Harold Titus's Blog, page 19
August 27, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2004 Election -- Bush and the Air National Guard
February 12, 2004. Great Britain’s The Guardian printed the following:
… the Bush administration's efforts to produce documentation that the president did fulfill his duty in the Texas air national guard more than 30 years ago were overwhelmed by a new round of damaging disclosures.
Led by USA Today, a number of US newspapers yesterday accused Mr. Bush and his advisers of seeking to purge his military records before his run for the presidency in 2000 to cover up any record of his youthful arrests.
The drip feed of new information about President Bush's stint in the guard has confounded White House efforts to close a chapter on the Vietnam war era.
Instead, White House spokesmen have spent most of the week trying to satisfy reporters' demands to explain the president's whereabouts during a one-year period beginning in May 1972.
Hours after the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, released a record of Mr Bush's annual dental examination at an Alabama air base, he was forced to answer new allegations that Republican operatives had doctored the president's military records.
In the USA Today account, a senior member of the Texas air national guard said that Republican operatives blacked out sections of Mr. Bush's military records before the 2000 elections.
The operatives apparently wanted to remove any reference to Mr. Bush's youthful arrests.
Although Mr Bush has admitted to being arrested twice for rowdiness, violations for alcohol or drugs would have made him ineligible for the national guard.
Meanwhile, several members of the national guard have come forward to say they have no recollection of seeing Mr. Bush in Alabama.
He has previously said that he transferred his duties from Texas to Alabama where he was working on a Senate election campaign.
"I don't remember seeing him. That does not mean he was not there," Wayne Rambo, who was a first lieutenant with the 187th Supply Squadron at the time, told the Associated Press.
The AP contacted more than a dozen former members of the unit on Wednesday, and none could recall ever running into Mr. Bush (Goldenberg, “Doubts” 1-3).
The following is part of an article printed March 4 in The Guardian that brought criticism of the Bush administration unrelated to the Texas National Guard issue.
One of the 30-second commercials includes a brief clip of a body, wrapped in the American flag, being lifted from the wreckage of New York's World Trade Centre. Firefighters, who emerged as heroes of the rescue effort, also feature in the adverts.
But the campaign appeared to have backfired badly today as relatives of those killed on September 11 accused the president of exploiting the tragedy to boost his political career.
"It's a slap in the face of the murders of 3,000 people. It is unconscionable," said Monica Gabrielle, whose husband died in the attacks on the twin towers.
Tom Roger, whose daughter was a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, said: "I would be less offended if he showed a picture of himself in front of the Statue of Liberty. But to show the horror of 9/11 in the background, that's just some advertising agency's attempt to grab people by the throat," he told the New York Daily News.
Firefighter Tommy Fee called the adverts "sick", adding: "The image of firefighters at Ground Zero should not be used for this stuff, for politics."
The intended message of the adverts is "steady leadership in times of change". To stirring music, Mr Bush tells viewers: "I know exactly what we need to do to make the world more free and peaceful."
…
… in a speech at a Republican fund-raiser in Los Angeles , … Mr Bush said the 19-year Senate veteran [John Kerry] had been "in Washington long enough to take both sides on just about every issue".
He said the election, which will be held in November, provided a choice "between an America that leads the world with strength and confidence, or an America that is uncertain in the face of danger" (Staff 1-2).
A September 10 Guardian article narrated how doubts about George Bush’s service in the National Guard had evolved into a GOP election crisis.
… memos, apparently from the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian of the Texas air national guard, urged Mr Bush's replacement by "a more seasoned pilot", because of his "failure to perform" to the required standards.
A senior officer had been "pushing to sugar-coat" Mr Bush's official evaluation, the memos said, voicing a suspicion that the young pilot had been "talking to someone upstairs" to facilitate his eventual transfer to Alabama.
Mr. Bush subsequently stopped showing up in Texas, but the Alabama unit's then commander has claimed that he did not report for duty in that state either. The White House insists that he did.
The CBS TV network has obtained the documents. It also showed an interview with a powerful Texas politician who said he had pulled strings on behalf of a friend of the family to get Mr. Bush into the national guard, so that he might avoid service in Vietnam.
"I was maybe determining life or death, and that's not a power that I want to have," said Ben Barnes, a former speaker of the Texas house of representatives.
"I've thought about it an awful lot. You walk through the Vietnam memorial, and I tell you, you'll think about it a long time."
Mr. Barnes confessed that he had abused his position of power in acceding to the request from Sid Adger, an oil baron, to allow Mr. Bush to jump the queue.
"I was a young, ambitious politician, doing what I thought was acceptable, that was important to make friends ... I would describe it as preferential treatment," he said.
His story is technically consistent with the Bush administration line that no member of the family tried to exert improper influence.
But the perception that the president drew on his connections is likely to be strengthened by an advert due to be shown next week, paid for by a group called Texans for Truth, questioning whether Mr. Bush ever appeared at his Alabama unit.
Last week, the widow of another family friend said the young Mr. Bush had been sent to Alabama because he was "getting in trouble and embarrassing the family" in Texas. The ad will provide a campaign counterweight to efforts in recent weeks by Republican supporters to cast doubt on John Kerry's war record.
Republicans lost no time in suggesting that Texans for Truth might have direct links to the Kerry campaign, nor in pointing out that Mr. Barnes was a Democratic fundraiser and campaign adviser.
This would put a new perspective on the Kerry campaign's stated intent to move beyond Vietnam, to concentrate on domestic economic issues.
As for Lt Col Killian's memos, said the president's spokesman, Dan Bartlett, "I chalk it down to politics. They play dirty down in Texas ... For anybody to try to interpret or presume they know what somebody who is now dead was thinking in any of these memos - I think is very difficult to do" (Burkeman “Documents” 1-2).
Here is part of a September 16 article printed in The Guardian.
The memos appear to be signed by Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, Mr Bush's commander in the Texas Air National Guard, who died 20 years ago. They rail against the young pilot and ambassador's son for failing to attend a compulsory physical examination and complain about pressure from senior officers to "sugar coat" his performance evaluation.
Since their publication, several experts have questioned whether they could have been produced on typewriters available at that time, although the technical evidence is not conclusive.
Yesterday, to cloud an already murky picture, Lt Col Killian's former secretary declared that the documents were forged, but were factually correct.
"These are not real. They're not what I typed, and I would have typed them for him," the former secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told the Dallas Morning News.
However, Ms Knox added: "The information in here was correct, but it was picked up from the real [documents]."
Both she and another former colleague of Lt Col Killian, Richard Via, recalled that he had kept careful notes on Mr Bush's shortcomings and transgressions as a pilot and stored them in a locked filing cabinet, the contents of which have since gone missing.
…
Senator Kerry's aides argue their campaign has suffered because the US media has focused more on sideshows such as the row over the documents than on substantive issues such as Iraq, unemployment and healthcare.
They also point out that the Democratic candidate's gaffes seem to get more of an airing than those of the president. Last month, Senator Kerry got the name of a stadium wrong in football-mad Wisconsin. His mistake has been broadcast relentlessly since, even becoming the subject of a Washington Post article yesterday, weeks after the slip (Borger “Forgerry” 1-3).
The Guardian’s narration of the air national guard story was updated September 21.
CBS television issued a humbling apology yesterday for a report on an investigative programme, saying that its story claiming that George Bush had been given special treatment during his stint in the Texas air national guard was deeply flawed and should not have gone on air.
It abruptly changed course after days of expressing confidence in the report on “60 Minutes,” which relied heavily on four memos purportedly written by a now dead commander in the guard to show that Mr Bush received special treatment during his military service.
"Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report," a statement by the president of CBS News, Andrew Heyward, said.
Dan Rather, the anchorman who presented the story and defended it for nearly two weeks, issued a separate apology.
"We made a mistake in judgment and for that I am sorry," he said.
The statement from Rather, an American television idol for 20 years, went on to make the embarrassing admission that the programme's producers had been duped by a disgrunted former member of the Texas national guard, who had provided the documents.
The network did not say the documents were forgeries, but after further investigation of the story at the weekend Rather concluded: "I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers.
"That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where - if I knew then what I know now - I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question."
Since the programme was shown on September 8, Rather has become a lightning rod for Republican and right wing outrage, and the subject of increasingly uncomfortable scrutiny by media commentators.
A number of leading Republicans accused him of bias.
Yesterday he said the reporting for the programme had been done in good faith.
The programme was based primarily on four memos from the early 1970s, allegedly from the private files of Mr Bush's squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian.
In one of the most damaging of the purported memos, the late Col Killian complained that Mr Bush disobeyed a direct order to submit to a medical exam.
The story also included a claim by a former Texas lieutenant governor, Ben Barnes, that he had pulled strings to get Mr Bush into the guard, and so spare him from being sent to Vietnam.
Within minutes of the broadcast doubts about the documents began circulating on the internet, claiming that the memos were fake.
Document experts said that the print on the memos did not correspond to that of the typewriters in use at the time but did seem suspiciously close to Windows computer programmes.
CBS stood by its story, even though two document specialists raised doubts about the authenticity of the memos before the story went on air.
Although Rather conceded in a report last week that the documents may appear fake, he insisted that Col Killian's frustration with Mr Bush was all too real, and he brought on the late commander's former secretary to substantiate the assertion (Goldenberg “CBS” 1-3).
Works cited:
Borger, Julian, “Forgery Row Threatens to Derail Kerry.” The Guardian. September 16, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...
Burkeman, Oliver, “Documents Put Bush's Vietnam Role Back on Election Agenda.” The Guardian, September 10, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...
Goldenberg, Suzanne, “Doubts about His Vietnam Record Dog Bush. The Guardian, February 12, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...
Goldenberg, Suzanne, “CBS Apologises for ‘Mistaken’ Story of Bush’s Military Service.” The Guardian, September 21, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/media/200...
Staff and Agencies, “Bush 9/11 Ads Spark Anger.” The Guardian, March 4, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...
… the Bush administration's efforts to produce documentation that the president did fulfill his duty in the Texas air national guard more than 30 years ago were overwhelmed by a new round of damaging disclosures.
Led by USA Today, a number of US newspapers yesterday accused Mr. Bush and his advisers of seeking to purge his military records before his run for the presidency in 2000 to cover up any record of his youthful arrests.
The drip feed of new information about President Bush's stint in the guard has confounded White House efforts to close a chapter on the Vietnam war era.
Instead, White House spokesmen have spent most of the week trying to satisfy reporters' demands to explain the president's whereabouts during a one-year period beginning in May 1972.
Hours after the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, released a record of Mr Bush's annual dental examination at an Alabama air base, he was forced to answer new allegations that Republican operatives had doctored the president's military records.
In the USA Today account, a senior member of the Texas air national guard said that Republican operatives blacked out sections of Mr. Bush's military records before the 2000 elections.
The operatives apparently wanted to remove any reference to Mr. Bush's youthful arrests.
Although Mr Bush has admitted to being arrested twice for rowdiness, violations for alcohol or drugs would have made him ineligible for the national guard.
Meanwhile, several members of the national guard have come forward to say they have no recollection of seeing Mr. Bush in Alabama.
He has previously said that he transferred his duties from Texas to Alabama where he was working on a Senate election campaign.
"I don't remember seeing him. That does not mean he was not there," Wayne Rambo, who was a first lieutenant with the 187th Supply Squadron at the time, told the Associated Press.
The AP contacted more than a dozen former members of the unit on Wednesday, and none could recall ever running into Mr. Bush (Goldenberg, “Doubts” 1-3).
The following is part of an article printed March 4 in The Guardian that brought criticism of the Bush administration unrelated to the Texas National Guard issue.
One of the 30-second commercials includes a brief clip of a body, wrapped in the American flag, being lifted from the wreckage of New York's World Trade Centre. Firefighters, who emerged as heroes of the rescue effort, also feature in the adverts.
But the campaign appeared to have backfired badly today as relatives of those killed on September 11 accused the president of exploiting the tragedy to boost his political career.
"It's a slap in the face of the murders of 3,000 people. It is unconscionable," said Monica Gabrielle, whose husband died in the attacks on the twin towers.
Tom Roger, whose daughter was a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, said: "I would be less offended if he showed a picture of himself in front of the Statue of Liberty. But to show the horror of 9/11 in the background, that's just some advertising agency's attempt to grab people by the throat," he told the New York Daily News.
Firefighter Tommy Fee called the adverts "sick", adding: "The image of firefighters at Ground Zero should not be used for this stuff, for politics."
The intended message of the adverts is "steady leadership in times of change". To stirring music, Mr Bush tells viewers: "I know exactly what we need to do to make the world more free and peaceful."
…
… in a speech at a Republican fund-raiser in Los Angeles , … Mr Bush said the 19-year Senate veteran [John Kerry] had been "in Washington long enough to take both sides on just about every issue".
He said the election, which will be held in November, provided a choice "between an America that leads the world with strength and confidence, or an America that is uncertain in the face of danger" (Staff 1-2).
A September 10 Guardian article narrated how doubts about George Bush’s service in the National Guard had evolved into a GOP election crisis.
… memos, apparently from the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian of the Texas air national guard, urged Mr Bush's replacement by "a more seasoned pilot", because of his "failure to perform" to the required standards.
A senior officer had been "pushing to sugar-coat" Mr Bush's official evaluation, the memos said, voicing a suspicion that the young pilot had been "talking to someone upstairs" to facilitate his eventual transfer to Alabama.
Mr. Bush subsequently stopped showing up in Texas, but the Alabama unit's then commander has claimed that he did not report for duty in that state either. The White House insists that he did.
The CBS TV network has obtained the documents. It also showed an interview with a powerful Texas politician who said he had pulled strings on behalf of a friend of the family to get Mr. Bush into the national guard, so that he might avoid service in Vietnam.
"I was maybe determining life or death, and that's not a power that I want to have," said Ben Barnes, a former speaker of the Texas house of representatives.
"I've thought about it an awful lot. You walk through the Vietnam memorial, and I tell you, you'll think about it a long time."
Mr. Barnes confessed that he had abused his position of power in acceding to the request from Sid Adger, an oil baron, to allow Mr. Bush to jump the queue.
"I was a young, ambitious politician, doing what I thought was acceptable, that was important to make friends ... I would describe it as preferential treatment," he said.
His story is technically consistent with the Bush administration line that no member of the family tried to exert improper influence.
But the perception that the president drew on his connections is likely to be strengthened by an advert due to be shown next week, paid for by a group called Texans for Truth, questioning whether Mr. Bush ever appeared at his Alabama unit.
Last week, the widow of another family friend said the young Mr. Bush had been sent to Alabama because he was "getting in trouble and embarrassing the family" in Texas. The ad will provide a campaign counterweight to efforts in recent weeks by Republican supporters to cast doubt on John Kerry's war record.
Republicans lost no time in suggesting that Texans for Truth might have direct links to the Kerry campaign, nor in pointing out that Mr. Barnes was a Democratic fundraiser and campaign adviser.
This would put a new perspective on the Kerry campaign's stated intent to move beyond Vietnam, to concentrate on domestic economic issues.
As for Lt Col Killian's memos, said the president's spokesman, Dan Bartlett, "I chalk it down to politics. They play dirty down in Texas ... For anybody to try to interpret or presume they know what somebody who is now dead was thinking in any of these memos - I think is very difficult to do" (Burkeman “Documents” 1-2).
Here is part of a September 16 article printed in The Guardian.
The memos appear to be signed by Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, Mr Bush's commander in the Texas Air National Guard, who died 20 years ago. They rail against the young pilot and ambassador's son for failing to attend a compulsory physical examination and complain about pressure from senior officers to "sugar coat" his performance evaluation.
Since their publication, several experts have questioned whether they could have been produced on typewriters available at that time, although the technical evidence is not conclusive.
Yesterday, to cloud an already murky picture, Lt Col Killian's former secretary declared that the documents were forged, but were factually correct.
"These are not real. They're not what I typed, and I would have typed them for him," the former secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told the Dallas Morning News.
However, Ms Knox added: "The information in here was correct, but it was picked up from the real [documents]."
Both she and another former colleague of Lt Col Killian, Richard Via, recalled that he had kept careful notes on Mr Bush's shortcomings and transgressions as a pilot and stored them in a locked filing cabinet, the contents of which have since gone missing.
…
Senator Kerry's aides argue their campaign has suffered because the US media has focused more on sideshows such as the row over the documents than on substantive issues such as Iraq, unemployment and healthcare.
They also point out that the Democratic candidate's gaffes seem to get more of an airing than those of the president. Last month, Senator Kerry got the name of a stadium wrong in football-mad Wisconsin. His mistake has been broadcast relentlessly since, even becoming the subject of a Washington Post article yesterday, weeks after the slip (Borger “Forgerry” 1-3).
The Guardian’s narration of the air national guard story was updated September 21.
CBS television issued a humbling apology yesterday for a report on an investigative programme, saying that its story claiming that George Bush had been given special treatment during his stint in the Texas air national guard was deeply flawed and should not have gone on air.
It abruptly changed course after days of expressing confidence in the report on “60 Minutes,” which relied heavily on four memos purportedly written by a now dead commander in the guard to show that Mr Bush received special treatment during his military service.
"Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report," a statement by the president of CBS News, Andrew Heyward, said.
Dan Rather, the anchorman who presented the story and defended it for nearly two weeks, issued a separate apology.
"We made a mistake in judgment and for that I am sorry," he said.
The statement from Rather, an American television idol for 20 years, went on to make the embarrassing admission that the programme's producers had been duped by a disgrunted former member of the Texas national guard, who had provided the documents.
The network did not say the documents were forgeries, but after further investigation of the story at the weekend Rather concluded: "I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers.
"That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where - if I knew then what I know now - I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question."
Since the programme was shown on September 8, Rather has become a lightning rod for Republican and right wing outrage, and the subject of increasingly uncomfortable scrutiny by media commentators.
A number of leading Republicans accused him of bias.
Yesterday he said the reporting for the programme had been done in good faith.
The programme was based primarily on four memos from the early 1970s, allegedly from the private files of Mr Bush's squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian.
In one of the most damaging of the purported memos, the late Col Killian complained that Mr Bush disobeyed a direct order to submit to a medical exam.
The story also included a claim by a former Texas lieutenant governor, Ben Barnes, that he had pulled strings to get Mr Bush into the guard, and so spare him from being sent to Vietnam.
Within minutes of the broadcast doubts about the documents began circulating on the internet, claiming that the memos were fake.
Document experts said that the print on the memos did not correspond to that of the typewriters in use at the time but did seem suspiciously close to Windows computer programmes.
CBS stood by its story, even though two document specialists raised doubts about the authenticity of the memos before the story went on air.
Although Rather conceded in a report last week that the documents may appear fake, he insisted that Col Killian's frustration with Mr Bush was all too real, and he brought on the late commander's former secretary to substantiate the assertion (Goldenberg “CBS” 1-3).
Works cited:
Borger, Julian, “Forgery Row Threatens to Derail Kerry.” The Guardian. September 16, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...
Burkeman, Oliver, “Documents Put Bush's Vietnam Role Back on Election Agenda.” The Guardian, September 10, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...
Goldenberg, Suzanne, “Doubts about His Vietnam Record Dog Bush. The Guardian, February 12, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...
Goldenberg, Suzanne, “CBS Apologises for ‘Mistaken’ Story of Bush’s Military Service.” The Guardian, September 21, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/media/200...
Staff and Agencies, “Bush 9/11 Ads Spark Anger.” The Guardian, March 4, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...
