Forward-Looking Democrats
JOHN FUND'S POLITICAL DIARY
opinionjournal.com
Forward-Looking Democrats
For Gore, the 2000 campaign goes on. His allies care more about 2002 and 2004.
Monday, December 4, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST
"Al Gore won the popular vote. I did my job. I did get that vote out. Unfortunately, I didn't get to count it."
--Donna Brazile, Gore campaign manager
If Democrats have their way, Ms. Brazile will sort of get her wish.
Many Democrats privately concede that Mr. Gore will not become president. But by creating enough doubts about a Bush victory, they may make it impossible for George W. Bush to govern effectively.
Gore allies are waging cool, calculated campaign to win enough legal skirmishes so that the GOP-controlled Florida Legislature and Congress are forced to take the political heat and step in to ratify the choice of Mr. Bush as president. Already the Miami Herald has conducted a dubious study of Florida's ballots that "proves" that "Gore would have had the edge in glitch-free Florida balloting." More such studies are sure to follow.
The likely result: a poisoning of public opinion, the creation of a climate of illegitimacy around the nascent Bush administration, and a rewriting of the history of the 2000 election. Then Democrats may run a permanent "We wuz robbed!" campaign to seize control of Congress in 2002 and then the White House in 2004.
The campaign to paint the Bush presidency as illegitimate began in earnest last Monday. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle flew to Florida to say it would be "tragic" if the country learned months from now that Mr. Gore had actually won more votes in Florida. "That's in large part our message today," Mr. Daschle said.
It was also the Democratic message on this weekend's talk shows. "Somebody's going back and recounting those ballots under Freedom of Information Act rules, and eventually we'll find out who actually won," House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt told NBC's "Meet the Press."
But as always it was James Carville who laid it on thick. He told an incredulous CNN "Capital Gang" panel Saturday that "we're going to have the wrong guy in the presidency because these votes are going to be counted under the Florida sunshine law. When they are, everybody knows Gore got the most votes. And so we're going to have the embarrassing prospect of having a president who's legally in office but he really wasn't elected." Mr. Carville even hinted at an O.J. Simpson analogy: "When you saw that Ryder truck going [down the highway], there was DNA in that truck. We know what the DNA evidence is."
The O.J. reference is apt, because Mr. Gore has assembled the most aggravating crew of trial lawyers and witnesses since Johnny Cochran's "dream team" won that infamous acquittal in Los Angeles. Saturday's Tallahassee hearing before Judge L. Sanders Sauls featured overcombative Gore lawyer Stephen Zack. After he badgered an expert witness about his credentials, ABC News reports, "Zack was unceremoniously cut short by a red-faced Judge Sauls, who furiously pointed out the attorney was not asking relevant questions and told him to sit down in no uncertain terms." Later Mr. Zack resumed his objections. Judge Sauls overruled him again and again, so many times that Gore lawyer David Boies finally had to lean over and gently push his co-counsel back into his chair.
Two of the Gore campaign's expert witnesses fared little better and were quickly exposed as amateurs. Elections expert Kimball Brace's favorite expression during cross-examination was "I don't know."
Statistician Nicolas Hengartner of Quebec was revealed to have submitted inaccurate information in a court affidavit he filed in an attempt to prove that he had found an uneven distribution of "undervotes"-- ballots showing no vote for president--in Florida. Only 0.3 percent of votes were not recorded in counties that used optical scanning devices, he testified, compared to 1.5 percent in counties that used punch cards. "Simply put," Hengartner said, "the problem lies not with the people but with the voting machines."
But problems with voting machines--or voters--weren't limited to Democratic counties such as Palm Beach, which not only used punch cards but has a large immigrant and elderly population:
• A Miami Herald survey of 12 Florida counties found that at least 445 felons illegally voted for president, and more than 75% of the voting felons were registered as Democrats. Extrapolated statewide, the Herald said, that would mean 5,000 illegal felon votes. (The survey covered all votes in Palm Beach and Pasco counties, most votes in Duval County and absentee votes only in nine other counties.)
