BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'TOO CLOSE TO CALL'
( Too Close to Call: The 36-Day Battle to Decide the 2001 Election
by Jeffrey Toobin, 297 pages. Random House. $25.95)
Recounting That Recount, Detail by Detail by Detail
October 18, 2001
From The New York Times
By JANET MASLIN
A five-page chronological chart and a
dramatis personae of 95 names
appear at the start of Jeffrey Toobin's
dissection of the Florida recount in last
year's presidential election. That's an
indication of how complicated this account
becomes, in keeping with the wild seesawing
of the political battle itself. "It is a testament
to the surreal complexity of the litigation of
the election," Mr. Toobin writes, "that even
these lawyers had a hard time knowing if
they'd won or lost."
So his book offers a step-by-step
description of the process, from a keen
observer who makes no bones about his
bias. "The wrong man was inaugurated on
Jan. 20, 2001, and this is no small thing in
our nation's history," Mr. Toobin ultimately
writes. "The bell of this election can never be
unrung, and the sound will haunt us for some
time."
In practical terms, this means a
demonstration of how, while Vice President
Al Gore and his aides "were hunched over
their calculators, the Republicans were
breaking bar stools over their heads." To
support that thesis Mr. Toobin recreates and examines each critical juncture
of the white-knuckle, chad-counting combat and also provides damning trivia
to reinforce his point of view. The latter is hardly decisive. But being told that
Gov. George W. Bush was already in his pajamas just after 9 p.m., when the
deciding Supreme Court ruling was delivered, or that Wayne Newton was
brought in to thank Republican workers with a rendition of "Danke Schoen"
does heighten the book's sense of injustice.
To be sure Mr. Toobin can be hard on the Gore team as well. It is his
contention that their crucial failing was their reluctance to ask for a full
67-county recount instead of concentrating only on Broward, Miami- Dade,
Palm Beach and Duval Counties after Florida's race proved so
extraordinarily tight. And he ascribes that reluctance to the fact that "the
Gore campaign was hobbled by its blind faith in elite opinion."
"Ironically but fittingly, Gore chose the limited recount to ingratiate himself
with Washington — and crippled himself in the course of that futile attempt,"
he writes. Mr. Gore was sadly burdened with "an internal censor so strong
that it wiped out not only the killer instinct but also the fighting spirit." Still,
Mr. Toobin never deviates from a sense of bullying Republican swagger and
decent Democrats who operated on a higher plane.
"Too Close to Call" looks so closely into the post-election struggle that the
reader can learn how Mr. Gore nearly called on Erin Brockovich for help
(because she had organized a large group of citizens to file a lawsuit). And it
notes that James A. Baker III was called away from a prospective pheasant
hunting trip in Europe with former President George Bush, Dick Cheney and
the retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf when Mr. Baker's Machiavellian
services were needed on the Florida front. The little details — when one of
Mr. Gore's lawyers declared, "You know, I would take a bullet for that guy,"
his colleagues remained notably silent — are welcome in Mr. Toobin's
otherwise somewhat remote examination of the fight.
In his earlier books about l'affaire Lewinsky ("A Vast Conspiracy") and
especially the O. J. Simpson trial ("The Run of His Life") Mr. Toobin faced
no difficulty in bringing events and personalities to life. They were all too
lively on their own. Yet this book, while dealing with matters that were
all-important to the nation less than a year ago, has more difficulty achieving
that kind of vitality. The arcane particulars of the on-and-off recounts, along
with the constantly shifting fortunes of the two groups of combatants, have
the inevitable effect of making this story a knotty one.
So does the need for thumbnail sketches of those 95 people who played
roles in the real-life drama. Yet not even the most memorable aspects of the
confrontation, like the surreal television images of chad- counting teams
hunched over ballots, emerge sharply from the book's dense legal minutiae.
And the most important twists and turns of the post-election period remain
too recent and well examined to be cast in a substantially new light. What
does seem new and holds the most interest is Mr. Toobin's
behind-the-scenes glimpses into the thinking processes of those involved.
The book describes pivotal tactics, as when it considers the Republican
position of insisting that no more vote counting was necessary after an initial
recount had taken place. "We need a P.R. strategy," he reports that Mr.
Baker said, in response to the Democrats' simple insistence on making sure
each vote be counted. "We're getting killed on `Count all the votes.' Who the
hell could be against that?"
In principle, nobody could. Yet "Too Close to Call" shows how furiously and
desperately even our most basic voting precepts could be subverted, from
that first suggestion of Mr. Baker's all the way to the Supreme Court. "The
justices," Mr. Toobin asserts bitterly about the political partisanship of their
final ruling, "had apparently taken to voting in court just as they had in their
voting booths on Election Day."
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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