August 25, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2004 Election -- Freak Show
Presidential elections featuring incumbents seeking reelection are typically referendums on the country’s performance during that incumbent’s tenure in office. President Bush fully expected to run as a successful commander-in-chief in the war against terrorism and as a strong leader who, with bold tax cuts, turned around an economy weakened by 9/11 and corporate scandals. By the spring of 2004 it became clear that a retrospective judgment on the President’s performance was no guaranteed route to victory. The public was pessimistic about the direction the country had taken at home and abroad and was in the market for change. Conditions in Iraq continued to deteriorate. The anticipated election-year economic recovery proved less broad-based and sustained than previous recoveries.
Moreover, Democrats avoided nominating their potentially weakest candidate-Howard Dean-and quickly rallied behind John Kerry. Money flowed into Kerry campaign and Democratic party coffers, equalizing what observers had expected would be a huge Bush advantage. Democrats were unified and energized, concentrating all of their rhetorical fire on the incumbent president.
The Bush campaign responded with a three-prong strategy. First, reduce the political fallout from Iraq by moving forward with a transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis and a more rapid replacement of American troops in urban areas of insurgent strength with newly trained Iraqi forces. Second, elevate the salience of terrorism as the overriding threat to American security. And third, define Kerry as unfit to be president, based on his alleged inconsistent record on national security matters and his liberal positions and votes on economic and domestic policy.
That strategy bore fruit in August and the first part of September, with the help of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a well-staged Republican convention, and Kerry’s defensiveness and incoherence on Iraq. What had been a modest Kerry lead in the horse race turned into a Bush lead (though its size varied greatly across polling organizations). Kerry’s standing with the public declined during this period, but the underlying public dissatisfaction with the situation in Iraq and the economy did not diminish. The structural forces working against the reelection of the President remain very much in place. … (Mann 4-5)
U.S. Senator John Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who had seen combat as a swift boat captain, [had been]… a leader of the anti-war movement once he [had] left the Navy. Bush focused on Kerry’s liberal voting record in the Senate, including a vote against an $87-billion bill to fund the war on terror. Bush chose to highlight this choice in his ads, leading Kerry to respond, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” Bush saw the opportunity to attack Kerry as a flip-flopper. Kerry, on the other hand, attacked Bush as an unqualified commander in chief, who tricked the American people into an ill-conceived and unpopular war in Iraq. He pledged to the Democratic National Convention and a national televised audience that he would “be a commander in chief who will never mislead us into war.” To drive the image home, he highlighted his wartime experience in Vietnam, saluting and declaring that he was “reporting for duty,” a line that garnered much popular criticism.
Bush experienced a Vietnam-era controversy of his own during the 2004 campaign when CBS reporter Dan Rather aired allegations that Bush did not fulfill his duties in the Texas Air National Guard, which later proved to be based on false reports and forged documents. Along with making a strong case against a John Kerry presidency, Bush focused his campaign on showing that he could continue to lead the nation on major issues. For his second term, he pledged “to modernize Social Security, reform the immigration system, and overhaul the tax code, while continuing No Child Left Behind and the faith-based initiative, implementing Medicare reform, and above all, fighting the war on terror.”
The two candidates debated three times during the fall campaign. Kerry was aggressive, particularly in the first debate, which caught Bush by surprise. Networks showed split screen images of Bush reacting to Kerry’s charges in that first debate, and the President appeared arrogant and disdainful. Bush corrected his expressions in the next two debates, while Kerry committed a major gaffe on a question about homosexuality when he cited the fact that Vice President Cheney’s daughter is a lesbian. Critics derided Kerry for gratuitously dragging the vice president’s family into the campaign (Gregg II 12-13).
...the extreme and eccentric voices who always populated the margins of politics now reside, with money and fame as the rewards, at the center. ... The collapse of filters and the collapse of civility together have changed the purpose of politics. The goal now is not simply to win, but to persuade voters (and donors and viewers and readers) that an opponent lacks the character and credibility even to deserve a place in the contest. That is Freak Show politics.
…
By conventional measures, the thick mane atop Kerry's lean, craggy face should have registered in the strengths column. His hair had grayed but not receded by a single follicle over his six decades. Kerry was a bit vain about his locks, and he gave them careful attention. As it happened, folks at the Republican National Committee had been paying attention, too. Sometime earlier, a tasty nugget of news raced around RNC headquarters. Would you believe that Kerry gets his hair cut at the Washington salon of Cristophe? Yes, exactly, that Cristophe -- the same guy who did Hillary Clinton's hair.
Cristophe was also the stylist who was trimming Bill Clinton that time in 1993 when Air Force One sat on the tarmac in Los Angeles for two hours while the whole world cooled its heels (never mind that reports about delayed air traffic turned out to be false). …
On Sunday, December 2, [2003] Kerry publicly announced his candidacy to Tim Russert on NBC's “Meet the Press.” …
"**Exclusive**" promised the “Drudge Report.” "Cash and Coif!" read his headline, using the alliteration [Matt] Drudge favors. "Democrat all-star John Kerry of Massachusetts is positioning himself as a populist politician while he takes the first step for a White House run. ... But the self-described 'Man of the People' pays $150 to get his hair styled and shampooed -- the cost of feeding a family of three for two weeks!"
Like many “Drudge Report” exclusives, this one implied rigorous reporting, including direct quotations from well-positioned sources to whom the author supposedly talked on a not-for-attribution basis. In this case, it was a "stylist source," who allegedly told him: "When it comes to his hair, Mr. Kerry is very, very particular. The coloring and the highlighting, the layering. But the results are fabulous." Drudge also claimed he had spoken to a "green room insider" at Fox News's Washington bureau: "It's always a fight to get mirror time. He obsessively primps and poses before he goes on the air."
… The assumption that Drudge is casually embroidering his stories -- what would be career-ending fraud for an Old Media journalist or author -- has not caused reporters to remove Drudge from their daily reading. … any superiority reporters and editors feel toward Drudge does not inhibit them from pouncing on his best items.
Within hours, the Cristophe story was everywhere. Rush Limbaugh chortled over it for an hour on his radio show. Later in the day, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan gave the website credit ("We learn from Drudge this morning . . .") on his MSNBC cable show. Kerry's team knew they had a genuine problem on their hands when they saw the next day's newspapers filled with accounts of "Senator Kerry's Bad Hair Day," as one newspaper put it. A Kerry spokeswoman noted indignantly that Drudge had erred: The senator did not pay $150 for his haircut, only $75 -- Cristophe charges less for men. … Inevitably, the whole fuss caught the attention of Jay Leno. By the end of the week he was joking on “The Tonight Show” that the "winds were so strong yesterday" in Massachusetts that "John Kerry's hair actually moved." …
…
In April 2003, a Times story by chief political writer Adam Nagourney and White House reporter Dick Stevenson quoted an unnamed Bush adviser commenting on Kerry's appearance. "He looks French," the adviser cracked. Whether a planned insult or a spur-of-the-moment inspiration, it was one of the most ingenious remarks of the entire campaign. It brilliantly combined two Freak Show themes that were central to the Bush case against Kerry. One was that he was an exotic, even feminine, character.
The other was that he was a virtual quisling, since the French were the most vocal foreign opponents of Bush's war in Iraq. Nagourney and Stevenson played the dig deep in their story, but it hardly went unnoticed. Teresa Heinz Kerry, the candidate's wife, perhaps did not help her husband's cause the next day when she responded with a shot of her own at White House advisers: "They probably do not even speak French." The Times story showed that one of the Trade Secrets of politics is truer than ever in the new environment: Little things can become big things.
The "looks French" line was picked up on Rush Limbaugh's show. Ann Coulter devoted a column to it. House Republican leader Tom DeLay delighted audiences with his new opening line: "Good afternoon. Or, as John Kerry might say, 'Bonjour!' " As 2003 stretched on, Kerry faded as a laugh line. …
… In mid-January, there had been passing references in the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Herald, and elsewhere to speculation that Kerry was freshening his look through injections of Botox. But this speculation did not ignite until it was highlighted on the” Drudge Report” on January 28: "New and Improved Kerry Takes New Hampshire." There were before-and-after photographs with analysis of the respective furrows. Kerry and his spokeswoman, Stephanie Cutter, both denied that he had received Botox injections. Former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee once described a certain type of especially delicious story: "Too good to check!" Kerry's alleged Botox treatments fell in this category. Whether true or not, it fit so neatly into the existing image of Kerry as a popinjay that the story scurried through the news.
CNBC, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer -- all of them, and lots of others, did Botox stories. … By March, even Vice President Dick Cheney was joining in the fun. At the Gridiron Dinner, an annual gathering of the Washington Establishment, he joked that the administration had dispatched weapons inspectors to "search for the bio-warfare agents we believe are hidden in Senator Kerry's forehead."
Another Drudge-driven story was not such a laughing matter. On February 12, the Drudge Report posted a "World Exclusive" stating various news outlets were investigating suspicions that Kerry had had an affair with a young woman, and that she had "fled the country, reportedly at the prodding of Kerry." Drudge wrote, accurately, that rival candidate Wes Clark had earlier told reporters, in an off-the-record session, that he believed Kerry's campaign would "implode over an intern issue." …
Kerry's rumored dalliance, as with all such stories in the Internet Age, unfolded in real time. It soon was known to every American with a modem and a discernible interest in politics. On cue, Limbaugh devoted the first hour of his show to the story. Kerry, meanwhile, kept a previous appointment on the Don Imus radio program and, when pressed, said only, "There is nothing more to report." Later in the day he was more emphatic: "It's untrue, period." The denial was widely reported, earning a few lines from ABC's Peter Jennings on that evening's World News Tonight. From Africa, the woman in question, journalist Alexandra Polier, also issued a denial. Polier later traced the story to its apparent source: a former high school acquaintance who was aware that Kerry and Polier had once shared dinner after meeting at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and had wrongly assumed a romance. Polier theorized that the gossiping friend told her boss, who happened to be Republican lobbyist Bill Jarrell. He allegedly gabbed to others, and a rumor was born.
…
By March, with the nomination in hand but many scars to show for it, Kerry felt he had earned a vacation. The candidate and his wife decamped for a skiing holiday in Idaho. Drudge was still hovering: "Spring Break: Kerry Retreats to His Sun Valley Mansion for 5-Day Luxury Unwind." As Republicans delighted in emphasizing, the Kerrys between them owned five properties. Drudge highlighted the fruits of some excellent Republican research on Kerry's Idaho home, including reference to the size, value, and taxes on the "compound," and the detail that the "mansion's 'Great Room' is a 500 year old barn" imported from England and reconstructed on site. Several newspapers began reporting on the other lavish Kerry-Heinz homes as well.
… there were so many cartoon image themes available in the Republican toy chest that sometimes it was difficult for Kerry's opposition to choose which characteristic to mock. In the GOP conception, Kerry alternatively wore sandals (hippie), French loafers (mon dieu!), or flip-flops (enough said). And a negative Kerry theme, once floated, never really evaporated.
Republicans also were quick to take advantage of Kerry's more blatant errors, most significantly when he declared at a West Virginia town meeting that he "was for" funding of the Iraq war "before he was against it," and when he decided to go windsurfing within camera view while vacationing on Nantucket, the graceful Massachusetts island where he and his wife owned a sumptuous multimillion-dollar oceanfront cottage. These two episodes, one about a serious matter and the other trivial, were cited by Bush aides as turning points in the election.
…
The big controversies coupled with the petty images (John Kerry ordering a Philly cheesesteak with -- take a deep breath -- Swiss cheese; Teresa Heinz's barking at a conservative reporter to "shove it" on the eve of the Democratic convention; Kerry mispronouncing the name of the Green Bay Packers' fabled Lambeau Field) added up.
The stories about Kerry's vacation habits, his houses, his ties to Europe, his complexion, his hair, and all the rest had been deliberately promoted in order to exploit what Republicans long recognized as the candidate's greatest vulnerability: that he lived a life beyond the experience or even imagination of most of the people he hoped to lead. The piece de résistance of the Freak Show in the 2004 campaign was taking Kerry's greatest asset, his military record in Vietnam, and transforming it into a liability. In the winter of 2004, this thirty-five-year-old period in Kerry's life was resurrected, as Dean faded and Kerry improved his campaign trail performance. The final lift came when former Navy colleagues -- the "Band of Brothers," as they became known -- showed up in Iowa to vouch for the candidate. A failing campaign was revived. The political logic seemed unassailable to Democratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire: There is no way a candidate with Purple Hearts on his chest and shrapnel in his leg can be portrayed as weak. The old Republican strategy of painting Democrats as unreliable on national security could not possibly work against this Democrat. Within days of the New Hampshire triumph, however, there were signs that such a strategy might indeed be effective.
Once more, the “Drudge Report” served as a leading indicator of the potential potency of an anti-Kerry scheme. On February 11, Drudge's opposition-research friendships were again in evidence. Someone alerted him to a 1970 Harvard Crimson article, which he rendered into the headline "Radical Kerry Revealed. Old Harvard Interview Unearthed." The story was interesting and relevant, too, as a historical document illuminating the thinking of the candidate as a young man. "I'm an internationalist,'' Kerry said then. "I'd like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations.'' He also said he wanted to "almost eliminate CIA activity." A few days later in the New York Times, Newt Gingrich announced that Republicans were not going to allow Kerry to go through the campaign portraying himself as a war hero. The reality, Gingrich said, was that he was a "Jane Fonda anti-war liberal."
In April, several Republican members of Congress marched to the House floor to deliver speeches about Kerry. The occasion was the thirty-third anniversary of his 1971 antiwar testimony to a Senate committee, when Kerry had alleged, among other things, that war crimes by U.S. servicemen were commonplace in the Vietnam theater. The congressmen, themselves Vietnam veterans, assailed Kerry for the "slander." One of them, Sam Johnson of Texas, showily entered Kerry's 1971 testimony into that day's Congressional Record.
In any era, the complexities and puzzles about Kerry's life in Vietnam and his subsequent return as a prominent antiwar leader would have been a subject of widespread attention in the Old Media. It was only in the context of the Freak Show, however, that this convoluted tale was forged into a powerful weapon by Kerry's opponents.
On Sunday, April 28, Bush's close confidante Karen Hughes appeared on CNN and was asked by Wolf Blitzer if too much was being made of Kerry's past. Referring to what George Bush experienced during the 2000 presidential campaign, she responded:
“[D]uring our own campaign, there was all kinds of gossip and innuendoes and rumors, and many of them were reported, and they were put on the Internet, and then the mainstream media thinks they have to pick them up. And I think that's very troubling to people. It's almost as if . . . a candidate has to disprove a negative, rather than someone has to come forward and make a charge against the candidate. And I worry that does prevent good people from entering the democratic process.”
Hughes then volunteered to say that she was "very troubled" by Kerry's charges of atrocities committed by Americans, although she acknowledged that Kerry had retreated somewhat from his statements of the 1970s.
Getting to where she wanted to arrive, she said she was "very troubled by the fact that he participated in the ceremony where veterans threw their medals away, and he only pretended to throw his. Now, I can understand if out of conscience you take a principled stand and you would decide that you . . . were so opposed to this that you would actually throw your medals. But to pretend to do so, I think that's very revealing."
A few hours later Matt Drudge posted the following dispatch:
XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX SUN APRIL 25, 2004 16:52:38 ET XXXXX 1971 VIDEO: KERRY ADMITS THROWING OWN MEDALS; CONTRADICTS CURRENT CLAIMS
In an interview published Friday in the LOS ANGELES TIMES, Dem presidential hopeful John Kerry claimed he "never ever implied" that he threw his own medals during a Hill protest in 1971 to appear as an antiwar hero.
But a new shock video shows John Kerry -- in his own voice -- saying he did! ABC's GOOD MORNING AMERICA is set to rock the political world Monday morning with an airing of Kerry's specific 1971 boast, sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT.
The video was made by a local news station in 1971.
It directly contradicts Kerry's own website headline: "RIGHTWING FICTION: John Kerry threw away his medals during a Vietnam war protest."
How did Drudge know what would be on “Good Morning America” the following morning? And how was it that the New York Times, also that Monday, would have a story based on the same 1971 video? … the Washington Post stated that "copies of the tape were provided to [the] two news organizations by the Republican National Committee, according to several media staff members familiar with the situation.")
In the fourth paragraph of its Monday story, the Times [noted] … "Republicans, nervous about questions regarding President Bush's Air National Guard service, have raised the issue to revive accusations by some veterans that the discarding of medals dishonored those who served and died in the war. At the same time, the Republicans have said that Mr. Kerry's explanation of what happened at the ceremony is an example of his proclivity to fall on both sides of every issue."
As for the “Good Morning America” airing of the tape, the stakes were raised by Hughes's remarks and the anticipation fostered among the Chattering Class by Drudge's hype. The stakes were raised even higher when Kerry agreed to appear live to proffer a response. The interview with ABC News's Charles Gibson was contentious, and after the segment ended, a heated Kerry, still wearing his microphone, bellowed, "God, they're doing the work of the Republican National Committee."
…
For days, talk radio, cable TV, and the blogs were consumed with the tape, Kerry's emotional response, and the question of his veracity. Politics has always been an unpredictable business -- more so, without question, in the Age of the Freak Show. And yet this strategy worked as if plotted play by play on a locker room chalkboard. By taking advantage of the new media environment, Kerry's foes painted him as an angry, unpatriotic liar. And the effective efforts to damage Kerry using his Vietnam-era past barely had begun (Halperin and Harris 7-18).
Works cited:
Gregg II, Gary L. “George W. Bush: Campaigns and Elections.” University of Virginia. Web. https://millercenter.org/president/gw...
Halperin, Mark and Harris, John F., Excerpts from The Way to Win and the ABC internet article “Political Pundits on How to Win the White House.” ABC News, October 30, 2006. Web. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Books...
Mann, Thomas E., “Campaigning and Governing: The 2004 Elections and Their Aftermath.” Brookings, September 13, 2004. Web. https://www.brookings.edu/on-the-reco...
Moreover, Democrats avoided nominating their potentially weakest candidate-Howard Dean-and quickly rallied behind John Kerry. Money flowed into Kerry campaign and Democratic party coffers, equalizing what observers had expected would be a huge Bush advantage. Democrats were unified and energized, concentrating all of their rhetorical fire on the incumbent president.
The Bush campaign responded with a three-prong strategy. First, reduce the political fallout from Iraq by moving forward with a transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis and a more rapid replacement of American troops in urban areas of insurgent strength with newly trained Iraqi forces. Second, elevate the salience of terrorism as the overriding threat to American security. And third, define Kerry as unfit to be president, based on his alleged inconsistent record on national security matters and his liberal positions and votes on economic and domestic policy.
That strategy bore fruit in August and the first part of September, with the help of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a well-staged Republican convention, and Kerry’s defensiveness and incoherence on Iraq. What had been a modest Kerry lead in the horse race turned into a Bush lead (though its size varied greatly across polling organizations). Kerry’s standing with the public declined during this period, but the underlying public dissatisfaction with the situation in Iraq and the economy did not diminish. The structural forces working against the reelection of the President remain very much in place. … (Mann 4-5)
U.S. Senator John Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who had seen combat as a swift boat captain, [had been]… a leader of the anti-war movement once he [had] left the Navy. Bush focused on Kerry’s liberal voting record in the Senate, including a vote against an $87-billion bill to fund the war on terror. Bush chose to highlight this choice in his ads, leading Kerry to respond, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” Bush saw the opportunity to attack Kerry as a flip-flopper. Kerry, on the other hand, attacked Bush as an unqualified commander in chief, who tricked the American people into an ill-conceived and unpopular war in Iraq. He pledged to the Democratic National Convention and a national televised audience that he would “be a commander in chief who will never mislead us into war.” To drive the image home, he highlighted his wartime experience in Vietnam, saluting and declaring that he was “reporting for duty,” a line that garnered much popular criticism.
