TAKE AN ELECTION—a tie in the Senate, a near tie in the House, a near tie in the popular vote, a near tie in the Electoral College. Three states too close to call days after the polls closed, other states decided with minuscule margins. Then, when it all comes down to the vote of one state, give this state a way of recounting that attempts to read not ballots but the intent of the voters, and you have the 2000 election: a perfect freak, an act of nature, a marvel, a brawl, and a mess. Never has so much power rested on so few votes subject to so much dissension and squabbling. Not that it did not have its own eerie splendor. “Just as the Perfect Storm swept aside the structures man built to shield himself from the environment, so the Perfect Tie overwhelmed the institutions that were designed, in the words of the Federalist Papers, to prevent ‘tumult and disorder,’” as James Ceaser and Andrew Busch put it in one of the torrent of recent books on the election. These books fall neatly into three categories: the trivial, the enraged, and the serious. The trivial books—as suggested by such titles as Dana Milbank’s Smashmouth: Two Years in the Gutter with Al Gore and George Bush—skim over the surface, ignoring matters like context and issues. Seeing the race as Survivor writ large, they focus on the political and legal lies, ploys, and chokeholds, marveling at how desperate, depraved, and low-down dirty two hapless, hopeless, spoiled-rotten, pathetic, clueless preppie twits can get when they run for president. Like the paperback by the Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach, It Looks Like a President, Only Smaller, these books are reductive, framing the race as a battle of midgets, on whom a writer can only look down. Jake Tapper’s Down and Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency has some useful accounts on the legal tactics deployed by both road gangs, but he seems to suggest that this is all there was to it. Implicit in all these books in the trivial category is the notion that the writers, had they found themselves in the situation of the candidates, would have acted with utter grace and restraint. The trivial books at least shower scorn on all parties. The enraged books do not. In Reckless Disregard, his quickie account of the legal arguments in Bush v. Gore, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz declares “the decision in the Florida election case may be ranked as the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history.” In The Betrayal of America, Vincent Bugliosi concludes that the majority of Supreme Court justices “are criminals in every true sense of the word, and in a fair and just world belong behind prison bars as much as any American white collar criminal who ever lived.” Similarly, Roger Simon’s Divided We Stand drips with loathing for George W. Bush, his supporters, Texas, conservatives, southerners, the Christian Right, and perhaps for Christians in general. Bill Sammon’s At Any Cost is, in turn, a long wail of rage against the Democrats and Al Gore. Gore, as it happens, has a great deal to answer for. He seemed willing to drag the whole country into a bottomless pit of litigation in which we might still be thrashing if the Supreme Court hadn’t stopped him. He sued his own party’s officials when they failed to do what he wanted. He threw out the ballots of absentee servicemen. He launched an attack upon the Florida official Katherine Harris. This is the man who cried the poll-tested slogan, “Count every vote!” while trying to throw away thousands; who insisted scratches be counted as valid, while backing efforts to throw out clearly marked ballots on which third parties had made minor mistakes. Gore had a reputation as a relentless and brutal campaigner, as well as a world-class truth-twister, and all of these unlovely facets were on display during the Florida aftervote. But was he truly the ice-cold monster of absolute malice that Sammon presents? Could it be true that he decided early on he had no chance of winning and carried on just to hurt Bush? Was everything he and his friends did in Florida beyond the pale of hardball conventional politics? Sammon suggests that Gore did not lose a single vote to ballot confusion in Duval and Palm Beach counties, which seems unlikely. He implies that Bush lost as many as ten thousand votes in the Florida panhandle, between 7:52, when the networks announced Gore’s victory in Florida, and 8:00, when the polls closed. He seems to think there was a network conspiracy to hurt Bush by calling early the states where Gore led. By the end of Sammon’s At Any Cost, the sustained outrage has lessened the impact. Still, at least Sammon’s book tells a story, which is more than can be said for Roger Simon’s Divided We Stand: How Al Gore Beat George Bush and Lost the Presidency. This is a book that will actually subtract from the sum total of your knowledge of politics—a disgrace to the author, the editor, and the house that has published it; arguably the worst book to appear about politics since the mixture of malice and cuteness that passed as Pat Schroeder’s memoir. Every one of Bill Sammon’s blind spots is shared by Simon, but in reverse. Simon is irate at the networks’ late night call for Bush of Florida, which crowned him as the winner, and