This piece by Jonathan Chait could not be more pertinent. He discusses how we have belatedly begun to absorb the understanding that the country’s reaction to 9/11 was twisted and incompetent. And then he addresses one aspect of it that has frustrated me for the last 20 years:
[T]here remains one important post-9/11 belief that has yet to undergo significant revision: the comforting fallacy that George W. Bush won the 2000 election more or less fairly.
Bush won the election because five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices overruled the Florida State Supreme Court and blocked a statewide ballot recount. A consortium of newspapers undertook its own recount. By an unfortunate accident of timing, those results came out in November 2001, when post-attack hysteria was at an apogee. A broad bipartisan consensus held that the paramount national imperative was to unify behind a president protecting the country from existential and ongoing threats. At the time, public pressure to rally around Bush and suppress any questions about his legitimacy was so intense that the mere decision to publish the findings at all provoked controversy.My Week In New YorkA week-in-review newsletter from the people who make New York Magazine.
Newspapers generally handled this pressure by presenting their results in the most delicate, Bush-friendly way. The Washington Post headlined its story, “Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush.” The New York Times report was headlined, “EXAMINING THE VOTE: THE OVERVIEW; Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote.”
These summaries were at best oversimplistic, and at worst outright false. But they registered in the public consciousness so deeply that most people believe those conclusions to this day.
The actual results of the recount was that Al Gore’s narrow winning margin would have been provided by a cache of “overvotes ” — ballots that were discarded by machine counts because they registered two votes for president, but which were revealed by hand inspection to show a clear choice. (These voters had marked Gore’s name, and then wrote his name in, causing the machines to discard them as a double vote.)
The result of the recount would have depended on whether the officials conducting the recount examined these overvote ballots. It can’t be proven either way. The major newspapers chose to assume that the overvotes would have been ignored in a recount, triggering a Bush victory. That assumption allowed them to fall back on the (then) safe and comforting conclusion that the recount would not have changed the outcome.
But it was just that — an assumption. The national media made no effort to test this assumption. Only the Orlando Sentinel bothered to ask Terry Lewis, the judge who had been overseeing the recount, about it. Lewis replied that he likely would have examined overvotes, a method that would have resulted in Gore winning. But none of the major media paid any attention to this significant finding or saw fit to revise the conclusions they had splashed out.
It’s difficult to convey to those who didn’t experience it the overwhelming force of the pro-administration Zeitgeist. I did not work in a major media newsroom at the time, so I can’t report firsthand on the calculations that caused those outlets to leap to a pro-Bush conclusion they hadn’t bothered to substantiate. I did work for a center-left opinion magazine, and I had to push back as hard as I ever had to resist my editor’s desire for me to publish a story ratifying the pro-Bush interpretation of the recount. The story that ran questioned the official narrative while backing into its important conclusion that Gore probably would have prevailed. My conclusion was almost apologetic:
The media’s impulse to exonerate Bush is understandable. Nobody wants to appear sour or partisan, or to shatter the unity necessary to prosecute the war on terrorism. But accepting the finality of the election and unifying against enemies abroad does not necessarily conflict with the idea that the president holds office due to bungling compounded by deliberate wrongdoing. We really ought to be able to hold both ideas in our heads at once.
Even Al Gore himself did not feel emboldened enough to supply a pro-Gore interpretation of the recount, instead nodding to the importance of rallying around Bush’s leadership in the emerging war on terror. “As I said on Dec. 13th of last year, we are a nation of laws and the presidential election of 2000 is over,” he wrote in a statement. “And of course, right now our country faces a great challenge as we seek to successfully combat terrorism. I fully support President Bush’s efforts to achieve that goal.”
The perspective of history renders Gore’s nonanswer much more revealing than it seemed at the time. His answer turned the subtext of the media’s coverage of the issue — Bush’s status as unchallengeable leader against the terrorist threat — into the text.
Twenty years on, not only does the impulse to follow Bush’s foreign policy look worse, but so too does the impulse to overlook the method by which he gained his office. His party’s terrifying will to power, including mobs shutting down a legitimate government proceeding over groundless fears that Democratic cities would manufacture fake votes, was an eerie precursor to its future. The truth we’ve suppressed is that Bush not only misused his office, but never should have held it in the first place.
He did not win that election. And the interjection of the Supreme Court in spite of the Constitution’s clear pathway to settling such disputes was a first shot across the bow by a Republican party that had already shown with the Clinton impeachment that it had little respect for democracy and was headed in a very radical direction.
Here’s a piece I wrote back in 2007:
[S]ince I first started writing on-line, one of my recurring themes is that the modern Republican party has become fundamentally hostile to democracy.(And we already knew they were crooks.) This was first made obvious to me back in 1994, when Republican leader Dick Armey famously stated “your president is just not that important for us.” They went on to impeach that president against the clear will of the people.
But the biggest clue about what they were up to came in 2000 with the Florida recount. I know it seems like ancient history to go back to that but it is extremely important to remember just how outrageous their tactics were: the Gore campaign used legal tactics and the Bush campaign didn’t. There was the “bourgeois riot” and dirty trickster Roger Stone directing the street theatre from a van. (Here’s a list of what the Village Voice termed the five worst Bush recount outrages.) They used every lever of power they could to count illegally cast overseas ballots. They operated a hypocritical and situational media campaign that the press completely failed to properly analyze until it was too late. And after they did they helpfully told those who objected to “get over it.” And I guess we did.