Bush experienced a Vietnam-era controversy of his own during the 2004 campaign when CBS reporter Dan Rather aired allegations that Bush did not fulfill his duties in the Texas Air National Guard, which later proved to be based on false reports and forged documents. Along with making a strong case against a John Kerry presidency, Bush focused his campaign on showing that he could continue to lead the nation on major issues. For his second term, he pledged “to modernize Social Security, reform the immigration system, and overhaul the tax code, while continuing No Child Left Behind and the faith-based initiative, implementing Medicare reform, and above all, fighting the war on terror.”
The two candidates debated three times during the fall campaign. Kerry was aggressive, particularly in the first debate, which caught Bush by surprise. Networks showed split screen images of Bush reacting to Kerry’s charges in that first debate, and the President appeared arrogant and disdainful. Bush corrected his expressions in the next two debates, while Kerry committed a major gaffe on a question about homosexuality when he cited the fact that Vice President Cheney’s daughter is a lesbian. Critics derided Kerry for gratuitously dragging the vice president’s family into the campaign (Gregg II 12-13).
...the extreme and eccentric voices who always populated the margins of politics now reside, with money and fame as the rewards, at the center. ... The collapse of filters and the collapse of civility together have changed the purpose of politics. The goal now is not simply to win, but to persuade voters (and donors and viewers and readers) that an opponent lacks the character and credibility even to deserve a place in the contest. That is Freak Show politics.
…
By conventional measures, the thick mane atop Kerry's lean, craggy face should have registered in the strengths column. His hair had grayed but not receded by a single follicle over his six decades. Kerry was a bit vain about his locks, and he gave them careful attention. As it happened, folks at the Republican National Committee had been paying attention, too. Sometime earlier, a tasty nugget of news raced around RNC headquarters. Would you believe that Kerry gets his hair cut at the Washington salon of Cristophe? Yes, exactly, that Cristophe -- the same guy who did Hillary Clinton's hair.
Cristophe was also the stylist who was trimming Bill Clinton that time in 1993 when Air Force One sat on the tarmac in Los Angeles for two hours while the whole world cooled its heels (never mind that reports about delayed air traffic turned out to be false). …
On Sunday, December 2, [2003] Kerry publicly announced his candidacy to Tim Russert on NBC's “Meet the Press.” …
"**Exclusive**" promised the “Drudge Report.” "Cash and Coif!" read his headline, using the alliteration [Matt] Drudge favors. "Democrat all-star John Kerry of Massachusetts is positioning himself as a populist politician while he takes the first step for a White House run. ... But the self-described 'Man of the People' pays $150 to get his hair styled and shampooed -- the cost of feeding a family of three for two weeks!"
Like many “Drudge Report” exclusives, this one implied rigorous reporting, including direct quotations from well-positioned sources to whom the author supposedly talked on a not-for-attribution basis. In this case, it was a "stylist source," who allegedly told him: "When it comes to his hair, Mr. Kerry is very, very particular. The coloring and the highlighting, the layering. But the results are fabulous." Drudge also claimed he had spoken to a "green room insider" at Fox News's Washington bureau: "It's always a fight to get mirror time. He obsessively primps and poses before he goes on the air."
… The assumption that Drudge is casually embroidering his stories -- what would be career-ending fraud for an Old Media journalist or author -- has not caused reporters to remove Drudge from their daily reading. … any superiority reporters and editors feel toward Drudge does not inhibit them from pouncing on his best items.
Within hours, the Cristophe story was everywhere. Rush Limbaugh chortled over it for an hour on his radio show. Later in the day, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan gave the website credit ("We learn from Drudge this morning . . .") on his MSNBC cable show. Kerry's team knew they had a genuine problem on their hands when they saw the next day's newspapers filled with accounts of "Senator Kerry's Bad Hair Day," as one newspaper put it. A Kerry spokeswoman noted indignantly that Drudge had erred: The senator did not pay $150 for his haircut, only $75 -- Cristophe charges less for men. … Inevitably, the whole fuss caught the attention of Jay Leno. By the end of the week he was joking on “The Tonight Show” that the "winds were so strong yesterday" in Massachusetts that "John Kerry's hair actually moved." …
…
In April 2003, a Times story by chief political writer Adam Nagourney and White House reporter Dick Stevenson quoted an unnamed Bush adviser commenting on Kerry's appearance. "He looks French," the adviser cracked. Whether a planned insult or a spur-of-the-moment inspiration, it was one of the most ingenious remarks of the entire campaign. It brilliantly combined two Freak Show themes that were central to the Bush case against Kerry. One was that he was an exotic, even feminine, character.
The other was that he was a virtual quisling, since the French were the most vocal foreign opponents of Bush's war in Iraq. Nagourney and Stevenson played the dig deep in their story, but it hardly went unnoticed. Teresa Heinz Kerry, the candidate's wife, perhaps did not help her husband's cause the next day when she responded with a shot of her own at White House advisers: "They probably do not even speak French." The Times story showed that one of the Trade Secrets of politics is truer than ever in the new environment: Little things can become big things.
The "looks French" line was picked up on Rush Limbaugh's show. Ann Coulter devoted a column to it. House Republican leader Tom DeLay delighted audiences with his new opening line: "Good afternoon. Or, as John Kerry might say, 'Bonjour!' " As 2003 stretched on, Kerry faded as a laugh line. …
… In mid-January, there had been passing references in the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Herald, and elsewhere to speculation that Kerry was freshening his look through injections of Botox. But this speculation did not ignite until it was highlighted on the” Drudge Report” on January 28: "New and Improved Kerry Takes New Hampshire." There were before-and-after photographs with analysis of the respective furrows. Kerry and his spokeswoman, Stephanie Cutter, both denied that he had received Botox injections. Former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee once described a certain type of especially delicious story: "Too good to check!" Kerry's alleged Botox treatments fell in this category. Whether true or not, it fit so neatly into the existing image of Kerry as a popinjay that the story scurried through the news.
CNBC, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer -- all of them, and lots of others, did Botox stories. … By March, even Vice President Dick Cheney was joining in the fun. At the Gridiron Dinner, an annual gathering of the Washington Establishment, he joked that the administration had dispatched weapons inspectors to "search for the bio-warfare agents we believe are hidden in Senator Kerry's forehead."
Another Drudge-driven story was not such a laughing matter. On February 12, the Drudge Report posted a "World Exclusive" stating various news outlets were investigating suspicions that Kerry had had an affair with a young woman, and that she had "fled the country, reportedly at the prodding of Kerry." Drudge wrote, accurately, that rival candidate Wes Clark had earlier told reporters, in an off-the-record session, that he believed Kerry's campaign would "implode over an intern issue." …
Kerry's rumored dalliance, as with all such stories in the Internet Age, unfolded in real time. It soon was known to every American with a modem and a discernible interest in politics. On cue, Limbaugh devoted the first hour of his show to the story. Kerry, meanwhile, kept a previous appointment on the Don Imus radio program and, when pressed, said only, "There is nothing more to report." Later in the day he was more emphatic: "It's untrue, period." The denial was widely reported, earning a few lines from ABC's Peter Jennings on that evening's World News Tonight. From Africa, the woman in question, journalist Alexandra Polier, also issued a denial. Polier later traced the story to its apparent source: a former high school acquaintance who was aware that Kerry and Polier had once shared dinner after meeting at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and had wrongly assumed a romance. Polier theorized that the gossiping friend told her boss, who happened to be Republican lobbyist Bill Jarrell. He allegedly gabbed to others, and a rumor was born.
…
By March, with the nomination in hand but many scars to show for it, Kerry felt he had earned a vacation. The candidate and his wife decamped for a skiing holiday in Idaho. Drudge was still hovering: "Spring Break: Kerry Retreats to His Sun Valley Mansion for 5-Day Luxury Unwind." As Republicans delighted in emphasizing, the Kerrys between them owned five properties. Drudge highlighted the fruits of some excellent Republican research on Kerry's Idaho home, including reference to the size, value, and taxes on the "compound," and the detail that the "mansion's 'Great Room' is a 500 year old barn" imported from England and reconstructed on site. Several newspapers began reporting on the other lavish Kerry-Heinz homes as well.
… there were so many cartoon image themes available in the Republican toy chest that sometimes it was difficult for Kerry's opposition to choose which characteristic to mock. In the GOP conception, Kerry alternatively wore sandals (hippie), French loafers (mon dieu!), or flip-flops (enough said). And a negative Kerry theme, once floated, never really evaporated.
Republicans also were quick to take advantage of Kerry's more blatant errors, most significantly when he declared at a West Virginia town meeting that he "was for" funding of the Iraq war "before he was against it," and when he decided to go windsurfing within camera view while vacationing on Nantucket, the graceful Massachusetts island where he and his wife owned a sumptuous multimillion-dollar oceanfront cottage. These two episodes, one about a serious matter and the other trivial, were cited by Bush aides as turning points in the election.
…
The big controversies coupled with the petty images (John Kerry ordering a Philly cheesesteak with -- take a deep breath -- Swiss cheese; Teresa Heinz's barking at a conservative reporter to "shove it" on the eve of the Democratic convention; Kerry mispronouncing the name of the Green Bay Packers' fabled Lambeau Field) added up.
The stories about Kerry's vacation habits, his houses, his ties to Europe, his complexion, his hair, and all the rest had been deliberately promoted in order to exploit what Republicans long recognized as the candidate's greatest vulnerability: that he lived a life beyond the experience or even imagination of most of the people he hoped to lead. The piece de résistance of the Freak Show in the 2004 campaign was taking Kerry's greatest asset, his military record in Vietnam, and transforming it into a liability. In the winter of 2004, this thirty-five-year-old period in Kerry's life was resurrected, as Dean faded and Kerry improved his campaign trail performance. The final lift came when former Navy colleagues -- the "Band of Brothers," as they became known -- showed up in Iowa to vouch for the candidate. A failing campaign was revived. The political logic seemed unassailable to Democratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire: There is no way a candidate with Purple Hearts on his chest and shrapnel in his leg can be portrayed as weak. The old Republican strategy of painting Democrats as unreliable on national security could not possibly work against this Democrat. Within days of the New Hampshire triumph, however, there were signs that such a strategy might indeed be effective.
Once more, the “Drudge Report” served as a leading indicator of the potential potency of an anti-Kerry scheme. On February 11, Drudge's opposition-research friendships were again in evidence. Someone alerted him to a 1970 Harvard Crimson article, which he rendered into the headline "Radical Kerry Revealed. Old Harvard Interview Unearthed." The story was interesting and relevant, too, as a historical document illuminating the thinking of the candidate as a young man. "I'm an internationalist,'' Kerry said then. "I'd like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations.'' He also said he wanted to "almost eliminate CIA activity." A few days later in the New York Times, Newt Gingrich announced that Republicans were not going to allow Kerry to go through the campaign portraying himself as a war hero. The reality, Gingrich said, was that he was a "Jane Fonda anti-war liberal."
In April, several Republican members of Congress marched to the House floor to deliver speeches about Kerry. The occasion was the thirty-third anniversary of his 1971 antiwar testimony to a Senate committee, when Kerry had alleged, among other things, that war crimes by U.S. servicemen were commonplace in the Vietnam theater. The congressmen, themselves Vietnam veterans, assailed Kerry for the "slander." One of them, Sam Johnson of Texas, showily entered Kerry's 1971 testimony into that day's Congressional Record.
In any era, the complexities and puzzles about Kerry's life in Vietnam and his subsequent return as a prominent antiwar leader would have been a subject of widespread attention in the Old Media. It was only in the context of the Freak Show, however, that this convoluted tale was forged into a powerful weapon by Kerry's opponents.
On Sunday, April 28, Bush's close confidante Karen Hughes appeared on CNN and was asked by Wolf Blitzer if too much was being made of Kerry's past. Referring to what George Bush experienced during the 2000 presidential campaign, she responded:
“[D]uring our own campaign, there was all kinds of gossip and innuendoes and rumors, and many of them were reported, and they were put on the Internet, and then the mainstream media thinks they have to pick them up. And I think that's very troubling to people. It's almost as if . . . a candidate has to disprove a negative, rather than someone has to come forward and make a charge against the candidate. And I worry that does prevent good people from entering the democratic process.”
Hughes then volunteered to say that she was "very troubled" by Kerry's charges of atrocities committed by Americans, although she acknowledged that Kerry had retreated somewhat from his statements of the 1970s.
Getting to where she wanted to arrive, she said she was "very troubled by the fact that he participated in the ceremony where veterans threw their medals away, and he only pretended to throw his. Now, I can understand if out of conscience you take a principled stand and you would decide that you . . . were so opposed to this that you would actually throw your medals. But to pretend to do so, I think that's very revealing."
A few hours later Matt Drudge posted the following dispatch:
XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX SUN APRIL 25, 2004 16:52:38 ET XXXXX 1971 VIDEO: KERRY ADMITS THROWING OWN MEDALS; CONTRADICTS CURRENT CLAIMS
In an interview published Friday in the LOS ANGELES TIMES, Dem presidential hopeful John Kerry claimed he "never ever implied" that he threw his own medals during a Hill protest in 1971 to appear as an antiwar hero.
But a new shock video shows John Kerry -- in his own voice -- saying he did! ABC's GOOD MORNING AMERICA is set to rock the political world Monday morning with an airing of Kerry's specific 1971 boast, sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT.
The video was made by a local news station in 1971.
It directly contradicts Kerry's own website headline: "RIGHTWING FICTION: John Kerry threw away his medals during a Vietnam war protest."
How did Drudge know what would be on “Good Morning America” the following morning? And how was it that the New York Times, also that Monday, would have a story based on the same 1971 video? … the Washington Post stated that "copies of the tape were provided to [the] two news organizations by the Republican National Committee, according to several media staff members familiar with the situation.")
In the fourth paragraph of its Monday story, the Times [noted] … "Republicans, nervous about questions regarding President Bush's Air National Guard service, have raised the issue to revive accusations by some veterans that the discarding of medals dishonored those who served and died in the war. At the same time, the Republicans have said that Mr. Kerry's explanation of what happened at the ceremony is an example of his proclivity to fall on both sides of every issue."
As for the “Good Morning America” airing of the tape, the stakes were raised by Hughes's remarks and the anticipation fostered among the Chattering Class by Drudge's hype. The stakes were raised even higher when Kerry agreed to appear live to proffer a response. The interview with ABC News's Charles Gibson was contentious, and after the segment ended, a heated Kerry, still wearing his microphone, bellowed, "God, they're doing the work of the Republican National Committee."
…
For days, talk radio, cable TV, and the blogs were consumed with the tape, Kerry's emotional response, and the question of his veracity. Politics has always been an unpredictable business -- more so, without question, in the Age of the Freak Show. And yet this strategy worked as if plotted play by play on a locker room chalkboard. By taking advantage of the new media environment, Kerry's foes painted him as an angry, unpatriotic liar. And the effective efforts to damage Kerry using his Vietnam-era past barely had begun (Halperin and Harris 7-18).
Works cited:
Gregg II, Gary L. “George W. Bush: Campaigns and Elections.” University of Virginia. Web. https://millercenter.org/president/gw...
Halperin, Mark and Harris, John F., Excerpts from The Way to Win and the ABC internet article “Political Pundits on How to Win the White House.” ABC News, October 30, 2006. Web. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Books...
Mann, Thomas E., “Campaigning and Governing: The 2004 Elections and Their Aftermath.” Brookings, September 13, 2004. Web. https://www.brookings.edu/on-the-reco...
August 21, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2004 Election -- Overview
Simply put, Bush won the 2004 presidential election because he improved his share of the vote in a wide range of states. It was not a distinct surge in the Bible Belt or Midwest or any other socially conservative region that put the Republican ticket over the top. The overwhelming pattern is one of stasis. The geographic basis of the vote in 2004 closely replicated patterns exhibited in the 2000 election. …
In the midst of great stability, even small changes can have important consequences. For example, reapportionment after the 2000 election helped Bush in an important way. The newly distributed Electoral College vote gave more weight to the Republican South and West, less to the Democratic Northeast and Midwest. As a result, many of the states Bush won in 2000 became worth more electoral votes in 2004. The 271 electoral votes Bush collected in 2000 were worth 278 electoral votes in 2004, a gain of seven before the 2004 campaign even began.
In addition to this initial advantage, Bush managed to win two new states in 2004 while only losing one that he had captured in 2000. The one state he lost – New Hampshire – was worth just four electoral votes. The two new states he won – Iowa and New Mexico – combined for 15 electoral votes.
…
I posit that women were the key swing constituency. Exit polls show the gender gap at just three points in 2004, less than half of what it was in 2000. Men actually voted for Kerry as much or more than they had for Gore, but women swung decidedly to Bush compared to 2000.
More specifically, married white women are almost entirely responsible for the change in the Bush vote. White women split equally between the major party candidates in 2000, and had favored the Democrats by five points in 1996. But in 2004 exit polls show that they reversed course, voting for Bush 55-44. As 36% of the voters in 2004, white women's five point swing could theoretically be responsible for most of Bush's gain (5 points x 36 percent [approximately equal to] 1.8 points). Married women showed a similar shift to the Republicans. They voted 46-48 against Bush in 2000 but 55-44 for Bush in 2004 (Burden 1-3).
Election day started with a shock wave through the campaigns and the media. According to exit polls, the President was doing poorly, even in strong Republican states such as Mississippi and South Carolina. Although they could not yet share their findings publicly, it was clear the media were bracing for a major upset. Bush’s chief strategist, Karl Rove, however, was convinced the methodology of the exit polls had to be wrong and, in the end, he was correct. The election would come down to the swing states of Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada, and Ohio. Though they were close, the Bush team became convinced they had won all four and, with them, the presidency. At about four in the morning, however, rumors began circulating that Kerry and Edwards would file a lawsuit over the results in Ohio. Provisional ballots had not been counted in the state by the end of election night, leaving the results in some doubt. Consequently, Bush chose not to declare victory and again denied his supporters, gathered near the White House, a chance to celebrate. Bush sent Chief of Staff Andy Card to explain: “President Bush decided to give Senator Kerry the respect of more time to reflect on the results of this election. We are convinced that President Bush has won reelection with at least 286 electoral votes.” Kerry called the next morning to concede.
In the end, Bush won 286 Electoral College votes to Kerry’s 251, along with 50.73 percent of the popular vote. Having lost the popular vote in 2000, this majority, bare though it was, added some popular legitimacy to the Bush presidency and gave him the confidence to focus on his domestic policy goals. Bush declared that he had earned political capital from the campaign and now he intended to spend it (Gregg II 9).
Bush’s First Four Years (Viewed September 2004)
President Bush’s bold political achievements have not been matched by clear progress on the problems the nation faced.