made Gore’s fight harder. But he says nothing of the first call, which probably cost Bush in the western states. He is outraged at the two decisions of the United States Supreme Court, but not at those of the Supreme Court of Florida, which had provoked them. You will find little here of debates or conventions, and nothing of issues or strategy. What you will find is that the book seems to exist mainly to allow Simon to sneak in goodies like these: Too much intelligence can be a drawback for a presidential candidate….In that respect the Bush campaign is one step ahead: it doesn’t have to dumb down its candidate for public consumption…. Gore is directly asked if he believes that Bush is “too dumb” to be president. His reaction: Gore convulsed in laughter while taking a drink of Diet Coke. He grabbed a towel to hold against his mouth, then, finally swallowing, insisted that the tape recorder be stopped for an off the record observation…. Bush gets through forty minutes of foreign policy questions without a major mistake…though he does goof up the number of men he is itching to execute in Texas…. Bush “wasn’t looking that closely” at how Cheney had voted [after Cheney’s voting record in the House had become controversial]. Why? The Rangers were on TV that day? On page 178, Bill Clinton is wildly popular, his resilience a source of astonishment. “Bill Clinton had never…had such support,…and he had never been stronger because no president in modern times…had been in such close touch with the ethos, the rhythms, the feelings of his time.” But somehow, without explanation, by page 195, this master of zeitgeist had managed to tick off so many of his people that he was proving a threat to his heir and vice president. “From the first day of campaigning to the last, Gore’s polling showed the same thing: Clinton was a loser,” Simon says. Simon never explains Bush’s electoral strategy or his well-detailed plans to reform the military, the education system, or social security. What he does in exchange is take us on small flights of fancy, little guided tours of Bush’s thoughts. Thus, at Bob Jones University, “The students are staring at Bush open-mouthed. He has not mentioned Jesus Christ once, not once! What kind of presidential candidate is he? So one student stands up and asks, ‘Are you a Christian? And tell us a little about your faith.’” To which, Bush answered, “Yes…and I’ve sought redemption”—all the while thinking, “There, that had to hold the little bastards,” or so Simon projects. But enough of that. The adult books about the election, written by serious people, are The Perfect Tie, by James W. Ceaser and Andrew E. Busch; and Deadlock, by David Von Drehle and the political staff of the Washin
gton Post. A third entry is by CNN’s Jeff Greenfield, a more personal story from someone who was actually on camera during the two calls for Florida and who uttered, on the first retraction, what became his book’s title: Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow! Aiming at fairness, and all three gracefully written, these books are concerned with issues and history, and place the election in the context of its times. They regard the candidates as well-matched and serious; and the campaign as fought over meaningful issues. They note that this stalemate has gone back many years. They cite the misleading “mandates” of the 1992 and 1994 elections, and the failures on both sides to make breakthroughs. They examine the gridlock with which voters seem happy enough. They observe the failure of the winners of the three presidential elections since 1988 to break the 50 percent mark, even in times of prosperity; and the nearly absolute parity—between 47.9 and 49.2 percent—of the votes for both parties in the Senate and the House. From these descriptions of generic deadlock, they go on to the specific things that caused the tie in the presidential campaign. Bush and Gore had résumés that were respectable, but not overwhelming; and strengths and weaknesses that were complementary and evenly matched. Bill Clinton, Gore’s patron, was a curse and blessing. Gore led on specific issues; and Bush led on overall themes. The two themes that swing most elections also had come out even: “The country believed, at one and the same time, that they’d never had it so good,” as Greenfield writes, “and that it was time for a change.” “The net effect of short-term forces split the non-partisan, or floating voters down the middle,” say Busch and Ceaser. “The Gallup tracking poll showed the lead changing no less than nine times.” Instead of breaking the stalemate, the campaign added to it, neither man showing the strengths—or the weaknesses—to attract or repel hordes of voters. And so it was closer, in more states, than any election in memory. And then the real fun began. “Mr. Daley,” one state official said to the man Al Gore chose to lead his attack on the Florida election results, “the recount procedures in Florida are designed to resolve contests in sheriffs’ races….They never contemplated anything the size of this.” Neither had anyone else. Both A Perfect Tie and Deadlock claim that Bush won the aftervote for the same reasons he eked out the election: superior executive and strategic abilities. Says Deadlock, “Bush was reluctant to revisit decisions. Gore…was