The Republicans have been remarkably good about keeping their mouths shut about the Florida shennanigans, pretending that Jeb Bush’s electoral apparatus gave them no unusual help. Still, I was surprised to see a former Florida recount icon show up on the Lehrer News Hour last week to argue that the US Attorney firings were completely above board. His name is Michael Carvin and he was the lawyer who argued the Bush case before the Florida Supreme Court. Here’s his picture. I’m sure many of you will remember him:
The Newshour failed to identify him as one of the Florida recount team and instead named him merely as a former Reagan official. But he didn’t fail to carry the Bush water one more time:
MICHAEL CARVIN: I really think this is much ado about very little. I’m not saying that they haven’t mishandled this from a public relations perspective. They clearly have.
But the notion that firing eight U.S. attorneys with White House personnel involved is somehow shocking is like saying you’re shocked to discover there’s gambling in Casablanca. I don’t know where these people have been.
There’s not one member of that Judiciary Committee who hasn’t called the White House or the Justice Department and said, “My cousin or my law school roommate wants to be a U.S. attorney.”
So the notion that these kinds of appointments and removals in Walter’s administration — they fired all 93 in one slot — the notion that is isn’t influenced by the fact that the president needs his team in place, both at the main Justice Department and in the field, is really quite silly and quite counterfactual.
This would be typical Carvin. For instance, here’s something he said after Bush v Gore was decided:
The new deadline for all recounts to be submitted to Katherine Harris was 5 p.m. Sunday, November 26. Now, that Sunday afternoon you could watch any of the television coverage and see that Palm Beach was still counting. And by late afternoon you heard various officials in Palm Beach acknowledging that they were not going to be finished by five. Now, we maintain that was completely illegal, because the law said you had to manually recount all ballots. [See Village Voice top five outrages for why this is such a slimy position for him to take.]
But as five o’clock approached, we heard that the secretary of state was going to accept the Palm Beach partial recount — even though the Palm Beach partial recount was blatantly illegal. We were told that the secretary of state’s view was that unless Palm Beach actually informed her — in writing or otherwise — that the returns were only a partial recount, she could not infer that on her own.
So we made some calls to a few Republicans overseeing the Palm Beach recount. We told them to gently suggest to the canvassing board that it might as well put PARTIAL RETURN on the front of the returns that were to be faxed up in time for the deadline. The reason we gave was clarity — that the words PARTIAL RETURN would distinguish those returns from the full count that would be coming in later that night. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I think the Palm Beach board did in the end write PARTIAL RECOUNT on the returns. We all know that the Secretary of State, in the end, rejected them. [By rejecting them, he means that she said that a partial return missed the deadline altogether and all the previously uncounted votes that were counted in the partial recount were never added to the tally. This had the effect of never allowing Gore to take the lead.]
I think the board members probably agreed to write the PARTIAL RECOUNT notation for two reasons. First of all, I think they hadn’t slept in 48 hours, so I think they’d sort of do anything. Second of all, I don’t think they or anybody else would have suspected that it would actually make any difference. Who would imagine that without the simple notation of PARTIAL RETURN the partial count would have been accepted as a complete count by the secretary of state? Even while the television showed them still counting?
But I don’t think it was Machiavellian to suggest to the board that it write PARTIAL RECOUNT, because that is what it was. I think it would have been sort of Machiavellian to suggest to pretend they were not partial returns. [Talk Magazine, March 2001, p. 172
I know that virtually nobody cares about this anymore, if they ever did, but this was so full of nonsense that it amazed me that he got away with saying it. And the tale he tells, bad as it is, is still obviously not the whole story.
They were clearly colluding with Katherine Harris’ office throughout and they determined that she could reject all of the Palm Beach county votes they had counted by 5pm with this little gambit. Everything depended on not allowing Al Gore to ever take the lead or their whole PR campaign would start to fall apart.
It’s a small thing, I know, and probably one of thousands of such small acts of illegal and inappropriate collusion between Jeb Bush and the campaign during the recount. But it happened and we knew it happened. And it was done by people like Michael Carvin, former Reagan Justice Department official who now implies that the US Attorney scandal is nothing because everyone knows that the Bush Justice department is an enforcement arm of the Republican Party and that’s perfectly normal.
That is just how these people think. It’s why they hunted Clinton and Reno like dogs for eight years, determined to find evidence of wrongdoing. They either assume everyone does it because they do or they know they can innoculate themselves against accusations of their own bad acts by getting to the punch first. (And harrassing Democrats is rewarding in and of itself.)
I wrote to reporters Don Van Atta and Jake Tapper about this Carvin tid-bit when they were covering the media recount for the NY Times and Salon (and Tapper was writing a book about it.) Tapper was uninterested, but Van Natta called me and I told him where to find the quote. (Talk Magazine is not on lexis-nexis.) Then came 9/11, the recount story was pretty much shelved and the entire country was told we had to gather around the president.
But then, we had been told that from the beginning, hadn’t we? The media were complicit in this, helping the Republicans along every step of the way during the recount with constant rending of garments about a constitutional crisis and fantasies about tanks in the streets if things weren’t settled instantly. (The deadlines! My god, the deadlines!) And when it was all done, they told us repeatedly to get over it.
And here we are, six years later, actually debating whether the Bush White House has been manipulating the electoral system. For god’s sake — of course they have been. This administration was installed through crude manipulation of the rigged levers of power in the Bush family’s political machine and they see such outrageous conduct as perfectly legitimate.
Indeed, I’m sure they believe “it’s not Machiavellian” to use the Department of Justice to rig the vote — it would be Machiavellian not to.