Taking the war on terrorism to Afghanistan and Iraq has proven much more problematic than anticipated. While the Taliban regime and Al Qaeda were quickly routed in Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden escaped in Tora Bora, and remnants of both groups continue to operate in Afghanistan and western Pakistan. A rapid military victory in Iraq was followed by an unanticipated and lethal insurgency, producing much bloodshed, chaos, insecurity, and delays in restoring essential services and a functioning economy. The Administration is vulnerable on its primary rationale for the war (WMDs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda, both rebutted by evidence), inadequate planning to win the peace, and incompetent management of postwar operations. Most Americans now believe the costs of the war in Iraq exceed the benefits, and that we are more, not less, vulnerable to terrorism as a consequence of it.
The extraordinary stimulus from a series of tax cuts, major spending increases, and an accommodative monetary policy has not produced the expected robust economic recovery from the 2001 recession. The economy has produced fewer jobs than it has lost since January 2001, wage gains have been stagnant, and high health care and energy costs have squeezed middle-class households. Moreover, federal budget surpluses generated at the end of the Clinton administration have turned into huge deficits almost certain to extend into the baby boomer retirement years.
The President’s signature domestic policy achievements-the No Child Left Behind education law and the Medicare prescription drug bill-have both generated more skepticism and complaints than political reward.
Finally, the President’s promise to a “uniter, not a divider” has proven empty. If anything, our political culture has become more, not less, coarse since he took office (Mann 2-3).
Works cited:
Burden, Barry C., “An Alternative Account of the 2004 Presidential Election.” The Forum. November 15, 2004. Web. http://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS125/ar...
Gregg II, Gary L. “George W. Bush: Campaigns and Elections.” University of Virginia. Web. https://millercenter.org/president/gw...
Mann, Thomas E., “Campaigning and Governing: The 2004 Elections and Their Aftermath.”Brookings, September 13, 2004. Web. https://www.brookings.edu/on-the-reco...
In the midst of great stability, even small changes can have important consequences. For example, reapportionment after the 2000 election helped Bush in an important way. The newly distributed Electoral College vote gave more weight to the Republican South and West, less to the Democratic Northeast and Midwest. As a result, many of the states Bush won in 2000 became worth more electoral votes in 2004. The 271 electoral votes Bush collected in 2000 were worth 278 electoral votes in 2004, a gain of seven before the 2004 campaign even began.
In addition to this initial advantage, Bush managed to win two new states in 2004 while only losing one that he had captured in 2000. The one state he lost – New Hampshire – was worth just four electoral votes. The two new states he won – Iowa and New Mexico – combined for 15 electoral votes.
…
I posit that women were the key swing constituency. Exit polls show the gender gap at just three points in 2004, less than half of what it was in 2000. Men actually voted for Kerry as much or more than they had for Gore, but women swung decidedly to Bush compared to 2000.
More specifically, married white women are almost entirely responsible for the change in the Bush vote. White women split equally between the major party candidates in 2000, and had favored the Democrats by five points in 1996. But in 2004 exit polls show that they reversed course, voting for Bush 55-44. As 36% of the voters in 2004, white women's five point swing could theoretically be responsible for most of Bush's gain (5 points x 36 percent [approximately equal to] 1.8 points). Married women showed a similar shift to the Republicans. They voted 46-48 against Bush in 2000 but 55-44 for Bush in 2004 (Burden 1-3).
Election day started with a shock wave through the campaigns and the media. According to exit polls, the President was doing poorly, even in strong Republican states such as Mississippi and South Carolina. Although they could not yet share their findings publicly, it was clear the media were bracing for a major upset. Bush’s chief strategist, Karl Rove, however, was convinced the methodology of the exit polls had to be wrong and, in the end, he was correct. The election would come down to the swing states of Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada, and Ohio. Though they were close, the Bush team became convinced they had won all four and, with them, the presidency. At about four in the morning, however, rumors began circulating that Kerry and Edwards would file a lawsuit over the results in Ohio. Provisional ballots had not been counted in the state by the end of election night, leaving the results in some doubt. Consequently, Bush chose not to declare victory and again denied his supporters, gathered near the White House, a chance to celebrate. Bush sent Chief of Staff Andy Card to explain: “President Bush decided to give Senator Kerry the respect of more time to reflect on the results of this election. We are convinced that President Bush has won reelection with at least 286 electoral votes.” Kerry called the next morning to concede.
In the end, Bush won 286 Electoral College votes to Kerry’s 251, along with 50.73 percent of the popular vote. Having lost the popular vote in 2000, this majority, bare though it was, added some popular legitimacy to the Bush presidency and gave him the confidence to focus on his domestic policy goals. Bush declared that he had earned political capital from the campaign and now he intended to spend it (Gregg II 9).
Bush’s First Four Years (Viewed September 2004)
President Bush’s bold political achievements have not been matched by clear progress on the problems the nation faced.
Taking the war on terrorism to Afghanistan and Iraq has proven much more problematic than anticipated. While the Taliban regime and Al Qaeda were quickly routed in Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden escaped in Tora Bora, and remnants of both groups continue to operate in Afghanistan and western Pakistan. A rapid military victory in Iraq was followed by an unanticipated and lethal insurgency, producing much bloodshed, chaos, insecurity, and delays in restoring essential services and a functioning economy. The Administration is vulnerable on its primary rationale for the war (WMDs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda, both rebutted by evidence), inadequate planning to win the peace, and incompetent management of postwar operations. Most Americans now believe the costs of the war in Iraq exceed the benefits, and that we are more, not less, vulnerable to terrorism as a consequence of it.
The extraordinary stimulus from a series of tax cuts, major spending increases, and an accommodative monetary policy has not produced the expected robust economic recovery from the 2001 recession. The economy has produced fewer jobs than it has lost since January 2001, wage gains have been stagnant, and high health care and energy costs have squeezed middle-class households. Moreover, federal budget surpluses generated at the end of the Clinton administration have turned into huge deficits almost certain to extend into the baby boomer retirement years.
The President’s signature domestic policy achievements-the No Child Left Behind education law and the Medicare prescription drug bill-have both generated more skepticism and complaints than political reward.
Finally, the President’s promise to a “uniter, not a divider” has proven empty. If anything, our political culture has become more, not less, coarse since he took office (Mann 2-3).
Works cited:
Burden, Barry C., “An Alternative Account of the 2004 Presidential Election.” The Forum. November 15, 2004. Web. http://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS125/ar...
Gregg II, Gary L. “George W. Bush: Campaigns and Elections.” University of Virginia. Web. https://millercenter.org/president/gw...
Mann, Thomas E., “Campaigning and Governing: The 2004 Elections and Their Aftermath.”Brookings, September 13, 2004. Web. https://www.brookings.edu/on-the-reco...
August 19, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2000 Election -- Florida -- Lawyering, Supreme Court Decision
Ted Cruz, a 29-year-old domestic-policy adviser on the Bush campaign at the time and a former law clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, put together Bush’s legal team. One of his first calls was to John Roberts, whom Cruz knew from the close-knit network of former Rehnquist clerks, nicknamed the Cabal.
“We started to assemble a team of the best lawyers and in particular the best Supreme Court lawyers in the country, and John’s name naturally came near the top of the list,” Cruz told The New York Times in 2005. Roberts, who had clerked for Rehnquist in 1980 and was now in private practice, caught the next flight to Tallahassee.
Roberts had a long history of opposition to voting rights. As a young lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, Roberts led the charge against the 1982 reauthorization of the VRA [Voting Rights Act], writing more than two dozen memos criticizing the landmark civil-rights law. Voting-rights violations “should not be made too easy to prove,” he wrote, and would lead to “a quota system in electoral politics.” Now he was helping the Bush team prevent eligible votes from being counted.
Roberts edited legal briefs, including the Bush campaign’s 50-page submission to the Supreme Court, and prepared Theodore Olson, a former assistant attorney general under Reagan, for oral arguments. He also advised Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush, on how the state legislature could assign its presidential electors to George W. Bush before the recount was finished. “I really appreciate your input on my role in this unique and historic situation,” Bush wrote to Roberts.
Roberts’s name appeared on no briefs, but his influence was unmistakable. “He is one of the finest legal writers of his generation,” Cruz said. “His editing pen was invaluable (Berman 5).
In Miami-Dade … a manual recount of undervotes began to produce a striking number of new votes for Gore. There, as in Palm Beach and Broward, fractious Democratic and Republican lawyers were challenging every vote the canvassing board decided. In Miami-Dade, Kendall Coffey, tall and gaunt, was the Democrats’ eyes and ears. As the Gore votes accumulated, he recalls, “panic buttons were being pushed.”
On Wednesday, November 22, the canvassing board made an ill-fated decision to move the counting up from the 18th floor of the Clark Center, where a large number of partisan observers had been able to view it, to the more cloistered 19th floor. Angry shouts rang out, and so began the “Brooks Brothers riot.”
Several dozen people, ostensibly local citizens, began banging on the doors and windows of the room where the tallying was taking place, shouting, “Stop the count! Stop the fraud!” They tried to force themselves into the room and accosted the county Democratic Party chairman, accusing him of stealing a ballot. A subsequent report by The Washington Post would note that most of the rioters were Republican operatives, many of them congressional staffers (Margolick 12-15).
IRS documents would later show that these rioters were flown in from out of state on private jets lent to the Bush campaign by supportive corporations including Enron and Halliburton, put up gratis in local hotels, and entertained by Wayne Newton singing “Danke Schoen,” all courtesy of the Republican Party. Many were specifically recruited by House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, and given directions from a communications-equipped Winnebago by party operatives keeping abreast of where their services might be best deployed.
Their rioters’ value was no doubt best demonstrated when, on November 22, a Miami-Dade canvassing board attempted at one point to undertake the hand recounts the courts had ordered. With just a few phone calls the Republican street operation produced hundreds of “volunteers” who, once engaged, according to Time, proved to be a “mob scene … screaming … pounding on doors and … [threatening an] alleged physical assault on Democrats … the Republicans marched on the counting room en masse, chanting ‘Three Blind Mice,’ and ‘Fraud, Fraud, Fraud.’ … let it be known that 1,000 local Cuban-American Republicans—[a group to whom violence as an instrument of political intimidation is not exactly unknown]—were on the way."
The mob chased down the chairman of the local Democratic Party because it falsely believed he had tried to steal a ballot. He required a police escort to escape. Another Democratic aide says he was punched and kicked by goons from the mob. Still others were trampled to the floor as the mob tried to break down the doors of the room outside the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections where the votes were being counted.
Longtime GOP operative Roger Stone oversaw phone banks urging activists to storm downtown Miami. The city’s most influential Spanish-language radio station, Radio Mambi, called on the hard-right Cuban-American community to head downtown to demonstrate. As Time noted, “Just two hours after a near riot outside the counting room, the Miami-Dade canvassing board voted to shut down the count.”
No legal charges were ever filed either against the rioters or their political paymasters. The payments were documented in the hundreds of pages of Bush committee records released to the IRS in July 2002 after a lengthy period of resistance and refusal (Alterman 3-4).
For all the tumult in Miami-Dade, both sides had realized that the presidency might well be determined not by hanging chads or overvotes but by absentee ballots. Republicans seethed with rumors of ballots by the bagful coming in from Israel—all, presumably, from Jewish Democrats. Democrats envisioned thousands of ballots coming in from military bases abroad—all, presumably, from Bush fans in uniform.
Lawyers of both sides clashed. Should any post-election absentee vote count, including those with late—or no—postmarks? The Florida Supreme Court ruled that absentee ballots should not be rejected “for minor ‘hypertechnical’ reasons.” The Republicans gained 123 votes.
The day before Thanksgiving, the Bush campaign turned to the United States Supreme Court. Claiming that the situation in Florida had degenerated into a “circus,” it asked the high court to stop everything, and cited two highly technical federal issues for it to consider. The first, based on an obscure law from 1887, prohibited states from changing the rules after the date of that election. The second, a jurisdictional issue, was that by stepping into the case the Florida Supreme Court had usurped the Florida legislature’s exclusive powers to set the procedures for selecting electors, as provided for by Article II of the United States Constitution. The Bush lawyers claimed, too, that the selective recounts violated constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection—meaning the different criteria for recounting the ballots did not give equal rights to all voters.
Bush’s petition for certiorari—that is, for the Court to take the case—went initially to Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose task it was to consider all emergency motions from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. For Kennedy, then 64, a man known to relish the pomp and circumstance of the Supreme Court and his own, often crucial role in close cases, weighing such a momentous matter must have been glorious indeed. Batting aside a Thanksgiving Day plea from the Gore campaign to pass on the case, Kennedy urged his colleagues to take it on, suggesting that the Court was absolutely the essential arbiter of such weighty matters. He conceded, though, that Bush faced an uphill struggle on the law.
…
As was customary, the Court did not detail how many justices had voted to hear the case, or who they were, and Gore’s lawyers didn’t really want to know. At that point, they felt a certain faith in the institution and in the law: it was inconceivable to them that the Court would intercede, much less decide the presidency by a vote of five to four. But the liberal clerks were more pessimistic. Why, they asked, would a majority of the Court agree to consider the Florida ruling unless they wanted it overturned and the recount shut down?
Certainly, that was what the justices who’d opposed taking the case believed. Convinced the majority would reverse the Florida court, they began drafting a dissent even before the case was argued in court. It was long—about 30 pages—and elaborate, written principally by Justice Stevens, then 80, the most senior of the would-be dissenters and, largely by default, the Court’s most liberal member ….
Meanwhile, events in Florida took their own course. On Sunday, November 26, the Palm Beach canvassing board sent an urgent request to Katherine Harris, saying that in order to complete its manual recount it needed two additional hours beyond the five P.M. deadline she had chosen to enforce, rather than the Monday deadline the Florida Supreme Court had offered her as an option. Harris conferred with Stipanovich and answered no. As a result the county’s entire recount effort was deemed null and void. That afternoon Harris certified the election, claiming that Bush had won by 537 votes, a total that appeared to include Bush’s net gain in absentee ballots, but none of the recounted votes from Palm Beach or Miami-Dade. Gore’s lawyers promptly contested the certification.
At the Supreme Court, the liberal clerks handicapped the case pretty much as the Gore camp did. At issue, as they often were in crucial cases, were Justices Kennedy and O’Connor. But were both really in play? At a dinner on November 29, attended by clerks from several chambers, an O’Connor clerk said that O’Connor was determined to overturn the Florida decision and was merely looking for the grounds. O’Connor was known to decide cases on gut feelings and facts rather than grand theories, then stick doggedly with whatever she decided. In this instance, one clerk recalls, “she thought the Florida court was trying to steal the election and that they had to stop it.” Blithely ignorant of what view she actually held, the Gore campaign acted as if she were up for grabs. In fact, the case would come down to Kennedy.
Conservatives, however, were not always happy with Kennedy, either. They had never forgiven him for his votes to uphold abortion and gay rights, and doubted both his intelligence and his commitment to the cause. Convinced he’d strayed on abortion under the pernicious influence of a liberal law clerk—a former student of the notoriously liberal Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, who was representing Gore in this case—they took steps to prevent any reoccurrences. Applicants for Kennedy clerkships were now screened by a panel of right-wing stalwarts. “The premise is that he can’t think by himself, and that he can be manipulated by someone in his second year of law school,” one liberal clerk explains. In 2000, as in most years, that system surrounded Kennedy with true believers, all belonging to the Federalist Society, the farm team of the legal right. …
…
Breyer and Souter saw Kennedy’s new focus on equal protection as an opportunity, suggesting during oral argument that if there were problems with the fairness of the recount the solution was simple: send the case back once more to the Florida Supreme Court and ask it to set a uniform standard. Breyer, whose chambers were next door to Kennedy’s, went to work on him personally. …
…
On December 1, lawyers for the two sides argued their cases before the Court. Laurence Tribe, an experienced and highly respected Supreme Court advocate, seemed flat that day and off his game; the justices appeared to chafe under what they considered his condescending professorial style. Bush’s lawyer, Theodore Olson, who later became solicitor general in John Ashcroft’s Justice Department, was more impressive, but then again, he was playing to a friendlier audience. Rehnquist and Scalia hinted that they favored the claim that the Florida Supreme Court had encroached upon the Florida legislature’s exclusive turf. Both O’Connor and Kennedy also voiced irritation with the Florida court. It did not augur well for Gore.
…
By December 4, all nine justices had signed on to the chief justice’s opinion. The unanimity was, in fact, a charade; four of the justices had no beef at all with the Florida Supreme Court, while at least four others were determined to overturn it. But this way each side could claim victory: the liberal-to-moderate justices had spared the Court a divisive and embarrassing vote on the merits, one they’d probably have lost anyway. As for the conservatives, by eating up Gore’s clock—Gore’s lawyers had conceded that everything had to be resolved by December 12—they had all but killed his chances to prevail, and without looking needlessly partisan in the process. With the chastened Florida court unlikely to intervene again, the election could now stagger to a close, with the Court’s reputation intact, and with Bush all but certain to win.
On Friday, December 8, however, the Florida Supreme Court confounded everyone by jumping back into the fray. By a vote of four to three, it ordered a statewide recount of all undervotes: the more than 61,000 ballots that the voting machines, for one reason or another, had missed. The court was silent on what standard would be used—hanging vs. pregnant chads—and so each county, by inference, would set its own. As they watched televised images of bug-eyed Florida officials inspecting punch-card ballots for hanging, dimpled, or pregnant chads, the Supreme Court clerks knew the case was certain to head back their way.
Sure enough, the Bush campaign asked the Court to stay the decision and halt the recount. In a highly unusual move, Scalia urged his colleagues to grant the stay immediately, even before receiving Gore’s response. Gore had been narrowing Bush’s lead, and his campaign expected that by Monday he would pull ahead. But Scalia was convinced that all the manual recounts were illegitimate. He told his colleagues such recounts would cast “a needless and unjustified cloud” over Bush’s legitimacy. It was essential, he said, to shut down the process immediately. The clerks were amazed at how baldly Scalia was pushing what they considered his own partisan agenda.
Scalia’s wish was not granted. But at his urging, Rehnquist moved up the conference he’d scheduled for the next day from 1 in the afternoon to 10 that morning. In the meantime, the conservative justices began sending around memos to their colleagues, each of them offering a different rationale for ruling in Bush’s favor; to the liberal clerks, it was apparent that the conservatives had already decided the case and were merely auditioning arguments.
… Finally, shortly before three o’clock, the Court granted the stay. No more votes would be counted. Oral arguments were set for the following Monday, December 11.
Gore and his team were crushed, but neither he nor his lawyers had given up. Even at this late date, Gore naïvely defended the good faith of the justices. “Please be sure that no one trashes the Court,” he instructed his minions. His lawyers still hoped that Kennedy or O’Connor or both could be won over; perhaps they could be peeled away from the conservative bloc as they had been several years earlier to preserve Roe v. Wade. …
The encounters between the two men must have been extraordinary: with the presidency of the United States hanging in the balance, two ambitious jurists—each surely fancying himself a future chief justice—working on each other. And for a brief moment Breyer appeared to have succeeded. At the conference following the oral argument, Kennedy joined the dissenters and, at least temporarily, turned them into the majority. The case would be sent back to the Florida court for fixing; the recount would continue. But the liberal clerks never believed that Kennedy had really switched, and predicted that, having created the desired image of agonizing, he would quickly switch back. “He probably wanted to think of himself as having wavered,” one clerk speculates. And, sure enough, within a half-hour or so, he did switch back.
… Breyer lamented that he had Kennedy convinced, only to have his clerks work him over and pull him back in the other direction (Margolick 12-15).
