Jeffrey Toobin writes in this 2001 book:
* The Eighth Congressional District in Indiana stretches along the southwestern corner of the state, from the university town of Bloomington to the industrial city of Evansville. The district had been so evenly balanced between Democrats and Republicans that it elected four different congressmen in four consecutive elections in the 1970s. In 1984, the incumbent Democrat, Frank McCloskey, was seeking his first re-election against an aggressive challenge from a Republican named Richard McIntyre. The election-night totals put McCloskey ahead by 72 votes, but it quickly became apparent that the votes in one precinct had been counted twice. When the votes were retallied, McIntyre was ahead by 34. A recount—and a political war—followed.
An army of Washington lawyers trooped out to the district for the battle, and young Ben Ginsberg wound up leading the Republican crusade. (The Democrats included Chris Sautter, who would later co-author The Recount Primer with Jack Young.) The recount showed McIntyre ahead by 418 votes, and the Indiana secretary of state certified the Republican victory, but the Democratic House, led by a rising star named Tony Coelho (later Gore’s campaign chairman), refused to seat McIntyre. In January, when the new Congress began work, “Indiana 8” was left vacant while the Democrats scrambled for a new way to count the votes. The House majority set up a task force to “study” the election results, a process that dragged on until April. Ultimately, the House voted along straight party lines to certify the Democrat, McCloskey, as the winner by 4 votes. As even many Democrats would acknowledge later, it was as close to an outright theft as had occurred in modern American political history.
Newt Gingrich said that the fight over Indiana 8 marked a turning point in the radicalization of the Republican minority in the House. (At the time, Representative Dick Cheney, of Wyoming, said of the recount battle, “I think we ought to go to war. There’s unanimity. We need bold and dramatic action.”) In a broad sense, Indiana 8 helped convince an entire generation of Republicans in Washington that the Democratic Party was not just politically misguided but fundamentally cynical and deeply corrupt. Fights like this one set the rhetorical tone of the Gingrich years in the House, and the Republican air of moral certainty had only grown stronger through the Clinton years and into the election of 2000. In a way, there was a bracing absence of cynicism in the Republican style of this era. Whether the subject was Monica Lewinsky or the vote in Florida, Ginsberg and his colleagues operated at a sustained pitch of perpetual outrage.
“Recounts change lives,” Ginsberg would often say. Indiana 8 changed his. Ginsberg’s anger over the Democrats’ tactics in that race turned him from a part-time volunteer to a full-time Republican Party activist, and he spent the next decade as the general counsel to various campaign committees, leading up to the Republican National Committee. In 1993, he joined the large lobbying firm of Patton Boggs, but he kept a close hand in party activities. He signed on early with George W. Bush’s campaign. Over the years, Ginsberg’s once-full head of hair retreated to a few wisps around a bald dome, but his passion never faded. As he listened to the honeyed phrases come forth from the Democrats on the Today show (“Count all the votes”), Ginsberg knew it was time once again, in Dick Cheney’s words, to go to war.
* Al Gore turned into the Ancient Mariner of the Florida recount, the man who couldn’t stop talking about his plight. There was an almost compulsive quality to his lobbying of the press. He called network anchormen, substitute network anchormen, and weekend network anchormen, not to mention cable personalities, newspaper columnists, and the editorial board of his beloved New York Times. Yet, as so often was the case, he never proved a very successful messenger. From Election Day forward, Gore had believed the Washington conventional wisdom that the public would quickly run out of patience with the recount. This turned out to be largely false. Throughout his effort to count the votes, Gore maintained remarkable popularity despite the many crises of the period—even through the “military”-absentee-voting controversy and the certification of the election by Katherine Harris. True, the numbers of people supporting Gore’s efforts dropped in early December, falling to around 40 percent in most polls. But notwithstanding the predictions, there was never a hemorrhage of support. The recount cause inspired loyalty, even if Gore himself did not.
The vice president’s neediness seemed to inspire a degree of contempt from those who interviewed him. On CBS’s 60 Minutes, on Sunday, December 3, Lesley Stahl practically baited Gore. “You’re not really reaching the public with this argument,” she informed him. “You’ve been making it over and over: ‘Every vote has to be counted.’ There is more of a sense that you’re asking, you know, to change the rules of the game. Can you go on if you lose the public?” Gore responded in his by now familiar singsong style: “The public, I think, has shown a remarkable amount of patience and a determination to see that all the votes are counted. Of course, it is split . . .”
“But it’s slipping. It’s slipping,” Stahl said.
“Well, you know, I—this isn’t easy for—for any of us in this country,” he replied. “And I know that the Bush family, same as my family, is wanting this to be over, and I—and I know the American family wants it to be over. But as strongly as people feel about that, they feel even more strongly that every legally cast vote should be counted.” The “count all the votes” theme had less visceral impact than “we wuz robbed,” but the cautious vice president would never allow the latter sentiment to pass his lips.
If Gore’s mission looked like a lonely crusade, that’s because it was. The vice president’s political operation in Washington belatedly brought together surrogates to speak for him in Florida, but it was a halfhearted endeavor on both ends. Gore didn’t have the kind of relationships with elected officials in which he felt comfortable asking them to go to Florida, and in turn, few Democratic politicians felt like putting themselves out for Gore. The Bush team, by contrast, ran its surrogates’ program out of Tallahassee and came up with more than a dozen names to fill a white marker board every day. “CBS Morning News—Gov. Racicot,” “CNN Midday—Gov. Whitman,” and so on. The surrogates’ operation also displayed the trademark Bush-team cockiness. Once the contest ended, Republican media adviser Dorrance Smith grew so confident about Gore hurting his own cause that he took to telling bookers, “We’d really like you to put Gore out again.”
* Far from ending with the inauguration, the politics of the recount became a touchstone of the new administration. To be sure, the recount reflected the personalities of the two candidates, but the early days of the Bush presidency also suggested that those thirty-six days displayed the DNA of the contemporary Democratic and Republican parties: the party of process versus the party of results, reliance on elite opinion versus trust in public opinion, the agony of deliberation versus the exercise of power. It took a little while for quasi-official Washington to understand this. For example, on the day after Bush declared victory, R. W. Apple, Jr., wrote in The New York Times: “Mr. Bush will need to foster the kind of bipartisan cooperation he promised during his campaign. To accomplish that, the Texas governor will have to choose his issues carefully and weigh with caution how hard to push his viewpoint on contentious questions like abortion and the sweeping tax cut he has pledged.” If he had won, Al Gore might actually have taken this kind of advice.
George W. Bush, by contrast, ran his new administration with the same air of jaunty confidence he had exhibited during the recount. The symbols and words of bipartisanship turned out to be just that. On his first day in office, Bush signed an executive order banning U.S. funding for international family-planning organizations that provide or counsel for abortions. As his first major legislative initiative, he advocated and won passage of the largest income-tax cut in a generation, just as he had pledged to do during the campaign. Bush didn’t modulate his views or his agenda just because the conventional wisdom suggested that he should. He had run as a committed political conservative, and that was the kind of president he would be.
Bush’s straight-ahead approach did exact costs in the closely divided capital. In May 2001, Republican senator Jim Jeffords, of Vermont, citing the rightward tilt of the Bush administration, switched to an independent affiliation, putting the Senate in Democratic hands for the first time in more than six years. But Jeffords’s defection had no discernible impact on the way Bush conducted his presidency. George W. Bush was a man of strong and steady convictions. And nothing—not the loss of the Senate, the advice of the Washington establishment, or the extraordinary circumstances of his victory—would change what he believed or how he behaved.