• The Washington Post notes that Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, had 27,000 spoiled ballots (9.23% of its total). The Post says that while Mr. Bush carried Duval with 58% of the vote, the spoiled ballots were concentrated in African-American sections of downtown Jacksonville. True enough, but those precincts have small populations so they don't make up anywhere near a majority of the spoilage. Fully 16,650 of the spoiled votes came in districts Mr. Bush carried by more than 2 to 1. That explains why the Gore people aren't calling for a recount of Duval. In addition, several GOP-leaning counties that used optical scanning machines but tabulated their votes at a central location rather than the precinct itself had spoilage rates that were higher than those in punch-card counties.
• The Washington Post has pointed out that some of the Florida counties with the highest rates of invalidated ballots--Hamilton, Hendry, Lafayette, Gulf--were won by Mr. Bush. Charlotte and Collier counties, which both voted 2 to 1 for Mr. Bush, had 6,500 spoiled ballots.
Curtis Gans, who heads the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, notes that this year about 2.5 million ballots nationally didn't register a choice for president. He says there are inequities in all forms of ballot recounting and it would be "an irrelevant exercise" to recount votes only in Florida. In Oregon, which Al Gore won by only 6,000 votes, there were 30,000 ballots with no presidential vote. In New Mexico, which Gore won by fewer than 400 votes, there were 6,000 such ballots. The recounting, once started everywhere, would never end.
Pat Caddell, a Florida native who has been a top pollster to Jimmy Carter, Mario Cuomo and Gary Hart, calls the statistical games the Gore people and their media allies are playing "a misrepresentation of what actually happens in real-world politics. It's not reality."
Mr. Caddell has examined the Miami Herald statistical study that purports to show Gore would have won the state by 23,000 votes "in an election where every ballot is fully filled out and every one of those ballots gets counted." He says the study is "riddled with assumptions you cannot make and rejects anomalies that don't agree with its conclusions." He points out, for example, that the Herald admits its study lacked data on undervotes for 30 out of Florida's 67 counties.
"I've spent my life arguing with statistics professors who, like macroeconomic modelers, don't understand that in the real world individual behavior is so much more complicated than the raw numbers they use," Mr. Caddell told me.
"If you tell me that if you were to put a gun to the head of everyone in the country and force them to vote that Gore would have won, I'll buy that. But our system requires people to cast a valid ballot." says Mr. Caddell. "Some people spoiled their ballot, some people got confused, some voted once and then wrote in their candidate's name again. Some people simply didn't vote for president."
Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, agrees. "Only legal votes matter. In our system, woulda, shoulda, coulda doesn't matter."
It's true that Mr. Gore sincerely believes he won the election. But his Democratic allies are thinking ahead. "This is as much about the 2002 and 2004 elections as it is about this year's election," a Northeastern Democratic congressman told me. Democrats see a real chance to take both houses of Congress in two years, especially if their base voters believe they were robbed of the presidency. They also cheerfully note that all three presidents--John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison--who fell short of a popular-vote plurality served only one term. (Adams and Harrison were defeated by the men they had beaten four years earlier; Hayes did not seek re-election.)
That's why Democrats are spending so much time on revisionist history. They know they likely will end up with a losing hand in Florida's courtrooms. Even Warren Chistopher, the vice president's top point man on the Florida recounts, nodded in that direction on CBS's "Face the Nation" yesterday. In discussing Gore's possible concession, he used illuminating grammar: "It's late innings, but the contest is not over. I can assure you that the vice president, when the time comes, will concede in a very gracious way. He understands his obligations to the people of the country."
Al Gore is indeed likely to concede. But will his scorched-earth campaign leave President-elect Bush with a Pyrrhic prize? If so, will Mr. Gore have put the interests of his party above the good of the country? |
