Down and Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency
By Jake Tapper
Little, Brown, 514 pages, $24.95
More than 180,000 Americans — 180,111 to be exact — cast ballots in Florida on Nov. 7 only to have them discarded, never counted. That was about 335 times the number of votes (537) by which George W. Bush led Al Gore in Florida at the time the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the state’s court-ordered recount, thus allotting Florida’s electoral votes to Bush and making him president.
These events took place along the way:
(1) On the basis of exit polls conducted by a single organization, the TV networks prematurely called Florida for Bush, led by the network whose chief vote-tabulating analyst, John Ellis, is the cousin of Bush and his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, creating a presumption lasting for weeks that Bush was the victor.
(2) A legally mandated recount in Miami-Dade County was cut short in part under the pressure of a stormy demonstration led by Republican operatives, including acts of physical violence directed against Democrats.
(3) Several county recounts were disallowed by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a former co-chair of the Bush campaign who, while in office, proved wholly inattentive to technical obstacles placed in the way of would-be voters, many of whom were (surprise!) black, and who hired a Republican-controlled firm to purge felons from the state’s voter rolls-a lawful move that resulted in a number of non-felons being mistakenly purged and given no chance to correct the error.
(4) Not a single disallowed ballot was examined by the conservative state judge who ate up several recount days-a judge who was feuding with the Democratic-controlled state Supreme Court.
Not least of all, (5) a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court-one of whose members had shouted out at an Election Night party, on hearing CBS’ Dan Rather call Florida for Gore, ” ‘This is terrible,’ ” and of which two other members had close relatives working for Bush-maintained that the principle of equal protection, a principle not previously of interest to them in voting matters, required that state procedures be interrupted and that the recount be stopped.
Meanwhile, (6) enough military absentee ballots arrived after Election Day to affect the outcome, those numbers swelling in the course of the week after Election Day, from 446 on Monday, Nov. 13, to a total of 3,733 by Friday, Nov. 17.
These six points are well-substantiated and not controversial. But the sixth is emphasized by Jake Tapper, who, having covered the ill-starred presidential campaign for salon.com, suggests in his new book, “Down and Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency,” that the surprising boom in late-coming absentee ballots might be accounted for by a Republican conference call on Nov. 10 or 11 that (so he was told by “a knowledgeable Republican operative”) “discussed having political operatives abroad and near military bases encourage certain soldiers who had registered to vote-but hadn’t yet done so-to fill out their ballots and send them in.”
Perhaps this happened, perhaps not. (Those who would know refused to return Tapper’s calls. One, Warren Tompkins, chief strategist in Bush’s “smear” campaign against John McCain in South Carolina’s primary election, once told reporters:
“‘ We play it different down here . . . We’re not dainty, if you get my drift. We’re used to playin’ rough.’ ” ) But don’t judge Tapper by his stab at a scoop. Not content to sniff at an anonymously reported gun whose smoke might well smell interesting, he racked up thousands of frequent-flier miles, wore out notebooks and tape-recorders, pounded palm-frond-strewn pavements and, in some kind of record time, came up with an outpouring of reportage, a churning effusion well worth reading, a book that is variously thorough and petty — a first draft of a feat of reporting that, for all its flaws, must still be read because the truth it contains along the way is simply devastating.
As James Baker might say, Tapper reports and reports and reports again. He reports the tick-tock of events where they are gripping and important (the on-again, off-again Miami-Dade recount), and, alas, where they are neither (many court sequences). He reports Democrats’ tripping over their own count-every-vote slogan — despite their admirable and unobjectionable defense of Florida law’s straightforward insistence that the vote-counting standard ought to be “the clear intent of the voter” — when they try to throw out absentee ballots in Seminole and Martin Counties that benefited from the help of Republican officials (no fault of the voters, however). He reports Republicans’ overlooking violations of law when they sniff GOP ballots, and Democrats’ doing the equivalent. Tapper, infrequently impressed with honesty or intelligence, has plenty of disgust to go around — not least of all for gullible reporters. None of the powers that collided in Florida was purely principled. He has evidence, he has logic, and usually the evidence and logic he cites are important.