…
Breyer and Souter saw Kennedy’s new focus on equal protection as an opportunity, suggesting during oral argument that if there were problems with the fairness of the recount the solution was simple: send the case back once more to the Florida Supreme Court and ask it to set a uniform standard. Breyer, whose chambers were next door to Kennedy’s, went to work on him personally. …
it became apparent that Kennedy and O’Connor would not join Rehnquist’s opinion on jurisdiction, and would decide the case strictly on equal-protection grounds. …
As the drafts began circulating, tempers began to fray. In an unusual sealed memo—an unsuccessful attempt to avoid the clerks’ prying eyes—Scalia complained about the tone of some of the dissents. He was, he confessed, the last person to criticize hard-hitting language, but never had he, as the dissenters were now doing, urged the majority to change its decision based on its impact on the Supreme Court’s credibility. He charged that his opponents in the case were inflicting the very wounds to the Court that they had supposedly decried. …
Kennedy, too, sent around a memo, accusing the dissenters of “trashing the Court.” Eager to suggest to the outside world that the Court was less divided than it appeared, he charged that the dissenters agreed with the equal-protection argument more than they were willing to admit. …
…
The Court’s opinions were issued at roughly 10 o’clock that night. … (Margolick 16-20).
The Court asserted that the recount violated the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment— established in 1868 to secure the rights of African-Americans—because there was no uniform statewide standard for counting disputed ballots in each county. In a draft of her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed in a footnote that if there was any equal- protection violation in Florida, it was because black voters encountered a disproportionate number of problems voting. Justice Antonin Scalia, her closest friend on the Court, objected to Ginsburg’s “Al Sharpton” footnote, according to The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, and she took it out. When one read the Bush v. Gore decision, it was as if the disenfranchisement of black voters had never occurred (Berman 7).
There were two more extraordinary passages: first, that the ruling applied to Bush and Bush alone, lest anyone think the Court was expanding the reach of the equal-protection clause; and, second, that the Court had taken the case only very reluctantly and out of necessity. “That infuriated us,” one liberal clerk recalls. “It was typical Kennedy bullshit, aggrandizing the power of the Court while ostensibly wringing his hands about it.”
Gore’s lawyers read him the ruling. At last he concluded that the Court had never really given him a shot, and he congratulated his legal team for making it so hard for the Court to justify its decision. …
O’Connor confessed surprise at the anger that greeted the decision, but that seemed to reflect naïveté more than any sober second thoughts. On her 71st birthday, in March 2001, she was sitting in the Kennedy Center when Arthur Miller, the playwright, denounced what the Court had done. Around Washington, a few people stopped shaking her hand, and Justice Scalia’s too; the consensus has since grown that because of Bush v Gore, he can never be named chief justice.
…
Ultimately, only the five justices in the majority know how and why they decided the case as they did and whether they did it in good or bad faith. Perhaps even they don’t know the answer. An insider was asked if the five would pass a lie-detector test on the subject. “I honestly don’t know,” this insider replies. “People are amazing self-kidders” (Margolick 12-17).
Bush v. Gore has been regarded as one of the most politically consequential decisions in the history of the court, and one that damaged the court's preferred image of itself as an institution far removed from everyday partisan politics (Elving 3-5).
Gore could theoretically have asked the Florida Supreme Court to order a statewide recount with more explicit standards. But he took the advice of one of his lawyers, who told him that this would “cause a tremendous uproar.” And in any case, as the book “Deadlock” later put it, “the best Gore could hope for was a slate of disputed electors” — i.e., he might become president, but Republicans would complain about it.
Thus, Gore [on December 13, 2000] conceded to Bush again, in a speech full of high-minded rhetoric about “the law” and how his surrender could “point us all to a new common ground.” Bush officially won Florida by 537 votes and the Electoral College by 271-266 and went on to become one of the most catastrophic presidents in U.S. history (Schwartz 7).
Works cited:
Alterman, Eric, “Florida 2000 Forever.” Center for American Progress, December 9, 2010. Web. https://www.americanprogress.org/issu...
Berman, Ari, “How the 2000 Election in Florida Led to a New Wave of Voter Disenfranchisement.” The Nation, July 28, 2015. Web. https://www.thenation.com/article/arc...
Elving, Ron, “The Florida Recount Of 2000: A Nightmare That Goes on Haunting.” NPR November 12, 2018. Web. https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/666812...
Margolick, David, “The Path to Florida.” Vanity Fair, March 19, 2014. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/...
Schwartz, Jon, “Democrats Should Remember Al Gore Won Florida in 2000 – But Lost the Presidency with a Pre-emptive Surrender.” The Intercept, November 10, 2018. Web. https://theintercept.com/2018/11/10/d...
“We started to assemble a team of the best lawyers and in particular the best Supreme Court lawyers in the country, and John’s name naturally came near the top of the list,” Cruz told The New York Times in 2005. Roberts, who had clerked for Rehnquist in 1980 and was now in private practice, caught the next flight to Tallahassee.
Roberts had a long history of opposition to voting rights. As a young lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, Roberts led the charge against the 1982 reauthorization of the VRA [Voting Rights Act], writing more than two dozen memos criticizing the landmark civil-rights law. Voting-rights violations “should not be made too easy to prove,” he wrote, and would lead to “a quota system in electoral politics.” Now he was helping the Bush team prevent eligible votes from being counted.
Roberts edited legal briefs, including the Bush campaign’s 50-page submission to the Supreme Court, and prepared Theodore Olson, a former assistant attorney general under Reagan, for oral arguments. He also advised Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush, on how the state legislature could assign its presidential electors to George W. Bush before the recount was finished. “I really appreciate your input on my role in this unique and historic situation,” Bush wrote to Roberts.
Roberts’s name appeared on no briefs, but his influence was unmistakable. “He is one of the finest legal writers of his generation,” Cruz said. “His editing pen was invaluable (Berman 5).
In Miami-Dade … a manual recount of undervotes began to produce a striking number of new votes for Gore. There, as in Palm Beach and Broward, fractious Democratic and Republican lawyers were challenging every vote the canvassing board decided. In Miami-Dade, Kendall Coffey, tall and gaunt, was the Democrats’ eyes and ears. As the Gore votes accumulated, he recalls, “panic buttons were being pushed.”
On Wednesday, November 22, the canvassing board made an ill-fated decision to move the counting up from the 18th floor of the Clark Center, where a large number of partisan observers had been able to view it, to the more cloistered 19th floor. Angry shouts rang out, and so began the “Brooks Brothers riot.”
Several dozen people, ostensibly local citizens, began banging on the doors and windows of the room where the tallying was taking place, shouting, “Stop the count! Stop the fraud!” They tried to force themselves into the room and accosted the county Democratic Party chairman, accusing him of stealing a ballot. A subsequent report by The Washington Post would note that most of the rioters were Republican operatives, many of them congressional staffers (Margolick 12-15).
IRS documents would later show that these rioters were flown in from out of state on private jets lent to the Bush campaign by supportive corporations including Enron and Halliburton, put up gratis in local hotels, and entertained by Wayne Newton singing “Danke Schoen,” all courtesy of the Republican Party. Many were specifically recruited by House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, and given directions from a communications-equipped Winnebago by party operatives keeping abreast of where their services might be best deployed.
Their rioters’ value was no doubt best demonstrated when, on November 22, a Miami-Dade canvassing board attempted at one point to undertake the hand recounts the courts had ordered. With just a few phone calls the Republican street operation produced hundreds of “volunteers” who, once engaged, according to Time, proved to be a “mob scene … screaming … pounding on doors and … [threatening an] alleged physical assault on Democrats … the Republicans marched on the counting room en masse, chanting ‘Three Blind Mice,’ and ‘Fraud, Fraud, Fraud.’ … let it be known that 1,000 local Cuban-American Republicans—[a group to whom violence as an instrument of political intimidation is not exactly unknown]—were on the way."
The mob chased down the chairman of the local Democratic Party because it falsely believed he had tried to steal a ballot. He required a police escort to escape. Another Democratic aide says he was punched and kicked by goons from the mob. Still others were trampled to the floor as the mob tried to break down the doors of the room outside the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections where the votes were being counted.
Longtime GOP operative Roger Stone oversaw phone banks urging activists to storm downtown Miami. The city’s most influential Spanish-language radio station, Radio Mambi, called on the hard-right Cuban-American community to head downtown to demonstrate. As Time noted, “Just two hours after a near riot outside the counting room, the Miami-Dade canvassing board voted to shut down the count.”
No legal charges were ever filed either against the rioters or their political paymasters. The payments were documented in the hundreds of pages of Bush committee records released to the IRS in July 2002 after a lengthy period of resistance and refusal (Alterman 3-4).
For all the tumult in Miami-Dade, both sides had realized that the presidency might well be determined not by hanging chads or overvotes but by absentee ballots. Republicans seethed with rumors of ballots by the bagful coming in from Israel—all, presumably, from Jewish Democrats. Democrats envisioned thousands of ballots coming in from military bases abroad—all, presumably, from Bush fans in uniform.
Lawyers of both sides clashed. Should any post-election absentee vote count, including those with late—or no—postmarks? The Florida Supreme Court ruled that absentee ballots should not be rejected “for minor ‘hypertechnical’ reasons.” The Republicans gained 123 votes.
The day before Thanksgiving, the Bush campaign turned to the United States Supreme Court. Claiming that the situation in Florida had degenerated into a “circus,” it asked the high court to stop everything, and cited two highly technical federal issues for it to consider. The first, based on an obscure law from 1887, prohibited states from changing the rules after the date of that election. The second, a jurisdictional issue, was that by stepping into the case the Florida Supreme Court had usurped the Florida legislature’s exclusive powers to set the procedures for selecting electors, as provided for by Article II of the United States Constitution. The Bush lawyers claimed, too, that the selective recounts violated constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection—meaning the different criteria for recounting the ballots did not give equal rights to all voters.
Bush’s petition for certiorari—that is, for the Court to take the case—went initially to Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose task it was to consider all emergency motions from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. For Kennedy, then 64, a man known to relish the pomp and circumstance of the Supreme Court and his own, often crucial role in close cases, weighing such a momentous matter must have been glorious indeed. Batting aside a Thanksgiving Day plea from the Gore campaign to pass on the case, Kennedy urged his colleagues to take it on, suggesting that the Court was absolutely the essential arbiter of such weighty matters. He conceded, though, that Bush faced an uphill struggle on the law.
…
As was customary, the Court did not detail how many justices had voted to hear the case, or who they were, and Gore’s lawyers didn’t really want to know. At that point, they felt a certain faith in the institution and in the law: it was inconceivable to them that the Court would intercede, much less decide the presidency by a vote of five to four. But the liberal clerks were more pessimistic. Why, they asked, would a majority of the Court agree to consider the Florida ruling unless they wanted it overturned and the recount shut down?
Certainly, that was what the justices who’d opposed taking the case believed. Convinced the majority would reverse the Florida court, they began drafting a dissent even before the case was argued in court. It was long—about 30 pages—and elaborate, written principally by Justice Stevens, then 80, the most senior of the would-be dissenters and, largely by default, the Court’s most liberal member ….
Meanwhile, events in Florida took their own course. On Sunday, November 26, the Palm Beach canvassing board sent an urgent request to Katherine Harris, saying that in order to complete its manual recount it needed two additional hours beyond the five P.M. deadline she had chosen to enforce, rather than the Monday deadline the Florida Supreme Court had offered her as an option. Harris conferred with Stipanovich and answered no. As a result the county’s entire recount effort was deemed null and void. That afternoon Harris certified the election, claiming that Bush had won by 537 votes, a total that appeared to include Bush’s net gain in absentee ballots, but none of the recounted votes from Palm Beach or Miami-Dade. Gore’s lawyers promptly contested the certification.
At the Supreme Court, the liberal clerks handicapped the case pretty much as the Gore camp did. At issue, as they often were in crucial cases, were Justices Kennedy and O’Connor. But were both really in play? At a dinner on November 29, attended by clerks from several chambers, an O’Connor clerk said that O’Connor was determined to overturn the Florida decision and was merely looking for the grounds. O’Connor was known to decide cases on gut feelings and facts rather than grand theories, then stick doggedly with whatever she decided. In this instance, one clerk recalls, “she thought the Florida court was trying to steal the election and that they had to stop it.” Blithely ignorant of what view she actually held, the Gore campaign acted as if she were up for grabs. In fact, the case would come down to Kennedy.
Conservatives, however, were not always happy with Kennedy, either. They had never forgiven him for his votes to uphold abortion and gay rights, and doubted both his intelligence and his commitment to the cause. Convinced he’d strayed on abortion under the pernicious influence of a liberal law clerk—a former student of the notoriously liberal Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, who was representing Gore in this case—they took steps to prevent any reoccurrences. Applicants for Kennedy clerkships were now screened by a panel of right-wing stalwarts. “The premise is that he can’t think by himself, and that he can be manipulated by someone in his second year of law school,” one liberal clerk explains. In 2000, as in most years, that system surrounded Kennedy with true believers, all belonging to the Federalist Society, the farm team of the legal right. …
…
Breyer and Souter saw Kennedy’s new focus on equal protection as an opportunity, suggesting during oral argument that if there were problems with the fairness of the recount the solution was simple: send the case back once more to the Florida Supreme Court and ask it to set a uniform standard. Breyer, whose chambers were next door to Kennedy’s, went to work on him personally. …
…
On December 1, lawyers for the two sides argued their cases before the Court. Laurence Tribe, an experienced and highly respected Supreme Court advocate, seemed flat that day and off his game; the justices appeared to chafe under what they considered his condescending professorial style. Bush’s lawyer, Theodore Olson, who later became solicitor general in John Ashcroft’s Justice Department, was more impressive, but then again, he was playing to a friendlier audience. Rehnquist and Scalia hinted that they favored the claim that the Florida Supreme Court had encroached upon the Florida legislature’s exclusive turf. Both O’Connor and Kennedy also voiced irritation with the Florida court. It did not augur well for Gore.
…
By December 4, all nine justices had signed on to the chief justice’s opinion. The unanimity was, in fact, a charade; four of the justices had no beef at all with the Florida Supreme Court, while at least four others were determined to overturn it. But this way each side could claim victory: the liberal-to-moderate justices had spared the Court a divisive and embarrassing vote on the merits, one they’d probably have lost anyway. As for the conservatives, by eating up Gore’s clock—Gore’s lawyers had conceded that everything had to be resolved by December 12—they had all but killed his chances to prevail, and without looking needlessly partisan in the process. With the chastened Florida court unlikely to intervene again, the election could now stagger to a close, with the Court’s reputation intact, and with Bush all but certain to win.
On Friday, December 8, however, the Florida Supreme Court confounded everyone by jumping back into the fray. By a vote of four to three, it ordered a statewide recount of all undervotes: the more than 61,000 ballots that the voting machines, for one reason or another, had missed. The court was silent on what standard would be used—hanging vs. pregnant chads—and so each county, by inference, would set its own. As they watched televised images of bug-eyed Florida officials inspecting punch-card ballots for hanging, dimpled, or pregnant chads, the Supreme Court clerks knew the case was certain to head back their way.
Sure enough, the Bush campaign asked the Court to stay the decision and halt the recount. In a highly unusual move, Scalia urged his colleagues to grant the stay immediately, even before receiving Gore’s response. Gore had been narrowing Bush’s lead, and his campaign expected that by Monday he would pull ahead. But Scalia was convinced that all the manual recounts were illegitimate. He told his colleagues such recounts would cast “a needless and unjustified cloud” over Bush’s legitimacy. It was essential, he said, to shut down the process immediately. The clerks were amazed at how baldly Scalia was pushing what they considered his own partisan agenda.
Scalia’s wish was not granted. But at his urging, Rehnquist moved up the conference he’d scheduled for the next day from 1 in the afternoon to 10 that morning. In the meantime, the conservative justices began sending around memos to their colleagues, each of them offering a different rationale for ruling in Bush’s favor; to the liberal clerks, it was apparent that the conservatives had already decided the case and were merely auditioning arguments.
… Finally, shortly before three o’clock, the Court granted the stay. No more votes would be counted. Oral arguments were set for the following Monday, December 11.
Gore and his team were crushed, but neither he nor his lawyers had given up. Even at this late date, Gore naïvely defended the good faith of the justices. “Please be sure that no one trashes the Court,” he instructed his minions. His lawyers still hoped that Kennedy or O’Connor or both could be won over; perhaps they could be peeled away from the conservative bloc as they had been several years earlier to preserve Roe v. Wade. …
The encounters between the two men must have been extraordinary: with the presidency of the United States hanging in the balance, two ambitious jurists—each surely fancying himself a future chief justice—working on each other. And for a brief moment Breyer appeared to have succeeded. At the conference following the oral argument, Kennedy joined the dissenters and, at least temporarily, turned them into the majority. The case would be sent back to the Florida court for fixing; the recount would continue. But the liberal clerks never believed that Kennedy had really switched, and predicted that, having created the desired image of agonizing, he would quickly switch back. “He probably wanted to think of himself as having wavered,” one clerk speculates. And, sure enough, within a half-hour or so, he did switch back.
… Breyer lamented that he had Kennedy convinced, only to have his clerks work him over and pull him back in the other direction (Margolick 12-15).
…
Breyer and Souter saw Kennedy’s new focus on equal protection as an opportunity, suggesting during oral argument that if there were problems with the fairness of the recount the solution was simple: send the case back once more to the Florida Supreme Court and ask it to set a uniform standard. Breyer, whose chambers were next door to Kennedy’s, went to work on him personally. …
it became apparent that Kennedy and O’Connor would not join Rehnquist’s opinion on jurisdiction, and would decide the case strictly on equal-protection grounds. …
As the drafts began circulating, tempers began to fray. In an unusual sealed memo—an unsuccessful attempt to avoid the clerks’ prying eyes—Scalia complained about the tone of some of the dissents. He was, he confessed, the last person to criticize hard-hitting language, but never had he, as the dissenters were now doing, urged the majority to change its decision based on its impact on the Supreme Court’s credibility. He charged that his opponents in the case were inflicting the very wounds to the Court that they had supposedly decried. …
Kennedy, too, sent around a memo, accusing the dissenters of “trashing the Court.” Eager to suggest to the outside world that the Court was less divided than it appeared, he charged that the dissenters agreed with the equal-protection argument more than they were willing to admit. …
…
The Court’s opinions were issued at roughly 10 o’clock that night. … (Margolick 16-20).
The Court asserted that the recount violated the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment— established in 1868 to secure the rights of African-Americans—because there was no uniform statewide standard for counting disputed ballots in each county. In a draft of her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed in a footnote that if there was any equal- protection violation in Florida, it was because black voters encountered a disproportionate number of problems voting. Justice Antonin Scalia, her closest friend on the Court, objected to Ginsburg’s “Al Sharpton” footnote, according to The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, and she took it out. When one read the Bush v. Gore decision, it was as if the disenfranchisement of black voters had never occurred (Berman 7).
There were two more extraordinary passages: first, that the ruling applied to Bush and Bush alone, lest anyone think the Court was expanding the reach of the equal-protection clause; and, second, that the Court had taken the case only very reluctantly and out of necessity. “That infuriated us,” one liberal clerk recalls. “It was typical Kennedy bullshit, aggrandizing the power of the Court while ostensibly wringing his hands about it.”
