Shootout In The Sun

Was Bush preparing himself for defeat? The appearance was deceiving. The Bush counter-attack came during a brief lull. On Saturday, lawyers stopped wrangling and turned to the most important local contest, the Florida-Florida State football game. Gore campaign chairman Bill Daley had time to go to his son's wedding at Blessed Sacrament Church in Washington (the so-called talking-head parish, because Chris Matthews, Mark Shields and Pat Buchanan occupy the pews). "I got a million cousins coming in," said a weary Daley.

Meanwhile, the Bush campaign was gearing up for an offensive. On Friday, Bush operatives got hold of a five-page letter, drafted by a Gore lawyer, with instructions on how to dispute absentee ballots from the military. Many letters home from military bases lacked postmarks. Most of these ballots were thrown out. The Bushies began to sense Democratic mischief when Duval County, with a large military population serving abroad, was slow to report its absentee ballots. When the Bush vote turned out to be much lower than expected in the morning, the Bushies launched their counterstrike. Governor Racicot, a former Army prosecutor, was chosen precisely because he was normally so amiable. When he re-entered the office at Bush headquarters Saturday afternoon after delivering his blast at the Democrats for disrespecting the armed forces, Bush aides stood and applauded.

What was Bush's role? Candidates are supposed to keep their distance from their more hard-edged surrogates. But Bush and Racicot are good friends, and they had dinner together Friday night. At dinner, it was Racicot who pushed Bush to take the evidence of voting abuses to the public. Bush turned to an aide and asked, "Why isn't he out there?" The Montana governor was said to be in line for a high post in a Bush administration. Racicot has endeared himself to Bush by being loyal--Bush's favorite quality--and by being low-key. Indeed, the TV networks generally avoid Racicot because he's not enough of a flamethrower. That may change: Sunday morning he was scheduled to appear on ABC's "This Week."

The battle was set to rage on this week on a number of fronts, all contentious and all important to the outcome. The Florida Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments on whether Harris abused her "discretion" by trying to cut off the hand counts in the three heavily Democratic counties. Florida's high court is stocked exclusively with Democratic appointees, and it has a reputation for liberal activism, which appeared to favor Gore. The crafty Boies was arguing that the judges are almost sure to approve hand counts. Why else would they be letting the vote go ahead, he asked, if they did not mean for the votes to be counted? But it also seemed possible that the judges wanted to watch the process work before rendering a judgment. If it took too long or seemed too unfair, the judges might have to throw out the manual recount--or, possibly, go the other way and order a statewide recount.

The early indications were that counting the three counties could take weeks, not the six to 10 days originally forecast. The pace was excruciatingly slow. Democratic operatives were accusing the Republicans of intentionally stalling and staging stunts, like getting the Sheriff's Office to sweep up loose chad on the floor to somehow suggest ballot tampering. Reports from Miami-Dade were that the county could take two to four weeks to recount its 654,000 votes. Challenges will abound: last week The Miami Herald reported that 39 convicted felons in Miami-Dade and Broward counties illegally cast absentee ballots. Most of them were Democrats. The newspaper interviewed a 50-year-old woman with a 15-year jail sentence for cocaine dealing who not only voted but served as a poll watcher. The Democrats were accusing Republican state officials of improperly helping absentee voters fill out their ballots, while Bush spokesman Karen Hughes was accusing the Democrats of distorting and sabotaging the vote count. Even if the Florida Supreme Court resolved these questions, the losers could appeal to the United States Supreme Court. While the justices would be reluctant to overrule the state court, they might conceivably step in if they believed a U.S. president had been chosen in a starkly unfair manner. The chaos and slow grinding of the legal gears raised the possibility that Florida would fail to finish by Dec. 18, the date every state's electors must cast their votes in the Electoral College. What if Florida's 25 electors hadn't been chosen? Would the Florida state legislature get into the act? Would the election be thrown to the House of Representatives, a possibility under the U.S. Constitution?

"We'll be lucky if we get this done before Congress convenes in January," said Lloyd Cutler, a lawyer who is known as one of the last Wise Men of the old Washington establishment. "It's like the Abbott and Costello skit--who's on first?" Cutler was already reading the law books to see what happens if the election winds up in Congress, a process no more certain to bring order and fairness than the workings of the Florida county election commissions. Eventually, America will have a new president. He may not have much of a mandate, and some, including foreign friends and foes, may question his legitimacy. But the republic will not fall. In the meantime, Americans were being treated to a heck of a show.

Eleanor Clift, Matt Bai, Mark Hosenball, Martha Brant, T. Trent Gegax, Debra Rosenberg, Joseph Contreras and Arian Campo-Flores

© 2000