For all his reportorial prowess, though, Tapper makes a better wise guy than wise man. He’s frequently juvenile. He likes to play good ol’ boy, which he thinks can be done with profanity, vulgarity and smirking out loud. He makes attitude do too much work for him. But when it comes to the central question of why “Bush seems to get away with his rank hypocrisies” he throws up his hands: “I have no idea why.” No idea? The least we should ask of a political journalist is that he figure out why — or figure out why he can’t figure out why.
On the other hand, Tapper’s callowness has its brassy-bright side. He is refreshingly blunt. He tells us that Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer “is known by reporters to have an on-again, off-again relationship with the truth.” U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) is a “loud-mouthed former fire chief.” Palm Beach County Democratic Party Chairman Monte Friedkin “seems obnoxious and rude . . . under the impression that he’s quite impressive.” During the South Carolina primary, Bush “sank lower in the mud than any major presidential candidate in more than a generation.” Tapper says he hated covering the Bush and Gore campaigns, which he calls “nakedly ambitious, morally ambiguous, and essentially empty.” Baker, the former secretary of state who ran Bush’s post-election Florida operations, was “duplications” (Tapper means “duplicitous” — a poor spot for a typo). Republicans like Gov. Marc Racicot of Montana were “lying, fibbing, exaggerating, and insinuating,” creating “a goulash of truth, lies, and innuendo” when they trashed a lawful hand-recount process, and later when they tried to maximize the absentee vote even when dubiously cast. During judicial hearings over the recount, Bush lawyer Theodore Olson (soon to be nominated to be U.S. solicitor general) commits “one of the more dishonest bits of lawyering in a scandal with more than its share coming full tilt from every side.” These are not idle insults: Tapper supplies details in mind-choking abundance (though his claim to have caught Gore “babbling untruths” at one point does not hold up). More-seasoned Washington reporters disdain flat-out spade-calling. Tapper deserves credit.
Then, just when Tapper has won your sympathy with his dogged, valuable reporting and principled outrage, he goes on, and on, reproducing the recount fog with a trivia fog of his own, including long sequences about court proceedings and vote-counting with no point or drama.
And Tapper does himself no good when he misspells names — not a hanging matter, but not a tiny one either for a book whose usefulness rests on scrupulous reporting (It’s Tony Coelho, not Coehlo; Ronnie Dugger, not Duggers; and Thruston Morton, not Thurston). To paraphrase Mark Twain, Tapper must have a better, shorter book in him, but didn’t have time to write it. Still and all, the one he did write remains something to be grateful for in a disgraceful time.
Was the Florida contest, in Tapper’s words, “a war between thieves?” Was there, as his subtitle states, a “plot”? Power plays and lies abounded, but one plot — as opposed to contending strategies? On the strength of his evidence, the answer is: not proved. The subtitle is no more than a tease, although Tapper tries to rescue it by roping everyone — including you, reader — into the act, as if voter complacency and inexperience, and bad ballot design, were the moral equivalents of lying and shabby judicial decision-making. It’s his flabbiest moment. This equal-opportunity blame game is a juvenile dodge, and on the strength of Tapper’s own evidence, an unnecessary one.
Forget about the “plot” of all against all. The decisive truth that Tapper establishes, for all his mess and excess, is that the Republicans won, finally, because they controlled the apparatus in Florida and Washington that enabled them to intervene decisively: Secretary of State Harris, Gov. Jeb Bush, the state Legislature and most of the relevant courts.
Both sides schemed, but the Republicans schemed better and had bigger battalions to call on. Neither side stuck to scruples. (A high-level Gore official whom Tapper calls “Strep Throat” put out the unproved story of an unseemly relationship between Harris and Jeb Bush.) More power corrupted more — much more. “It may well be,” Tapper writes at one juncture, “that the biggest difference between Bush and Gore at this point is that Bush has a Katherine Harris, and Gore doesn’t.”
In the end, Bush had more than Harris to help his cause. Ultimately, the biggest difference was who commanded the loyalty of the five voters who mattered most: Justices Kennedy, O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas.