Gore’s lawyers read him the ruling. At last he concluded that the Court had never really given him a shot, and he congratulated his legal team for making it so hard for the Court to justify its decision. …
O’Connor confessed surprise at the anger that greeted the decision, but that seemed to reflect naïveté more than any sober second thoughts. On her 71st birthday, in March 2001, she was sitting in the Kennedy Center when Arthur Miller, the playwright, denounced what the Court had done. Around Washington, a few people stopped shaking her hand, and Justice Scalia’s too; the consensus has since grown that because of Bush v Gore, he can never be named chief justice.
…
Ultimately, only the five justices in the majority know how and why they decided the case as they did and whether they did it in good or bad faith. Perhaps even they don’t know the answer. An insider was asked if the five would pass a lie-detector test on the subject. “I honestly don’t know,” this insider replies. “People are amazing self-kidders” (Margolick 12-17).
Bush v. Gore has been regarded as one of the most politically consequential decisions in the history of the court, and one that damaged the court's preferred image of itself as an institution far removed from everyday partisan politics (Elving 3-5).
Gore could theoretically have asked the Florida Supreme Court to order a statewide recount with more explicit standards. But he took the advice of one of his lawyers, who told him that this would “cause a tremendous uproar.” And in any case, as the book “Deadlock” later put it, “the best Gore could hope for was a slate of disputed electors” — i.e., he might become president, but Republicans would complain about it.
Thus, Gore [on December 13, 2000] conceded to Bush again, in a speech full of high-minded rhetoric about “the law” and how his surrender could “point us all to a new common ground.” Bush officially won Florida by 537 votes and the Electoral College by 271-266 and went on to become one of the most catastrophic presidents in U.S. history (Schwartz 7).
Works cited:
Alterman, Eric, “Florida 2000 Forever.” Center for American Progress, December 9, 2010. Web. https://www.americanprogress.org/issu...
Berman, Ari, “How the 2000 Election in Florida Led to a New Wave of Voter Disenfranchisement.” The Nation, July 28, 2015. Web. https://www.thenation.com/article/arc...
Elving, Ron, “The Florida Recount Of 2000: A Nightmare That Goes on Haunting.” NPR November 12, 2018. Web. https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/666812...
Margolick, David, “The Path to Florida.” Vanity Fair, March 19, 2014. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/...
Schwartz, Jon, “Democrats Should Remember Al Gore Won Florida in 2000 – But Lost the Presidency with a Pre-emptive Surrender.” The Intercept, November 10, 2018. Web. https://theintercept.com/2018/11/10/d...
August 16, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2000 Election -- Florida, Chaotic Returns
The presidential election of 2000 stands at best as a paradox, at worst as a scandal, of American democracy. Democrat Albert Gore won the most votes, a half million more than his Republican opponent George W. Bush, but lost the presidency in the electoral college by a count of 271-267. Even this count was suspect, dependent on the tally in Florida, where many minority voters were denied the vote, ballots were confusing, and recounts were mishandled and manipulated. The choice of their leader came not from the citizens of the nation, but from lawyers battling for five weeks. The final decision was made not by 105 million voters, but by a 5-4 majority of the unelected U.S. Supreme Court, issuing a tainted and partisan verdict (Pomper 201).
When we revisit the gut-wrenching night of Nov. 7, 2000, we recall that the TV networks looked at exit polls and sample swing precincts from Florida and declared it a win for Al Gore, who was the incumbent vice president and the Democratic nominee for president.
Among those making that call were ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and The Associated Press. Their predictions came not long after the official closing time for voting in the state, when relatively few votes had actually been counted.
By 8 p.m. ET on their election night specials, the national networks were calling populous swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan for Gore.
Taken together with Florida, those states triggered the network's computer programs to conclude Gore would win the Electoral College. Viewers around the country would soon see Gore's face on screen as the projected winner of the presidency. Celebrations began in Democratic headquarters everywhere.
Not so fast.
After calling the race, the networks began getting phone calls from Republicans. One of them came from the campaign of the Republican nominee, George W. Bush, then governor of Texas. Bush's chief strategist, Karl Rove, phoned Fox News to insist that Florida was still in play. He shared his displeasure with someone who was likely to offer a sympathetic ear – John Ellis, a Fox analyst and member of the extended Bush family.
Soon, the on-air personalities on Fox were telling viewers to reserve judgment on Florida. Before long, other networks were hearing the objections and reaching the same conclusion (Elving 1)
At 2:16 A.M., November 8, 2000, six hours after the networks projected that Florida would go to Gore, based on shoddy reporting done by the Voter News Service (V.N.S.), a young hotshot at Fox News named John Ellis, who happened to be George W. Bush’s cousin, called the state—and the election—for Bush. Within four minutes, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN followed suit. “It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth,” Ellis would later say to The New Yorker. “Me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the president-elect. Now, that was cool.”
Gore phoned Bush to offer his congratulations, but as he made his way from campaign headquarters at his Nashville hotel to the War Memorial to give his concession speech, Nick Baldick, his chief operative in Florida, saw that something was seriously amiss. V.N.S. had guessed that 180,000 votes were still outstanding. In fact, there were 360,000 votes that hadn’t been counted—from precincts in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade Counties, which were largely Gore country. And what was this? Negative 16,000 votes for Gore in Volusia County? A computer glitch, it turned out. Baldick watched the Bush lead wither with each new report.
As the rain poured down on Gore’s motorcade, Baldick made a frantic call to Michael Whouley, Gore’s field strategist. Whouley passed the word on to Mike Feldman, Gore’s chief of staff. Feldman called campaign chairman Bill Daley. This thing was not over yet.
By the time Gore pulled up to the memorial, he was trailing statewide by fewer than 2,000 votes. But he didn’t know that. Speechwriter Eli Attie, who had been with Daley, fought his way through the crowd to get to him. “I stopped him from going out onstage,” recalls Attie, “and said, ‘With 99 percent of the vote counted, you’re only 600 votes behind.’”
Gore called Bush again, and the conversation went something like this:
“Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you,” Gore told him. “The state of Florida is too close to call.”
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Bush asked. “Let me make sure I understand. You’re calling back to retract your concession?”
“You don’t have to be snippy about it,” said Gore.
Bush responded that the networks had already called the result and that the numbers were correct—his brother Jeb had told him.
“Your little brother,” Gore replied, “is not the ultimate authority on this.”
Americans, some of whom went to bed thinking Gore had won, others that Bush had won, all woke up to find out that no one had won, in spite of Gore’s half-million vote edge in the U.S. popular vote. Since the margin of error in Florida was within 0.5 percent of the votes cast, a machine recount there would be conducted. While Gore retreated home to Washington, where he would try to remain above the fray, Ron Klain, a Democratic lawyer who had once been his chief of staff, descended with a planeload of volunteers on Florida by six the next morning.
Information came pouring in faster than anyone could digest it—about polling places that had been understaffed, about voters who had been sent on wild-goose chases to find their polling places, about blacks barred from voting, and about police roadblocks to keep people from the polls. So far, these were rumors. The one obvious, indisputable problem was Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballot (designed by a Democratic supervisor of elections), in which the names of candidates appeared on facing pages with a set of holes down the center for voters to punch. Bush’s name appeared first, on the left-hand page, with Gore’s name directly below. The second hole, however, was for Pat Buchanan, whose name was first on the right-hand page. Buchanan won 3,407 votes in Palm Beach—around 2,600 more than he received in any other county in Florida. The irony was rich. Many of those voters were elderly Jews, thrilled to be voting for Joe Lieberman, the first Jew ever on a presidential ticket; instead, the confusing design had led them to cast their vote for a Holocaust trivializer. While Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer maintained, with trademark certitude in the face of all reason, that Palm Beach was a “Buchanan stronghold,” Buchanan himself admitted that many of the votes cast for him had been cast in error.
The voters’ choice on about 170,000 ballots could not be read by machine.
In Palm Beach, 10,000 ballots had been set aside because the voting machines had recorded “undervotes”—that is, no vote for president. According to former Gore lawyer Mitchell Berger, 4 percent of voters in Palm Beach voted for senator, but not president—an odd twist, to say the least. A similar situation occurred in Miami-Dade. As for Broward, third of the big three southern counties, in which Fort Lauderdale is located, it was beset by rumors of missing ballot boxes and unexpected totals from certain precincts. And what about that “computer error” in Volusia that initially cost Gore 16,000 votes? Was there more to this story?
None of these irregularities would be addressed by the automatic recount, which at best would merely check the totals of successfully cast votes. Manual recounts would be needed to judge the more questionable votes. Desperate for legal advice, Klain reached out to prominent firms in the capital of Tallahassee. He found little help. “All the establishment firms knew they couldn’t cross Governor Bush and do business in Florida,” recalls Klain. And so he improvised, pulling together a team headed by former secretary of state Warren Christopher, now a Los Angeles-based lawyer in private practice. Christopher, Gore felt, would imbue the team with an image of decorous, law-abiding, above-the-fray respectability. Instead, Christopher set a different tone, one that would characterize the Democrats’ efforts over the next 35 days: hesitancy and trepidation.
By contrast, Christopher’s Republican counterpart, James Baker, [who had run successful presidential campaigns for Ronald Reagan and the nominee's father, George H. W. Bush]… dug in like a pit bull. Unlike Christopher and company, Baker spoke to the press loudly and often, and his message was Bush had won on November 7. Any further inspection would result only in “mischief.” Privately, however, he knew that at the start he was on shaky political ground. “We’re getting killed on ‘count all the votes,’” he told his team. “Who the hell could be against that?”
Baker saw his chance that Thursday, November 9, when the Gore team made a formal request for a manual recount in four counties: Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade. Asking for a recount in these large, Democrat-dominated counties left the Gore team fatally vulnerable to the charge that they wanted not all votes counted, as Gore kept claiming in his stentorian tones, but only all Gore votes. Yet the Bush team knew full well that Gore could not have asked for a statewide recount, because there was no provision for it in Florida law. A losing candidate had 72 hours to request a manual recount on a county-by-county basis or wait until the election was certified to pursue a statewide recount. The requests had to be based on perceived errors, not just the candidate’s wish to see recounts done. Certainly, Gore chose counties that seemed likely to yield Gore votes. But he chose them because that’s where the problems were. Proper as this was by Florida election law, the Democrats’ strategy gave Baker the sound bite he’d been seeking: Gore was just cherry-picking Democratic strongholds. It was a charge the Bush team wielded to devastating effect in the media, stunning the Gore team, which thought its strategy would be viewed as modest and fair.
The automatic recount was finished on November 9, and for the Bush team the news was sobering. Though many of Florida’s 67 counties “recounted” merely by looking at their previous tallies, Bush’s lead had shrunk from 1,784 votes to 327. Gore votes, it seemed, were everywhere. Who knew how many more a manual recount would uncover? From then on, the Republican strategy was simple: stop the counting. That Saturday, Baker filed suit in federal court to stop all manual recounts—the first legal shot across the bow, though Republicans would later accuse Gore of taking the election to court.
While all this was going on, Katherine Harris, Florida’s elected secretary of state, managed to make herself into a lightning rod for both sides’ feelings about the election. She had worked in her spare time as an ardent partisan for the Bush campaign and had served as a delegate to the Republican convention that summer. She remained one of George W.’s eight campaign co-chairs for Florida right up until Election Day.
According to Jeffrey Toobin in his 2001 book, Too Close to Call, Harris, having gone to sleep thinking her candidate had won, was awakened at 3:30 A.M. the morning after Election Day by a phone call from George W.’s campaign chairman, Don Evans, who put Jeb on the line. “Who is Ed Kast,” the governor asked icily, “and why is he giving an interview on national television?”
In her sleep-befuddled state, Harris had to ponder that a moment. Who was Ed Kast? Chances were she’d barely met the assistant director of elections, whose division reported to her. Kast at that moment was nattering on about the fine points of Florida election law. Under that law, manual recounts were called for in very close races, and voter intent was the litmus test for whether disputed votes counted or not. Recounts and voter intent were almost certainly not subjects the governor wanted aired—already, his general counsel had made a call to get Kast yanked off the air, as brusquely as if with a cane.
In the white-hot media glare that first post-election day, Harris appeared overwhelmed and underinformed. She seemed to have no idea what the county supervisors had been doing, much less that one had drawn up a butterfly ballot, another a “caterpillar,” both sure to cause chaos at the polls. Sensing trouble, the Bush camp gave her a “minder”: Mac Stipanovich, a coolly efficient Republican lobbyist who worked in Tallahassee. Stipanovich had served as a campaign adviser for Jeb in his first, unsuccessful run for governor, in 1994, and he had remained closely aligned with him ever since. …
…
On Friday, November 10, three of Gore’s four target counties—Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach—which all used punch-card voting machines, started to weigh whether to conduct manual recounts of, at first, 1 percent of their ballots, and then, if the results were dramatic, the other 99 percent. At issue were “undervotes,” meaning blank or incompletely filled-out ballots. While totally blank ballots could hardly be counted, what about, in the case of the punch-card machines, ballots where the puncher, or stylus, hadn’t quite gone through?
In those counties using optiscan machines, manual recounts also had to consider “overvotes,” where voters appeared to have cast more than one vote in a contest. (In 2000, a majority of Florida’s counties—41 of 67—had optiscans. A voter filled in ovals next to his candidates of choice on a paper ballot and then fed it into the optiscan, which looked rather like a street-corner mailbox. The ballot was then recorded electronically.) No one would dispute that some overvotes had to be put aside—when, for example, a voter had filled in the ovals next to Bush’s name as well as Gore’s. But some voters had filled in the Gore oval and then written “Al Gore” next to it. Should those ballots be nixed? For that matter, a stray pencil mark on an otherwise properly filled-in ballot would cause the ballot to be rejected as an overvote by an optiscan voting machine. Shouldn’t these all be examined, since the gold standard of Florida election law was voter intent? There were, in all, 175,000 overvotes and undervotes.
Harris and Stipanovich couldn’t tell the four target counties how to do their l percent recounts—at least, not directly. But they could, and did, send a young, strawberry-blonde lawyer named Kerey Carpenter to offer help to Palm Beach County’s three-person canvassing board. According to the board’s chairman, Judge Charles Burton, Carpenter mentioned she was a lawyer, but not that she was working for Katherine Harris.
At one point, when the recount had produced 50 new Gore votes, Burton, after talking to Carpenter, declared the counting would have to start again with a more stringent standard—the punched-out paper chad had to be hanging by one or two of its four corners. By this stricter standard, Gore’s vote gain dropped to half a dozen. Carpenter also encouraged Burton to seek a formal opinion from Harris as to what grounds would justify going to a full manual recount. Burton happily complied.
That Monday, November 13, Harris supplied the opinion. No manual recount should take place unless the voting machines in question were broken. Within hours, a judge overruled her, declaring the recounts could proceed as planned. Harris countered by saying she would stop the clock on recounts the next day, November 14, at 5 P.M.—before –Palm Beach and Miami-Dade had even decided whether to recount, and before Broward had finished the recount it had embarked upon. (Only Volusia, far smaller than the other three counties, was due to finish its recount by November 14, in time to be counted on Harris’s schedule.)
Circuit-court judge Terry Lewis, … rendered a fairly gentle ruling on Harris’s decision to certify those results. She could do this, he suggested, but only if she came up with a sensible reason. So Harris asked the remaining three Gore-targeted counties to explain why they wished to continue their recounts. Palm Beach cited the discrepancies between the results of its limited manual recount and its machine recount. Broward told of its large voter turnout and accompanying logistical problems. Miami-Dade argued that the votes it had recounted so far would provide a different total result. As soon as she received the responses, Harris rejected them all. On Friday, November 17, with the last of the absentee ballots ostensibly in, Harris announced that she would certify the election by the next morning. The Florida Supreme Court intervened this time, declaring she could not do that, and deciding, with a weekend to think about it, that the three target counties could take until Sunday, November 26, to finish counting—or, if Harris so deigned, until Monday, November 27 (Margolick 8-20).
Worrks cited:
Elving, Ron, “The Florida Recount Of 2000: A Nightmare That Goes on Haunting.” NPR November 12, 2018. Web. https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/666812...
Margolick, David, “The Path to Florida.” Vanity Fair, March 19, 2014. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/...
Pomper, Gerald M., “The 2000 Presidential Election: Why Gore Lost.” Political Science Quarterly, Summer 2001, volume 116, issue 2. Web. https://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS125/a...
When we revisit the gut-wrenching night of Nov. 7, 2000, we recall that the TV networks looked at exit polls and sample swing precincts from Florida and declared it a win for Al Gore, who was the incumbent vice president and the Democratic nominee for president.
Among those making that call were ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and The Associated Press. Their predictions came not long after the official closing time for voting in the state, when relatively few votes had actually been counted.
By 8 p.m. ET on their election night specials, the national networks were calling populous swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan for Gore.
Taken together with Florida, those states triggered the network's computer programs to conclude Gore would win the Electoral College. Viewers around the country would soon see Gore's face on screen as the projected winner of the presidency. Celebrations began in Democratic headquarters everywhere.
Not so fast.
After calling the race, the networks began getting phone calls from Republicans. One of them came from the campaign of the Republican nominee, George W. Bush, then governor of Texas. Bush's chief strategist, Karl Rove, phoned Fox News to insist that Florida was still in play. He shared his displeasure with someone who was likely to offer a sympathetic ear – John Ellis, a Fox analyst and member of the extended Bush family.
Soon, the on-air personalities on Fox were telling viewers to reserve judgment on Florida. Before long, other networks were hearing the objections and reaching the same conclusion (Elving 1)
At 2:16 A.M., November 8, 2000, six hours after the networks projected that Florida would go to Gore, based on shoddy reporting done by the Voter News Service (V.N.S.), a young hotshot at Fox News named John Ellis, who happened to be George W. Bush’s cousin, called the state—and the election—for Bush. Within four minutes, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN followed suit. “It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth,” Ellis would later say to The New Yorker. “Me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the president-elect. Now, that was cool.”
Gore phoned Bush to offer his congratulations, but as he made his way from campaign headquarters at his Nashville hotel to the War Memorial to give his concession speech, Nick Baldick, his chief operative in Florida, saw that something was seriously amiss. V.N.S. had guessed that 180,000 votes were still outstanding. In fact, there were 360,000 votes that hadn’t been counted—from precincts in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade Counties, which were largely Gore country. And what was this? Negative 16,000 votes for Gore in Volusia County? A computer glitch, it turned out. Baldick watched the Bush lead wither with each new report.
As the rain poured down on Gore’s motorcade, Baldick made a frantic call to Michael Whouley, Gore’s field strategist. Whouley passed the word on to Mike Feldman, Gore’s chief of staff. Feldman called campaign chairman Bill Daley. This thing was not over yet.
By the time Gore pulled up to the memorial, he was trailing statewide by fewer than 2,000 votes. But he didn’t know that. Speechwriter Eli Attie, who had been with Daley, fought his way through the crowd to get to him. “I stopped him from going out onstage,” recalls Attie, “and said, ‘With 99 percent of the vote counted, you’re only 600 votes behind.’”
Gore called Bush again, and the conversation went something like this:
“Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you,” Gore told him. “The state of Florida is too close to call.”
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Bush asked. “Let me make sure I understand. You’re calling back to retract your concession?”
“You don’t have to be snippy about it,” said Gore.
Bush responded that the networks had already called the result and that the numbers were correct—his brother Jeb had told him.
“Your little brother,” Gore replied, “is not the ultimate authority on this.”
