Shootout In The Sun

The tumult was too overwhelming for Gore campaign spokesman Chris Lehane. When a local radio reporter followed him into a men's room at the Palm Beach airport and thrust a mike in his face as he stood at the urinal, Lehane decided to retreat to Washington. Still, the Democrats seemed to warm more easily to this roiled scene than the Bush campaign. The Democratic machine in Massachusetts parachuted dozens of veteran operatives, from Kennedy aides to the deputy mayor of Boston, into Palm Beach. Denied office space in Republican-run county buildings, they set up shop in a dented, rusted-out Winnebago--"something out of 'The Partridge Family'," joked one--across the street. Ron Klain, the Gore-ites' legal captain, tapped his old professor from Harvard Law, Larry Tribe, to fashion constitutional arguments. The big Democratic catch was David Boies, possibly the best trial lawyer in the country. Dressed in his trademark black knit tie and inexpensive blue suit, the man who successfully sued to break up Microsoft for the Justice Department was racing from court to court and camera to camera last week, spinning and arguing with disarming charm, while rushing out three times a day for his favorite snack, frozen yogurt. Diet magnate Daniel Abraham, the chairman of Slim-Fast and a major Democratic donor, provided his private jet to ferry around the Democrats' legal team.

In her cramped, over-air-conditioned office at Republican National Committee headquarters, Barbara Comstock watched the Gore juggernaut with alarm. During the campaign, Comstock and her team of "opposition researchers" had fed the press a steady stream of e-mails documenting Gore's exaggerations and "lies." More than anyone, Comstock's team had succeeded in establishing Gore's reputation as a truth-stretcher. Comstock's group pestered the Bush campaign to fight harder. But the Austin Powers had always scoffed at the free advice coming from Washington, and seemed a little slow to react to the severity of Gore's challenge in Florida. Not until the Thursday after the election did Bush get his own superlawyer, Theodore Olson, on a plane to Florida. A close friend of Monica Lewinsky prosecutor Ken Starr's, Olson is a hardened veteran of Washington's partisan legal wars. His clients include Ronald Reagan and, briefly, Starr's chief witness in the Whitewater controversy, Judge David Hale. His wife, Barbara, is well known as a fearsome blond right-wing TV pundit. By the time Olson entered the fray, his options were limited. He challenged the manual recount in federal court, but his odds of success were always long: federal courts generally do not like to second-guess state courts on election matters like ballot counts. By midweek, a weary Olson was back on a plane to Washington, to get fresh clothes for the long siege and feed his dogs (one of whom is named Ronald Reagan).

Some local Republican operatives were disheartened. "Of course I'm frustrated. They've outsmarted us," groused Reeve Bright, chief counsel to the Palm Beach County Republican Party. Republicans weren't playing hardball like the Democrats, he complained, and had muffed a chance to pick up votes by failing to demand hand counts in counties with a GOP edge. (The Republicans had missed the deadline of 72 hours after the polls closed.) Bright dismissed the Republicans' legal challenge in federal court as too little, too late. "I was talking to one of our guys up there [in Tallahassee], and he said to me, 'This will muss up their hair.' I said to him, 'Muss up their hair? Are you kidding? They've got blood all over the table here, pal'."

Bright wanted to fight "fire with fire." He had come across evidence that the crusty, tough-talking Carol Roberts, one of the three commissioners on the board overseeing the vote, had been soliciting campaign contributions for the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, Bill Nelson. He had a letter from Roberts to a local businessman stating that she had the "distinct honor" to host a Nelson fund-raiser. Bright was ecstatic: a provision in the local election code appears to bar election overseers from being "active participants" in any election they might have to certify. Bright wanted to go to court to disqualify Roberts. But up in Tallahassee, the GOP legal honchos said no. They didn't want to seem to be taking "the low road," said Bright. He complained that he couldn't even get the Bush campaign on the phone. The Bush lawyers were too busy writing high-minded legal briefs, he said, while the Gore forces were all over Palm Beach. "This is the frickin' ground game right here," said Bright. "They ought to know where the booty is."

How long--and how hard--to fight for the "booty" (the votes) is up to the candidates themselves. According to one top Gore campaign operative, the "hardest of the hard-liners are the two candidates," Gore and Lieberman. The two men, who somewhat ostentatiously took their wives to see the new movie "Men of Honor" last week, seem to be relishing the fight. Gore has set up a war room in the dining room of the vice president's mansion. On Thursday, he came up with a showy gambit to seize the moral high ground. Gore is a close reader of The New York Times editorial page, which has been advocating a statewide recount and a public summit between the two candidates to reassure the nation. Gore decided to go on national TV--right in the middle of the nightly news--and offer a deal: he would drop all lawsuits if Bush agreed to abide by the results of a statewide recount. He called for a good-will meeting with Bush and generally did his best to appear statesmanlike. The offer was an old Gore ploy: propose a reasonable-sounding deal you're sure your opponent will reject. (He had done the same with Bill Bradley during the primaries, suggesting they forgo 30-second ads and debate every week.) When Gore was done, he went back to work, phoning the editorial-page editor of The Miami Herald to personally press his case. (Tom Fiedler was so disbelieving that he had the veep on the line that he almost hung up. Gore had to put Tipper on the line to convince him.)

Down in Texas, Bush seemed to be caught off guard by Gore's offer. He was out at his beloved 1,500-acre ranch and had to drive nearly two hours back into Austin to face the cameras. After saying no to Gore, he got right back into his car and headed out to the ranch. He sleeps better there, his aides say. He and Laura are busily finishing their comfortable but low-key ranch house. According to architect David Heymann, Bush's no-nonsense wife, Laura, had one guiding caution: "Is it pretentious?" Friends said the Bushes have taken a calm "if it's meant to happen..." approach to the waiting game. During a recent interview with NEWSWEEK, Laura explained, "Both of us have a lot of peace about our lives." On election night, when a pool reporter asked Bush how it felt to have his future in the balance, he quickly corrected, "My whole future isn't on the line." Asked the same question about his brother, Jeb Bush reiterated the point. "My brother's life is in good shape," he said.