The Left would love to cast Harris as the second coming of the ungainly Linda Tripp. Unfortunately for them, Mrs. Harris is pretty and charming. Foreign newspapers, unlikely to have a dog in this fight, have almost unanimously found her engaging, even fascinating. (London’s Sunday Telegraph called her “the foxy, fashion-crazed Mrs. Harris.”) So, perhaps strangely for the party of feminism, Gore supporters have extrapolated from Harris’s prettiness to the assumption that she’s evil, as Paul Begala did in dubbing her Cruella De Vil, or Gore spokesman Chris Lehane did in calling her a “hack,” or legal hack Alan Dershowitz did in calling her a “crook.” (Compared, presumably, with such uniformly upstanding Dershowitz clients as O. J. Simpson.)

Even stranger are those who view Harris’s beauty as evidence of idiocy. “Attention debutantes. Calling all Junior Leaguers and Barbie collectors,” wrote Frank Cerabino of the Palm Beach Post. ” . . . You look at Harris, and you can see the vast emptiness there, and the need for the handlers who walk her back and forth to her podium, and answer all the questions that go beyond her script.” It’s odd that Cerabino would use “emptiness” to describe a woman who speaks more languages than he does, reads Flannery O’Connor for pleasure, has a master’s degree from Harvard in public administration, has studied art in Spain and philosophy and religion in Switzerland, and plays the accordion.

This is not to claim Harris is a leading intellectual of our time. But she’s highly intelligent, and, even more frustrating to the Gore side, had the backbone to stand firm against a cyclone of media vilification in recent years. Agree with her decisions or not, she showed she had little in common with the bimbo or Barbie described by Cerabino and much of the national media. They wish.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.