Americans, some of whom went to bed thinking Gore had won, others that Bush had won, all woke up to find out that no one had won, in spite of Gore’s half-million vote edge in the U.S. popular vote. Since the margin of error in Florida was within 0.5 percent of the votes cast, a machine recount there would be conducted. While Gore retreated home to Washington, where he would try to remain above the fray, Ron Klain, a Democratic lawyer who had once been his chief of staff, descended with a planeload of volunteers on Florida by six the next morning.
Information came pouring in faster than anyone could digest it—about polling places that had been understaffed, about voters who had been sent on wild-goose chases to find their polling places, about blacks barred from voting, and about police roadblocks to keep people from the polls. So far, these were rumors. The one obvious, indisputable problem was Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballot (designed by a Democratic supervisor of elections), in which the names of candidates appeared on facing pages with a set of holes down the center for voters to punch. Bush’s name appeared first, on the left-hand page, with Gore’s name directly below. The second hole, however, was for Pat Buchanan, whose name was first on the right-hand page. Buchanan won 3,407 votes in Palm Beach—around 2,600 more than he received in any other county in Florida. The irony was rich. Many of those voters were elderly Jews, thrilled to be voting for Joe Lieberman, the first Jew ever on a presidential ticket; instead, the confusing design had led them to cast their vote for a Holocaust trivializer. While Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer maintained, with trademark certitude in the face of all reason, that Palm Beach was a “Buchanan stronghold,” Buchanan himself admitted that many of the votes cast for him had been cast in error.
The voters’ choice on about 170,000 ballots could not be read by machine.
In Palm Beach, 10,000 ballots had been set aside because the voting machines had recorded “undervotes”—that is, no vote for president. According to former Gore lawyer Mitchell Berger, 4 percent of voters in Palm Beach voted for senator, but not president—an odd twist, to say the least. A similar situation occurred in Miami-Dade. As for Broward, third of the big three southern counties, in which Fort Lauderdale is located, it was beset by rumors of missing ballot boxes and unexpected totals from certain precincts. And what about that “computer error” in Volusia that initially cost Gore 16,000 votes? Was there more to this story?
None of these irregularities would be addressed by the automatic recount, which at best would merely check the totals of successfully cast votes. Manual recounts would be needed to judge the more questionable votes. Desperate for legal advice, Klain reached out to prominent firms in the capital of Tallahassee. He found little help. “All the establishment firms knew they couldn’t cross Governor Bush and do business in Florida,” recalls Klain. And so he improvised, pulling together a team headed by former secretary of state Warren Christopher, now a Los Angeles-based lawyer in private practice. Christopher, Gore felt, would imbue the team with an image of decorous, law-abiding, above-the-fray respectability. Instead, Christopher set a different tone, one that would characterize the Democrats’ efforts over the next 35 days: hesitancy and trepidation.
By contrast, Christopher’s Republican counterpart, James Baker, [who had run successful presidential campaigns for Ronald Reagan and the nominee's father, George H. W. Bush]… dug in like a pit bull. Unlike Christopher and company, Baker spoke to the press loudly and often, and his message was Bush had won on November 7. Any further inspection would result only in “mischief.” Privately, however, he knew that at the start he was on shaky political ground. “We’re getting killed on ‘count all the votes,’” he told his team. “Who the hell could be against that?”
Baker saw his chance that Thursday, November 9, when the Gore team made a formal request for a manual recount in four counties: Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade. Asking for a recount in these large, Democrat-dominated counties left the Gore team fatally vulnerable to the charge that they wanted not all votes counted, as Gore kept claiming in his stentorian tones, but only all Gore votes. Yet the Bush team knew full well that Gore could not have asked for a statewide recount, because there was no provision for it in Florida law. A losing candidate had 72 hours to request a manual recount on a county-by-county basis or wait until the election was certified to pursue a statewide recount. The requests had to be based on perceived errors, not just the candidate’s wish to see recounts done. Certainly, Gore chose counties that seemed likely to yield Gore votes. But he chose them because that’s where the problems were. Proper as this was by Florida election law, the Democrats’ strategy gave Baker the sound bite he’d been seeking: Gore was just cherry-picking Democratic strongholds. It was a charge the Bush team wielded to devastating effect in the media, stunning the Gore team, which thought its strategy would be viewed as modest and fair.
The automatic recount was finished on November 9, and for the Bush team the news was sobering. Though many of Florida’s 67 counties “recounted” merely by looking at their previous tallies, Bush’s lead had shrunk from 1,784 votes to 327. Gore votes, it seemed, were everywhere. Who knew how many more a manual recount would uncover? From then on, the Republican strategy was simple: stop the counting. That Saturday, Baker filed suit in federal court to stop all manual recounts—the first legal shot across the bow, though Republicans would later accuse Gore of taking the election to court.
While all this was going on, Katherine Harris, Florida’s elected secretary of state, managed to make herself into a lightning rod for both sides’ feelings about the election. She had worked in her spare time as an ardent partisan for the Bush campaign and had served as a delegate to the Republican convention that summer. She remained one of George W.’s eight campaign co-chairs for Florida right up until Election Day.
According to Jeffrey Toobin in his 2001 book, Too Close to Call, Harris, having gone to sleep thinking her candidate had won, was awakened at 3:30 A.M. the morning after Election Day by a phone call from George W.’s campaign chairman, Don Evans, who put Jeb on the line. “Who is Ed Kast,” the governor asked icily, “and why is he giving an interview on national television?”
In her sleep-befuddled state, Harris had to ponder that a moment. Who was Ed Kast? Chances were she’d barely met the assistant director of elections, whose division reported to her. Kast at that moment was nattering on about the fine points of Florida election law. Under that law, manual recounts were called for in very close races, and voter intent was the litmus test for whether disputed votes counted or not. Recounts and voter intent were almost certainly not subjects the governor wanted aired—already, his general counsel had made a call to get Kast yanked off the air, as brusquely as if with a cane.
In the white-hot media glare that first post-election day, Harris appeared overwhelmed and underinformed. She seemed to have no idea what the county supervisors had been doing, much less that one had drawn up a butterfly ballot, another a “caterpillar,” both sure to cause chaos at the polls. Sensing trouble, the Bush camp gave her a “minder”: Mac Stipanovich, a coolly efficient Republican lobbyist who worked in Tallahassee. Stipanovich had served as a campaign adviser for Jeb in his first, unsuccessful run for governor, in 1994, and he had remained closely aligned with him ever since. …
…
On Friday, November 10, three of Gore’s four target counties—Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach—which all used punch-card voting machines, started to weigh whether to conduct manual recounts of, at first, 1 percent of their ballots, and then, if the results were dramatic, the other 99 percent. At issue were “undervotes,” meaning blank or incompletely filled-out ballots. While totally blank ballots could hardly be counted, what about, in the case of the punch-card machines, ballots where the puncher, or stylus, hadn’t quite gone through?
In those counties using optiscan machines, manual recounts also had to consider “overvotes,” where voters appeared to have cast more than one vote in a contest. (In 2000, a majority of Florida’s counties—41 of 67—had optiscans. A voter filled in ovals next to his candidates of choice on a paper ballot and then fed it into the optiscan, which looked rather like a street-corner mailbox. The ballot was then recorded electronically.) No one would dispute that some overvotes had to be put aside—when, for example, a voter had filled in the ovals next to Bush’s name as well as Gore’s. But some voters had filled in the Gore oval and then written “Al Gore” next to it. Should those ballots be nixed? For that matter, a stray pencil mark on an otherwise properly filled-in ballot would cause the ballot to be rejected as an overvote by an optiscan voting machine. Shouldn’t these all be examined, since the gold standard of Florida election law was voter intent? There were, in all, 175,000 overvotes and undervotes.
Harris and Stipanovich couldn’t tell the four target counties how to do their l percent recounts—at least, not directly. But they could, and did, send a young, strawberry-blonde lawyer named Kerey Carpenter to offer help to Palm Beach County’s three-person canvassing board. According to the board’s chairman, Judge Charles Burton, Carpenter mentioned she was a lawyer, but not that she was working for Katherine Harris.
At one point, when the recount had produced 50 new Gore votes, Burton, after talking to Carpenter, declared the counting would have to start again with a more stringent standard—the punched-out paper chad had to be hanging by one or two of its four corners. By this stricter standard, Gore’s vote gain dropped to half a dozen. Carpenter also encouraged Burton to seek a formal opinion from Harris as to what grounds would justify going to a full manual recount. Burton happily complied.
That Monday, November 13, Harris supplied the opinion. No manual recount should take place unless the voting machines in question were broken. Within hours, a judge overruled her, declaring the recounts could proceed as planned. Harris countered by saying she would stop the clock on recounts the next day, November 14, at 5 P.M.—before –Palm Beach and Miami-Dade had even decided whether to recount, and before Broward had finished the recount it had embarked upon. (Only Volusia, far smaller than the other three counties, was due to finish its recount by November 14, in time to be counted on Harris’s schedule.)
Circuit-court judge Terry Lewis, … rendered a fairly gentle ruling on Harris’s decision to certify those results. She could do this, he suggested, but only if she came up with a sensible reason. So Harris asked the remaining three Gore-targeted counties to explain why they wished to continue their recounts. Palm Beach cited the discrepancies between the results of its limited manual recount and its machine recount. Broward told of its large voter turnout and accompanying logistical problems. Miami-Dade argued that the votes it had recounted so far would provide a different total result. As soon as she received the responses, Harris rejected them all. On Friday, November 17, with the last of the absentee ballots ostensibly in, Harris announced that she would certify the election by the next morning. The Florida Supreme Court intervened this time, declaring she could not do that, and deciding, with a weekend to think about it, that the three target counties could take until Sunday, November 26, to finish counting—or, if Harris so deigned, until Monday, November 27 (Margolick 8-20).
Worrks cited:
Elving, Ron, “The Florida Recount Of 2000: A Nightmare That Goes on Haunting.” NPR November 12, 2018. Web. https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/666812...
Margolick, David, “The Path to Florida.” Vanity Fair, March 19, 2014. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/...
Pomper, Gerald M., “The 2000 Presidential Election: Why Gore Lost.” Political Science Quarterly, Summer 2001, volume 116, issue 2. Web. https://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS125/a...
August 13, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2000 Election -- Florida -- Voter Disenfranchisement
Amid the media frenzy after the election, one story went untold … [;] thousands of African-Americans in Florida had been stripped of their right to vote.
Adora Obi Nweze, the president of the Florida State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P., went to her polling place and was told she couldn’t vote because she had voted absentee—even though she hadn’t. Cathy Jackson of Broward, who’d been a registered voter since 1996, showed up at the polls and was told she was not on the rolls. After seeing a white woman casting an affidavit ballot, she asked if she could do the same. She was turned down. Donnise DeSouza of Miami was also told that she wasn’t on the rolls. She was moved to the “problem line”; soon thereafter, the polls closed, and she was sent home. Lavonna Lewis was on the rolls. But after waiting in line for hours, the polls closed. She was told to leave, while a white man was allowed to get in line, she says.
U.S. congresswoman Corrine Brown, who was followed into her polling place by a local television crew, was told her ballot had been sent to Washington, D.C., and so she couldn’t vote in Florida. Only after two and a half hours was she allowed to cast her ballot. Brown had registered thousands of students from 10 Florida colleges in the months prior to the election. “We put them on buses,” she says, “took them down to the supervisor’s office. Had them register. When it came time to vote, they were not on the rolls!” Wallace McDonald of Hillsborough County went to the polls and was told he couldn’t vote because he was a felon—even though he wasn’t. The phone lines at the N.A.A.C.P. offices were ringing off the hook with stories like these. “What happened that day—I can’t even put it in words anymore,” says Donna Brazile, Gore’s campaign manager, whose sister was asked for three forms of identification in Seminole County before she was allowed to vote. “It was the most painful, dehumanizing, demoralizing thing I’ve ever experienced in my years of organizing.”
For African-Americans it was the latest outrage perpetrated by Jeb Bush’s government. During his unsuccessful bid for governor in ’94, Jeb was asked what he would do for the African-American community. “Probably nothing,” he answered. In November 1999, he announced his One Florida Initiative, in which, with the stroke of a pen, he ended mandatory affirmative-action quotas by cutting off preferential treatment in the awarding of state contracts, university admissions, and government hiring. Tom Hill, then a state representative, and U.S. congressman Kendrick Meek, then a 33-year-old state senator, staged a 25-hour sit-in outside Jeb’s office. “[The initiative was done] without any consultation from the legislators, students, teachers, the people who were going to be affected,” says Meek. Jeb wasn’t moved by their presence. “Kick their asses out,” he told an aide. (He later claimed to be referring to reporters stationed near the sit-in.) Energized, African-Americans marched through Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. They also registered to vote. By Election Day 2000, 934,261 blacks were registered, up by nearly 100,000 since 1996.
Election Day itself felt like payback. Jesse Jackson immediately took up the cause in the streets of Florida, but at that point the facts were simply too sketchy, too anecdotal, too mixed up with simple bureaucratic ineptness to prove any kind of conspiracy. Anyone wanting to get Gore into the White House believed that hitching the cause to Jackson was madness; they wanted the middle, not the lefty fringe. Through a request from Brazile, Gore asked Jackson to get out of the way.
In retrospect, the claims of disenfranchisement were hardly phony.
In January and February 2001, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the highly divided, highly partisan government-appointed group formed in 1957, heard more than 30 hours of damning testimony from more than 100 witnesses. The report, which came out in June of that year, made a strong case that the election violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The commissioners duly passed their report up to newly installed attorney general Ashcroft. Little was done.
Strong as the report from the Commission was, it did not yet have the full story. The disenfranchisement of African-Americans in Florida was embedded in many facets of the election—from the equipment used to the actions of key local election officials, to the politically motivated manipulation of arcane Florida law, to the knowing passivity of Jeb Bush himself. Nowhere was that more obvious than in Gadsden County.
Twenty minutes west of Tallahassee, Gadsden is one of Florida’s poorest counties. African-Americans make up 57 percent of the population, the largest percentage of any county in the state. Even so, the 2000 election was run by a white conservative supervisor, in this case the late Denny Hutchinson.
“He thought things were ‘fine as they were,’” says ... Ed Dixon, Gadsden County commissioner ... When the commissioners wanted to put in more polling places to accommodate the increase in registration, Hutchinson wouldn’t budge. “He never advocated for any increased precincts, even though some of our people had to drive 30 miles to get to a poll,” says Dixon. “In the only county that’s a majority African-American,” he adds, “you want a decreased turnout.”
In November 2000, Shirley Green Knight, Hutchinson’s deputy, a soft-spoken African-American, had recently defeated him for the office of elections supervisor, though she had yet to assume the office. After the votes had been tallied, she noticed something strange: more than 2,000 ballots, out of 14,727 cast, had not been included in the registered count.
How had this happened? Because of a very technical but profoundly important detail. The central optiscan machine used in Gadsden had a sorting switch which when put in the “on” position would cause the machine to record overvotes or undervotes in a separate category for possible review. After the election, Knight says, she learned that Hutchinson had demanded that the switch be kept off. “I have no idea why he would do that,” says Knight. Seeing how many ballots never got counted, she urged him to run them through the machine again—this time with the sorting switch on—but he resisted. Hutchinson was finally overruled by the Gadsden canvassing board. They looked at the rejected ballots. Sure enough, they were overvotes—and for good reason.
Gadsden had used a variant of the caterpillar ballot, in which the candidates’ names appeared in two columns. One column listed Bush, Gore, and six others. The next column listed two more candidates—Monica Moorehead and Howard Phillips—as well as a line that said, “Write-In Candidate.” Thinking they were voting in different races, hundreds of voters had filled in a circle for one candidate in each column, thereby voting twice for president. Others filled in the circle for Gore and then, wanting to be extra clear, wrote “Gore” in the write-in space. All these votes were tossed.
In some optiscan counties, such overvotes would have been spit right back at the voter, giving him a chance to correct his mistake on the spot. But Gadsden, like many other poor counties, used a cheaper system, in which overvotes would only register at the central optical-scanner machine, denying the voter a chance to correct his mistake. [State elections officials] should have been aware of this crucial discrepancy. Neighboring Leon County used the more expensive machinery, and technicians there had warned the Division of Elections well before Election Day of the disparate impact these two different systems would have. They had even set up a demonstration of the superior machines across the street from the division offices in Tallahassee.
Some of the faulty ballots in Gadsden were counted in those first days after the election as part of the county’s “automatic recount,” giving Gore a net gain of 153. Those votes, at least, were included in the certified state count.
Three hours east in Duval County, however, voters weren’t as lucky.
Here, in a county that includes Jacksonville, which is 29 percent black, 21,000 votes were thrown out for being overvotes, and here, an overvote was even more likely than in Gadsden. Prior to the election, the elections supervisor, John Stafford, had placed a sample-ballot insert in the local papers instructing citizens to vote every page. Any voter who followed this instruction invalidated his or her ballot in the process.
During the critical 72-hour period in which manual recounts could be requested, Mike Langton, chairman of the northeast Florida region for the Gore campaign, spent hours with Stafford, a white Republican. “I asked John Stafford how many under- and overvotes there were, and he said, ‘Oh, just a few,’” recalls Langton. Then, shortly after the deadline to ask for a recount had passed, Stafford revealed that the number of overvotes was actually 21,000. Nearly half of those were from four black precincts that normally vote over 90 percent Democratic.
Then there was the matter of usage of a very inaccurate felons list.
If the Gadsden and Duval stories might be characterized as a kind of disenfranchisement by conscious neglect, a much more sinister story began to emerge in the months following the election. Throughout Florida, people—many of them black men, such as Willie Steen, a decorated Gulf War veteran—went to the polls and were informed that they couldn’t vote, because they were convicted felons—even though they weren’t.
“The poll worker looked at the computer and said that there was something about me being a felon,” says Steen, who showed up at his polling place in Hillsborough County, young son in tow. Florida is one of just seven states that deny former felons the right to vote, but Steen wasn’t a felon.
“I’ve never been arrested before in my life,” Steen told the woman. A neighbor on line behind him heard the whole exchange. Steen tried to hide his embarrassment and quietly pleaded with the poll worker, How could I have ended up on the list? She couldn’t give him an answer. As the line lengthened, she grew impatient. “She brushed me off and said, ‘Hey, get to the side,’” recalls Steen. The alleged felony, Steen later learned, took place between 1991 and 1993—when he was stationed in the Persian Gulf.
Steen wasn’t the only upstanding black citizen named Willie on the list. So was Willie Dixon, a Tampa youth leader and pastor, and Willie Whiting, a pastor in Tallahassee. In Jacksonville, Roosevelt Cobbs learned through the mail that he, too, was a felon, though he wasn’t. The same thing happened to Roosevelt Lawrence. Throughout the state, scores of innocent people found themselves on the purge list.
The story got little attention at the time. Only Greg Palast, a fringe, old-school investigator, complete with fedora, was on its trail. With a background in racketeering investigation for the government, Palast broke part of the story while the recount was still going on, but he did it in England, in The Observer. None of the mainstream media in the U.S. would touch it. “Stories of black people losing rights is passé, it’s not discussed, no one cares,” says Palast, whose reporting on the subject appears in his 2002 book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. “A black person accused of being a felon is always guilty.”
How the state ended up with the “felon list” in the first place has its roots in one of the uglier chapters in American history. In 1868, Florida, as a way of keeping former slaves away from the polls, put in its constitution that prisoners would permanently be denied the right to vote unless they were granted clemency by the governor. In those days, and for nearly a hundred years after, a black man looking at a white woman was cause for arrest. The felony clause was just one of many measures taken to keep blacks off the rolls, including literacy tests, poll taxes, and “grandfather clauses,” by which a man could vote only if his grandfather had. All these other methods were effectively ended. But the constitutional provision about former felons remained.
