Weathering the Storm: Final days of a Bushie - W

National Review, Dec 4, 2000 by Jay Nordlinger

Election Day in Austin dawned dark and stormy.

Well, it did. The previous day, Monday, had been beautiful-a touch of Texas fall. But this was a gloomy, ominous day.

I went in to work around noon-no sense coming in earlier, I'd been told. Election Morning is always a funny, jittery period-there are little rumors, little anecdotes ("My Aunt Bess said turnout was big in Rochester"), but nothing solid. Nothing even remotely solid.

I'd been in Austin since mid September, having taken a leave from National Review. Had come to write speeches. And I was hopeful we were going to win. In fact, I thought we were going to win, and pretty comfortably.

Besides which: Bush was going to make a fine president-maybe even an extraordinary one. If for Social Security reform alone, it was important that he win. Then there was respect for the rule of law and all that.

When I got to the office, people were in a state of nervous anticipation. At about one o'clock, we got some preliminary figures: Neck and neck in Florida. ("That's good! The Panhandle votes late-and they're our people.") Three down in Pennsylvania. ("That's good too!" I wasn't sure why, but I trusted it was.) Badly down in Michigan. That, we'd expected. We'd been going south there for the last few days.

Stupid Michigan (my home state).

By late afternoon, it was clear we wouldn't have a blowout-maybe a nice, solid win, but not a blowout. Nothing of (senior) Bush 1988 proportions, which I'd anticipated-though quietly.

Of course, I'd been worried about the Zogby poll. On Election Eve, he showed Gore up, by two points. Some of us were thinking that Zogby'd be embarrassed, tarnished, on Election Day-"the Chicago Tribune of 2000"! (That paper, of course, had been the one that blared "Dewey Defeats Truman.") Boy, would he have egg on his face! And wasn't he polling in the daytime, when people-our people, working people, people busy doing useful things-weren't home?

Yeah, but he wasn't an idiot, Zogby. I mean, he could adjust for that. And he might be right.

Before long, we could see that the election was very, very . . . "tight." That was our word for it, the word of the night: tight. Michigan was still bad; Pennsylvania didn't look so hot; but Florida was okay, and that was the ball game. We'd have preferred a triumphant march through the states, but, hey: As I'd heard Jack Germond say a hundred times on The McLaughlin Group, when you win, you win-mandate, schmandate. No one remembers the margin. There's a winner and there's a loser-and the winner governs.

We had a couple of things on our schedule that evening: a reception for staff and friends, at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel, a few blocks from the (beautiful, majestic, red-granite) capitol; then the outdoor celebration in front of the capitol, where Governor Bush-no, President- elect Bush!-would give his victory speech (a model of humility and graciousness). We-certainly I-expected the speech to come shortly after ten o'clock, our time, after the polls had closed on the West Coast.

Decency would at last return to Washington. The Clinton-Gore poison would finally be flushed out.

Not wanting to hang around the office-just being nervous with colleagues and glancing at television-I headed for the reception at the hotel-to be nervous with colleagues and glance at television. The place was packed with celebrants, or would-be celebrants; a dozen TVs were spaced around two rooms, tuned to various channels.

As the returns came in, I began to wonder what had gone . . . you know: wrong. Well, not exactly wrong, but not exactly swimmingly. Someone said that the "late-breakers"-those voters who made up their minds at the last minute-had gone heavily to Gore. A substantial portion of them cited as their reason: DUI.

That stupid drunk-driving thing. This was the Democrats' ultimate dirty trick (if you don't count stealing the election, but more on that later). The report was true, of course: Bush had been pulled over in 1976. But it was still a dirty trick, as every sensitive mind realizes. A friend of mine put it this way: On the Thursday before the election, you spring on the public that your opponent, 24 years ago-a quarter of a century ago, is the other way to put it-saw a psychiatrist. (Shades of Eagleton.) He is perfectly well now. Moreover, he has spoken repeatedly of his past troubles, though in a fairly general way, and of his gratitude at overcoming them.

Your report is true. But is it also a dirty trick? Sure.

We also heard that there had been an immense black turnout, making the difference in several states. When, I wondered, would Republicans learn to talk to black voters? And what should they say? Same thing they say to everyone else, I should think. I would fall over dead-of joy-if some candidate, somewhere, spoke to a black audience about . . . missile defense. Why not? They're Americans, too, and they're presumably interested in being protected from nuclear attack.

Of course, we had faced the most hideous tactics the Democrats could scare up. Their ads all but accused Bush of lynching a black man in Texas. Gore went around campaigning with the dead man's sister. (Our vice president knows that subtle politics is for fools.) He suggested that our judicial philosophy was a throwback to slavery. Janet Reno-in a reprise of her 1998 trick-pretended that Republicans were about to suppress the black vote. You know: We were just sitting there at the polling places, waiting to demand of black voters that they guess the number of beans in a jar.