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Gore Scrounges for Florida Votes
Insight on the News, Dec 18, 2000 by Jennifer G. Hickey
The Gore campaign was well-prepared beforehand for a vote recount in Florida and immediately put into play its no-holds-barred strategy to spin the vote total around in Gore's favor.
As this is written, we do not know who will be the next president," the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal declared on Nov. 9, 1960, as the nation awaited results in the presidential contest between Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Vice President Richard M. Nixon. The closeness of that 1960 race and the undeniable fraud were followed by the manly response of Nixon. What a far cry that was from the lachrymose Chinese opera now surrounding Al Gore and George W. Bush as history no longer is being repeated but reshaped.
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Despite allegations of Democratic election fraud, particularly in Texas and Chicago, where former senator Lyndon Johnson and the family of former mayor Richard J. Daley were past masters at political pilfering, the Nixon campaign surmised that legal challenges would, in the end, be fruitless. The Gore campaign saw the landscape differently. In fact, it produced a "Chad"-aquiddick drama that has cast a cloud over the Sunshine State's 25 electoral votes -- something which may have been foreseen by Gore when he chose Richard J. Daley's son, William Daley, to be his campaign manager.
The pattern was there. From the hyperactive get-out-the-vote effort launched by the Democratic National Committee and such sympathetic interest groups as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and organized labor, the ward-healing Democrats were well ahead of their more inhibited GOP rivals. With Gore unable to gin up enough energy with his policy lectures and high-spirited, pulpit-pounding pronouncements, the party stepped up its effort to scour every county, district and precinct in search of Gore voters who might be bused, wheeled or carried drooling to the polls. Churches, schools, homeless shelters, mental asylums, nursing homes and even prisons were seen as housing potential voters to do their bit for the veep.
With Florida long-targeted as a battleground state, its elderly population was as vital to the Democratic campaign as it had been in re-electing Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles in 1994. Labor unions offered warehouses to set up phone banks from which calls were made decrying the Texas governor's alleged plans to turn seniors over to Dr. Jack Kevorkian or take away their bingo cards. In response to this scorched-earth strategy, the Republicans seemed content simply to contain the fires -- and, come Election Day, Florida was fully in play.
Seniors were collected by Democratic Party vote wranglers and driven to the polling places as union officials, taking the day off, worked frenetically to ensure their appearance. The black churches collected newly registered faithful in buses and did the same. But therein lay a pitfall of the get-out-the-vote strategy: You can lead a voter to a punchcard (and tell him which hole to punch) but you can't punch it for him.
As the Florida contest was called, recalled, called again and inspected, the political campaigns concentrated on their postelection strategies. The usual Republican second-guessers were quick to find reporters willing to quote them as flogging the Bush campaign in Florida. Among these, alas, was Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott whose own political wisdom is hardly recommended by the impotence of the GOP strategies during the Senate impeachment trial and the frittering away of Republican advantage in the Senate. Meanwhile, Democrats were moving the battle from the court of public opinion to the courts of Democrat-appointed judges.
Confirming their candidate's earlier assertion that he would do anything to win the presidency, Gore's forces started making calls from phone banks around the country to complain of alleged voting irregularities in Florida, particularly in the three Democrat-heavy counties of Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach.
As reported by Ryan Lizza in the pro-Gore New Republic magazine, the Gore staff had been "putting together a team of field operatives and lawyers to fan across Florida in search of voter irregularities" and "sent top recount experts" to Florida to watch what they expected to be a close election. According to Lizza, soon heading the recount charge was Chris Sautter, a Democratic activist who not only authored a 1994 book titled The Recount Primer but was on a plane to Florida the morning after the election to put his words into action for Gore.
Ironically, one of the first races in which Sautter's strategies for recount counterattack were used was the 1994 Maryland gubernatorial race in which Democrat Parris Glendening fought off a recount challenge from his GOP opponent Ellen Sauerbrey. The Democratic legal eagles who flew in for that one had argued for dismissal of her complaint on the ground that she allegedly had missed the deadline for contesting the qualifications of unqualified voters and disputed absentee ballots.