constantly revising his options.” Bush deployed his team well, according to specialty, and trusted their judgments. Gore second-guessed his troops and shuffled them endlessly, eventually using David Boies for just about everything, moving him from state court to county court to federal court without stopping. From the start, Bush and his people knew the Supreme Court of Florida would try to give Gore the election and planned their appeal through the federal system. Gore, on the other hand, thought Florida election law was a local dispute and doubted the high court would even consider it. “This is about Florida law, not constitutional law,” Gore told Laurence Tribe, the constitutional lawyer, as Gore foolishly replaced him prior to the second argument before the Supreme Court. Tribe did not believe him. And, of course, Tribe was right. From the start, it was unhappily certain that nothing but a rough and jagged ending would occur. The margin of votes was so thin that even the concept of winning was never a certainty. The wide variations in methods of counting could lead the loser to claim that the counters had used the wrong standard. And then, as Jeff Greenfield points out, the elastic provisions of the Florida recount process ran head-on into the very fixed timeposts that governed presidential elections in federal law. Obeying one law meant disregarding the other. Greenfield muses, “There were plenty of cases (in Florida) where officials had been removed months after taking office….Would a clerk from Florida circuit court show up at the Inaugural platform, armed with a subpoena? Would a team of Florida state troopers storm the…White House sometime in mid-March?” The two camps took to the courts armed with entirely different views of what an election should be. Democrats insisted that standards be bent to their concepts of fairness. Republicans insisted that the standards were what defined fairness. “I could survive any recount,” Bush told the Washington Post. But “I couldn’t survive any re-vote, and they were re-voting….It was political, and it was chaotic beyond description….So long as the Florida Supreme Court was rewriting the law, and people were divining intent, we had a battle on our hands…. The problem was that we were dealing in a standardless world.” From the Republicans’ point of view, the final assault upon standards and order took place in the December 8 ruling of the Florida Supreme Court that voided the certification of the secretary of state, arbitrarily altered the standing vote total, and ordered a statewide recount of all Florida undervotes, using no specified standards whatever. Some vote totals from Miami-Dade would be obtained by using the canvassing board’s partial recount; others would be counted at the state capital by a new group of people. “We have just left the gravitational pull of the earth,” thought Jeff Greenfield. “You know what, David? We just won this case,” a Bush lawyer told the Gore team’s top advocate. “It’s so bad, it’s good.” The court judgments that ended the battle were almost as close as the election: a 4-3 ruling in the Supreme Court of Florida, a 5-4 vote to void it in the Supreme Court of the United States, each with bitter dissents from minority justices and blistering attacks from partisans whose favorite cause had been injured. What all the adult books on the election conclude is that the Florida court set the country on a path of great danger, and the Supreme Court of the United States had no choice but to check it. Thus, Busch and Ceaser write, the justices on the Supreme Court “stepped in…not to undermine a political process, but to curb a judicial one.” The Court’s ruling—”badly written and badly argued”—was rushed and, at times, incoherent, but “a prudential decision must be judged by the effects in a specific context….Would the consequences of not acting have been worse?” Jeff Greenfield concludes, “My own hunch is that George W. Bush would have ended up president…but only after a fight that would have put our political system to its severest test.” The problem is this: If you don’t want the president “selected” by the highest court of the entire nation, how about one selected by the highest court of Florida? Or by the Florida legislature? Or by Jeb Bush, as governor of Florida, signing a paper to make his brother president? Or by Al Gore, as president of the Senate, voting to elect himself? At the time, these were the only possibilities. “I would not be surprised,” Greenfield writes, “if at least one of these [U.S. Supreme Court] justices looked down the road and concluded simply, ‘Either we stop this now, or we are heading right for a train wreck. I just can’t take that chance.’” Now, half a year after it ended, this election, expected to decide the deadlock of years, has only extended and deepened the deadlock of American politics. Surveys by news organizations, expected to clear up the Florida muddle, have instead been caught in it. The nearly tied Senate broke, first to the Republicans, and then to the Democrats, restoring the situation, apparently dear to voters, of a White House and Senate held by different parties. People are still waiting to see the tie-breaker. When it will come, nobody knows. Noemie Emery is a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard.
