The Republic of Chad
Eight years ago this month, all eyes were laser-focused on Florida, where a recount of votes in the presidential race would determine George W. Bush’s fate—and the nation’s. For the many Texans who endured endless days and sleepless nights on their candidate’s behalf, the memories are still fresh. And yes, the victory is still sweet.
(Page 6 of 6)
ALLBAUGH: The first Supreme Court [hearing] was amazing. I had never heard arguments before the high court. David Boies would make his presentation, then we would go. We ended up sharing this same room for press conferences. Originally there was just a blue curtain for a backdrop, so we put flags up. Then someone took the flags down, so we put them back up. It was chaos.
FLETCHER: I got a break from Florida twice, when I went to D.C. for the Supreme Court hearings. I flew with Ben and Ted. Everyone had a good sense of humor. Ben is hilarious, and that kept everyone really lively. There were all of these attorneys who were having a ball.
BAKER: I didn’t go to the arguments before the Supreme Court because I had been involved in the appointments of some of the justices. But that Sunday, Katherine Harris certified Bush as the winner of Florida by 537 votes. Certification changed the landscape. The Gore campaign was no longer protesting an election count. It was contesting a certified election.
ALLBAUGH: The Florida Supreme Court ruled again and said, “Start the count,” so we literally mobilized six hundred people overnight. All night long, our campaign political director, Ken Mehlman, was conducting training classes: This is what you do, this is where you go. They were going to start counting the following morning.
BAKER: Florida chief justice Charles T. Wells’s dissent from his own court regarding the statewide recount points out the legal and political arguments that we were making from day one. The court’s majority ruling was outrageous. The U.S. Constitution says that the legislatures of the various states shall determine how presidential electors are selected, and the Florida Supreme Court substituted its judgment for the Florida legislature’s. Why did the U.S. Supreme Court stay the judgment of the Florida Supreme Court? They did it because they told the Florida Supreme Court the first time they remanded the case, “Explain to us how you got here in the face of the U.S. Constitution.” The Florida Supreme Court came back with this four-to-three decision and never even acknowledged the U.S. Supreme Court. Well, that might well have been designed to piss off the members of the higher court, and I think it did. And in my mind, I think it was one of the reasons that we got a stay. A lower court should never stick its thumb in the eye of a higher court.
FLETCHER: After the second hearing at the U.S. Supreme Court, there was a place with a microphone and the press outside, and every [politician] was there trying to get his place in the sun. There was a line, but I had the guy who had just argued in front of the Supreme Court. So I explained to Jesse Jackson that we were next. Ben made this joke, “Oh, my God! Mindy totally took on Jesse Jackson.”
“Congratulations, Mr. President-elect.”
The U.S. Supreme Court issued its final 65-page ruling in Bush v. Gore on December 12, shortly after ten o’clock in the evening in Florida. At that point, Bush’s lead had dropped to about 150 votes.
BAKER: I had my inside group in the office with me, and we read through [the ruling] rather quickly. It didn’t take us long to conclude that the election was over. I called the governor and said to him, “Congratulations, Mr. President-elect.” But we didn’t want him to make any statement claiming victory because we wanted Gore to have time to come to his own conclusion. He did so, and the next night he gave a truly wonderful concession speech. That was not easy for him, I know.
EVANS: Reporters were running out of the Supreme Court trying to figure out what it says at the same time that we were trying to figure out what it says. There was early talk that Gore thought he had this opening or that opening, but before I went to bed that night, I knew that we had won.
ALLBAUGH: I walked into Jim Baker’s office, and he had just talked to the president-elect. He said, “Joe, do you want to go home?” And I said, “Yessir, I’ll make it happen.”
BAKER: People keep misinterpreting the decision in Bush v. Gore. They keep calling it a five-to-four political decision. But the ruling was seven to two, on constitutionality, with one justice appointed by a Democrat voting with the majority and another appointed by a Republican voting with the minority. The high court held that the Florida Supreme Court’s recount was unconstitutional because the lack of uniform counting rules violated the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. The five-to-four decision that came down at the same time was with respect to remedy. It simply said there wasn’t time to finish a statewide recount.
EVANS: I remember calling my son, who was ten years old at the time. We had hunted together every fall, and we were going to go after the election, but that got blown up, of course. I called him and said, “Donnie, your godfather is going to be the president of the United States.” And he said, “Does that mean we get to go hunting this weekend?”
OXFORD: I flew back to Houston. By this time my law partners—not to mention my clients—were wondering where the hell I was. So I just went home and got back to work. We were worn out, and it didn’t feel like much of a victory yet.
FLETCHER: When the decision came out that night, I did what I always did: I showed my copy to a lawyer and said, “Tell me what it says in English.” You got to a point where you became numb to it. One day there would be a great court case, and the next day there would be a bad one. We had been trained not to get too up or too down. But then I came into the office the next morning, and Joe said, “My plane is leaving in an hour. Do you want to be on it?” So I ran back to the hotel, threw my stuff in a bag, and got on the plane. I kissed the ground when we landed in Austin.
ALLBAUGH: That night we orchestrated giving the acceptance speech in the Texas State House of Representatives, and Democratic speaker Pete Laney introduced the president-elect to the country. But the night was a blur. I was so tired. I’m not sure I could carry on a conversation.
BRANCH: I’ve heard the story from Pete Laney that when they went out, the president-elect commented to him, “Don’t mess it up.”
BARTLETT: It was an extraordinary moment to hear the speech at the Capitol, where a lot of us had spent time with him when he was governor. It reminded me that things had come full circle. Afterward my wife and I and some friends went to the Brown Bar—we were supposed to go the night of the real election. But we never felt like there was a proper celebration.
MCKINNON: The thing about campaigns is, there is no greater experience than winning, and there’s no worse feeling than losing. It is so bad that I almost quit doing them for a while. You invest so much time and energy that it is just crushing to lose. And sometimes it’s crushing to win. In 2000 we never really got to celebrate. There was a mental and physical letdown even after we had won. I was sick after that campaign.
DOWD: There wasn’t a break after it ended. In the time between Bush’s being declared the winner and the inauguration, I wrote the first memo looking ahead to the 2004 election.
“ ‘What’s Happening in Your Country?’ ”
In the end, Bush’s 537-vote victory in Florida decided the 2000 election, but the question still lingered: Who really won? In 2001 two independent media investigations, one led by the Miami Herald and USA Today and the other sponsored by outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press, concluded that had the counting continued, Bush most likely would have defeated Gore.
DOWD: I’m sure there are some people in the Democratic party who still believe it was a stolen election. But I think the public has moved past it. They’re more pissed now at things that have been screwed up on other levels.
BAKER: People ask me if we’ll litigate every close election now, but I don’t believe that will happen. We were fighting to preserve an election in Florida. I used to get calls from former foreign ministers and prime ministers that I worked with as Secretary of State, and they would say, “What’s happening in your country? Can’t you get an election right?” And I would say, “I’ll tell you what’s happening: Our system is working. I dare say that if something as tension-filled and emotional as this were occurring in your country, you’d see tanks in the streets.” Some had to acknowledge that that was true.
BARTLETT: It was the unspoken aspect of arriving in Washington after the election was resolved: “Is this going to be an anticlimactic presidency because of the way we won? Can we overcome the way we came in?” That had to be in the back of everyone’s mind; I know it was in mine. Little did I know what was waiting.
My Library