In Florida, there are an estimated 700,000 ex-felons, and 1 in 4 is a black male. Six years ago, Florida state representative Chris Smith, of Fort Lauderdale, sat outside a local Winn-Dixie grocery store trying to get people to register. “A lot of black men that looked like me, around my age, would just walk past me and say, ‘Felony,’ ‘Felony,’ and not even attempt to register to vote,” Smith recalls. Why so many? In the past few years the majority-Republican legislature has upgraded certain misdemeanors to felonies and also created dozens of new felonies that disproportionately affect the urban poor. Intercepting police communications with a ham radio is a felony. So is the cashing of two unemployment checks after the recipient has gotten a new job. State senator Frederica Wilson, like other black lawmakers in Florida, believes these felonies are “aimed at African-American people.”
… black lawmakers have tried in vain to legislate rights restoration to some offenders who have served their sentences. …
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… While some governors, such as Reubin Askew and Bob Graham, restored the rights of tens of thousands of felons who’d served their time, Jeb Bush allowed the backlog of applicants to grow to as many as 62,000 in 2002.
The law that disenfranchises felons took on a new life after the 1997 Miami mayoral race, in which a number of dead people “voted,” as did 105 felons. Seventy-one percent of those felons found on voter rolls were registered Democrats. Weeks later, the state legislature went to work on a sweeping anti-fraud bill. It called for stricter enforcement of the constitutional provision and stated that “the division shall annually contract with a private entity” to maintain a list of deceased individuals still on the rolls, those adjudicated “mentally incompetent” to vote, and, most important, felons. The appropriations committee allocated $4 million to the project; no money was appropriated from the state for voter education in 1998, 1999, or 2000.
When the state started soliciting bids for the high-tech felon hunt, at least three companies stepped up. One was Computer Business Services; another, Professional Analytical Systems & Software, bid under $10,000. After three rounds of bidding, Database Technologies, a Boca Raton company (since merged with ChoicePoint), emerged the winner. In its proposal, DBT estimated the cost at $4 million, knowing somehow that this was the exact amount the state had provided for the job. “There has been four million dollars allocated by the state for this project,” DBT senior vice president of operations George Bruder wrote to his boss, C.E.O. Chuck Lieppe, in an e-mail. “The bid we are constructing will have three different levels for price (a little bird told me this will help).” The little bird was correct.
From the start, there were questions about the felon list. “We were sent this purge list in August of 1998,” says Leon County elections supervisor Ion Sancho, moving feverishly through his cluttered office. “We started sending letters and contacting voters, [saying] that we had evidence that they were potential felons and that they contact us or they were going to be removed from the rolls. Boy, did that cause a firestorm.” One of those letters was sent to Sancho’s friend Rick Johnson, a civil-rights attorney, who was no felon. “Very few felons,” Sancho points out, “are members of the Florida bar.”
Sancho decided to get to the bottom of it. Early in 2000 he sat down with Emmett “Bucky” Mitchell, the Division of Elections’ assistant general counsel, and demanded to know why the list contained so many names of innocent people. “Bucky told me face-to-face that the Division of Elections was working on the problem,” recalls Sancho, “that it was the vendor’s [DBT’s] problem, and that they were telling the vendor to correct it.”
James Lee, chief marketing officer of ChoicePoint, the company that acquired DBT in the spring of 2000, says that the state did just the opposite. “Between the 1998 run and the 1999 run, the office of elections relaxed the criteria from 80 percent to 70 percent name match,” says Lee. “Because after the first year they weren’t getting enough names.”
And so, equipped with a database of felons supplied by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (F.D.L.E.), DBT programmers crouched at their computers and started scooping up names, many of which were only partial matches, from the Florida voter rolls and various other databases. Middle initials didn’t need to be the same; suffixes, such as Jr. and Sr., were ignored. Willie D. Whiting Jr., pastor, was caught because Willie J. Whiting was a felon. First and middle names could be switched around: Deborah Ann, Ann Deborah—same thing. Nicknames were fine—Robert, Bob, Bobby. The spelling of the last name didn’t have to be exact, either. The only thing Willie Steen was guilty of was having a name similar to that of a felon named Willie O’Steen.
DBT project manager Marlene Thorogood expressed concern in a March 1999 e-mail to the Division of Elections that the new parameters might result in “false positives” (i.e., wrongly included people). Bucky Mitchell wrote back, explaining the state’s position: “Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren’t matches and let the [elections] supervisors make a final determination rather than exclude certain matches altogether.” Guilty until proved innocent, in other words.
In May 2000, supervisors got a new list, for the upcoming election, and discovered that it included 8,000 names from Texas. But the Texans, now living in Florida, weren’t guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors. DBT took the blame, claiming a computer glitch, and hastily corrected the problem. How, though, had Texans gotten on the list in the first place? Texas was a state that automatically restored the rights of felons who had served their time.
According to two separate Florida court rulings rendered before the 2000 election, prisoners who’d had their rights restored in other states retained them when they moved across state lines to Florida. Instead, the Division of Elections was advised by the Office of Executive Clemency to have DBT include out-of-state ex-felons residing in Florida, even those from so-called automatic-restoration states. In order to vote, these ex-felons would have to show written proof of clemency from their former state, or re-apply for it in Florida. …
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When the “corrected” list went out to all 67 supervisors in late May 2000, many were stunned. Linda Howell, elections supervisor of Madison County, found her own name on it. In Monroe County, the supervisor, Harry Sawyer, found his dad on the list, as well as one of his seven employees and the husband of another; none of them were felons. As a result of the mistakes, a couple of counties, including Broward and Palm Beach, decided not to use the list. Sancho, whose list had 697 names on it, went through them one by one, scrupulously checking. “We went for a five-for-five match,” says Sancho. “Those were criteria such as name, birth date, race, sex, Social Security number. When we applied that to this list of 697 that we got in 2000, I could verify only 33.”
Other elections supervisors did no such investigation. In Bay County, where the list contained approximately 1,000 names, elections officials essentially took it at face value. Once he got the list, says Larry Roxby, deputy elections supervisor, “it was pretty much a done deal.” In Miami-Dade, whose lists contained about 7,000 people, Supervisor David Leahy sent out letters, informing people of their felony status and advising that they could come in for a hearing if they wanted to appeal. If he didn’t hear back from them, these names were simply struck. Throughout the state, many of these letters came back “undeliverable.” Small wonder: the addresses provided by DBT were often out-of-date.
A few of the more dutiful supervisors found themselves taking on the extra role of citizens’ advocates. In Hillsborough County, Supervisor of Elections Pam Iorio, now the mayor of Tampa, sent out letters to all 3,258 people on her list. If they appealed, she worked with them to try to keep them on the rolls. Roosevelt Lawrence was one such person. “We were going back to the state and saying, ‘This gentleman has the following facts: here are the facts, this is what he is saying,’” Iorio recalls. “‘He lived a lawful life for over 40 years and he’s been employed here and done this.’ Twice they said, ‘No, that’s incorrect.’ In writing. . . . And he never voted in the 2000 election.” Lawrence continued to protest; finally, the F.D.L.E. realized its record on Roosevelt was wrong (Margolick17-27).
The NAACP sued Florida after the election for violating the Voting Rights Act (VRA). As a result of the settlement, the company that the Florida legislature entrusted with the purge—the Boca Raton–based Database Technologies (DBT)—ran the names on its 2000 purge list using stricter criteria. The exercise turned up 12,000 voters who shouldn’t have been labeled felons. That was 22 times Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory.
No one could ever determine precisely how many voters who were incorrectly labeled felons were turned away from the polls. But the US Civil Rights Commission launched a major investigation into the 2000 election fiasco, and its acting general counsel, Edward Hailes, did the math the best that he could. If 12,000 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls, and 44 percent of them were African-American, and 90 percent of African-Americans voted for Gore, that meant 4,752 black Gore voters—almost nine times Bush’s margin of victory—could have been prevented from voting. It’s not a stretch to conclude that the purge cost Gore the election. “We did think it was outcome-determinative,” Hailes said (Berman 2-3).
On January 11, 2001, Jeb Bush testified before the Civil Rights Commission during its investigation into the election problems in Florida. “What, if anything, did you do to ensure the election laws were faithfully executed?” general counsel Hailes asked the Florida governor. Bush said that he wasn’t responsible for the problems in Florida, including the voter purge. He blamed Katherine Harris. “It is the responsibility of the secretary of state as part of our Constitution,” Bush answered.
“You had no authority, no responsibilities, and took no actions with regard to the election?” Hailes pressed.
“No, the secretary of state and the 67 supervisors of election were responsible for that,” Bush said (Berman 8).
The suit ended in settlement agreements, in September 2002, that appeared to rectify the problem for the future. The state agreed to restore to its rolls the out-of-state felons from “automatic restoration” states. DBT agreed to run the names from the 1999 and 2000 purge lists using stricter criteria, and to provide to Florida’s elections supervisors the names of people who most likely shouldn’t have been on the list. The list of potentially wrongly targeted voters came to 20,000—more than a third of DBT’s May 2000 list. The supervisors, in turn, were supposed to restore these names to their voting rolls, had they been wrongly purged.
More than two years later, with the election of 2004 looming, Jeb Bush’s government has utterly failed to uphold its end of the bargain. Virtually none of the 20,000 people erroneously purged from Florida’s rolls have been reinstated in any formalized way. In September 2003, DBT and the state did manage to finish vetting the list and to send out a so-called filtered list to the elections supervisors to “re-evaluate.” No deadline was imposed for restoring the innocents, and little direction on the subject came from the state. If supervisors wanted to restore the names, they could; if they wanted to ignore the task, they could do that too.
Some supervisors have worked with the filtered list to restore names. But others have put it aside; as of June [2004], more than a few had no recollection of ever receiving it. (After prodding from advocacy groups, the state re-sent the list.) In Miami-Dade, the filtered list had more than 17,000 names. Of those, to date, only 14 voters wrongly identified as felons have been restored to the voting rolls.
These are just the snarls of the old ex-felon list. But in Florida, it seems, there’s always another angle. Last May the Division of Elections attempted a new purge, with a brand-new felon list. This list came to 48,000 names. Accompanying it was a memo to the supervisors from Ed Kast, director of the Division of Elections, informing them to start the purging process. For Ion Sancho it started another firestorm. “I asked my staff, ‘Look through [the list] and do a cursory exam. Nothing detailed. What can you tell me?’ They identified a dozen people who they recognized right off the bat weren’t felons,” Sancho says, storming about his office.
…
For weeks, liberal advocacy groups such as the A.C.L.U. and People for the American Way urged the supervisors to let them see the list so they could help vet it for accuracy, and avoid a repeat of the debacle of 2000. On May 12, in one of [Director of the Elections Division Ed] Kast’s last moves in his post, he sent a memo to the supervisors, detailing how to thwart the request, citing statutes about the privacy of voter-registration information and the will of the legislature—even though nothing in the law prevents the same information from going to political candidates to further their campaigns. “This is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to an intimidation letter to come out of the Division of Elections,” says Sancho.
As with many things concerning the Florida government, it would take a lawsuit to get any traction. In late May, CNN, with the support of Senator Bill Nelson, filed suit against the state for access to the list. Judge Nikki Clark ordered it released to the public.
It took The Miami Herald just a day to discover that the list, which the state had tried hard to keep under wraps, contained the names of at least 2,119 ex-felons who had been granted clemency in Florida, and thus had had their voting rights restored. Like the 2000 list, the new one turned out to be disproportionately Democrat.
…
In spite of the scrapping of the list, the state has informed the elections supervisors that it is still their legal obligation to bar ex-felons from voting in November (Margolick 28-34).
Works cited:
Berman, Ari, “How the 2000 Election in Florida Led to a New Wave of Voter Disenfranchisement.” The Nation, July 28, 2015. Web. https://www.thenation.com/article/arc...
Margolick, David, “The Path to Florida.” Vanity Fair, March 19, 2014. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/...
Adora Obi Nweze, the president of the Florida State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P., went to her polling place and was told she couldn’t vote because she had voted absentee—even though she hadn’t. Cathy Jackson of Broward, who’d been a registered voter since 1996, showed up at the polls and was told she was not on the rolls. After seeing a white woman casting an affidavit ballot, she asked if she could do the same. She was turned down. Donnise DeSouza of Miami was also told that she wasn’t on the rolls. She was moved to the “problem line”; soon thereafter, the polls closed, and she was sent home. Lavonna Lewis was on the rolls. But after waiting in line for hours, the polls closed. She was told to leave, while a white man was allowed to get in line, she says.
U.S. congresswoman Corrine Brown, who was followed into her polling place by a local television crew, was told her ballot had been sent to Washington, D.C., and so she couldn’t vote in Florida. Only after two and a half hours was she allowed to cast her ballot. Brown had registered thousands of students from 10 Florida colleges in the months prior to the election. “We put them on buses,” she says, “took them down to the supervisor’s office. Had them register. When it came time to vote, they were not on the rolls!” Wallace McDonald of Hillsborough County went to the polls and was told he couldn’t vote because he was a felon—even though he wasn’t. The phone lines at the N.A.A.C.P. offices were ringing off the hook with stories like these. “What happened that day—I can’t even put it in words anymore,” says Donna Brazile, Gore’s campaign manager, whose sister was asked for three forms of identification in Seminole County before she was allowed to vote. “It was the most painful, dehumanizing, demoralizing thing I’ve ever experienced in my years of organizing.”
For African-Americans it was the latest outrage perpetrated by Jeb Bush’s government. During his unsuccessful bid for governor in ’94, Jeb was asked what he would do for the African-American community. “Probably nothing,” he answered. In November 1999, he announced his One Florida Initiative, in which, with the stroke of a pen, he ended mandatory affirmative-action quotas by cutting off preferential treatment in the awarding of state contracts, university admissions, and government hiring. Tom Hill, then a state representative, and U.S. congressman Kendrick Meek, then a 33-year-old state senator, staged a 25-hour sit-in outside Jeb’s office. “[The initiative was done] without any consultation from the legislators, students, teachers, the people who were going to be affected,” says Meek. Jeb wasn’t moved by their presence. “Kick their asses out,” he told an aide. (He later claimed to be referring to reporters stationed near the sit-in.) Energized, African-Americans marched through Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. They also registered to vote. By Election Day 2000, 934,261 blacks were registered, up by nearly 100,000 since 1996.
Election Day itself felt like payback. Jesse Jackson immediately took up the cause in the streets of Florida, but at that point the facts were simply too sketchy, too anecdotal, too mixed up with simple bureaucratic ineptness to prove any kind of conspiracy. Anyone wanting to get Gore into the White House believed that hitching the cause to Jackson was madness; they wanted the middle, not the lefty fringe. Through a request from Brazile, Gore asked Jackson to get out of the way.
In retrospect, the claims of disenfranchisement were hardly phony.
In January and February 2001, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the highly divided, highly partisan government-appointed group formed in 1957, heard more than 30 hours of damning testimony from more than 100 witnesses. The report, which came out in June of that year, made a strong case that the election violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The commissioners duly passed their report up to newly installed attorney general Ashcroft. Little was done.
Strong as the report from the Commission was, it did not yet have the full story. The disenfranchisement of African-Americans in Florida was embedded in many facets of the election—from the equipment used to the actions of key local election officials, to the politically motivated manipulation of arcane Florida law, to the knowing passivity of Jeb Bush himself. Nowhere was that more obvious than in Gadsden County.
Twenty minutes west of Tallahassee, Gadsden is one of Florida’s poorest counties. African-Americans make up 57 percent of the population, the largest percentage of any county in the state. Even so, the 2000 election was run by a white conservative supervisor, in this case the late Denny Hutchinson.
“He thought things were ‘fine as they were,’” says ... Ed Dixon, Gadsden County commissioner ... When the commissioners wanted to put in more polling places to accommodate the increase in registration, Hutchinson wouldn’t budge. “He never advocated for any increased precincts, even though some of our people had to drive 30 miles to get to a poll,” says Dixon. “In the only county that’s a majority African-American,” he adds, “you want a decreased turnout.”
In November 2000, Shirley Green Knight, Hutchinson’s deputy, a soft-spoken African-American, had recently defeated him for the office of elections supervisor, though she had yet to assume the office. After the votes had been tallied, she noticed something strange: more than 2,000 ballots, out of 14,727 cast, had not been included in the registered count.
How had this happened? Because of a very technical but profoundly important detail. The central optiscan machine used in Gadsden had a sorting switch which when put in the “on” position would cause the machine to record overvotes or undervotes in a separate category for possible review. After the election, Knight says, she learned that Hutchinson had demanded that the switch be kept off. “I have no idea why he would do that,” says Knight. Seeing how many ballots never got counted, she urged him to run them through the machine again—this time with the sorting switch on—but he resisted. Hutchinson was finally overruled by the Gadsden canvassing board. They looked at the rejected ballots. Sure enough, they were overvotes—and for good reason.
Gadsden had used a variant of the caterpillar ballot, in which the candidates’ names appeared in two columns. One column listed Bush, Gore, and six others. The next column listed two more candidates—Monica Moorehead and Howard Phillips—as well as a line that said, “Write-In Candidate.” Thinking they were voting in different races, hundreds of voters had filled in a circle for one candidate in each column, thereby voting twice for president. Others filled in the circle for Gore and then, wanting to be extra clear, wrote “Gore” in the write-in space. All these votes were tossed.
In some optiscan counties, such overvotes would have been spit right back at the voter, giving him a chance to correct his mistake on the spot. But Gadsden, like many other poor counties, used a cheaper system, in which overvotes would only register at the central optical-scanner machine, denying the voter a chance to correct his mistake. [State elections officials] should have been aware of this crucial discrepancy. Neighboring Leon County used the more expensive machinery, and technicians there had warned the Division of Elections well before Election Day of the disparate impact these two different systems would have. They had even set up a demonstration of the superior machines across the street from the division offices in Tallahassee.
Some of the faulty ballots in Gadsden were counted in those first days after the election as part of the county’s “automatic recount,” giving Gore a net gain of 153. Those votes, at least, were included in the certified state count.
Three hours east in Duval County, however, voters weren’t as lucky.
Here, in a county that includes Jacksonville, which is 29 percent black, 21,000 votes were thrown out for being overvotes, and here, an overvote was even more likely than in Gadsden. Prior to the election, the elections supervisor, John Stafford, had placed a sample-ballot insert in the local papers instructing citizens to vote every page. Any voter who followed this instruction invalidated his or her ballot in the process.
During the critical 72-hour period in which manual recounts could be requested, Mike Langton, chairman of the northeast Florida region for the Gore campaign, spent hours with Stafford, a white Republican. “I asked John Stafford how many under- and overvotes there were, and he said, ‘Oh, just a few,’” recalls Langton. Then, shortly after the deadline to ask for a recount had passed, Stafford revealed that the number of overvotes was actually 21,000. Nearly half of those were from four black precincts that normally vote over 90 percent Democratic.
Then there was the matter of usage of a very inaccurate felons list.
If the Gadsden and Duval stories might be characterized as a kind of disenfranchisement by conscious neglect, a much more sinister story began to emerge in the months following the election. Throughout Florida, people—many of them black men, such as Willie Steen, a decorated Gulf War veteran—went to the polls and were informed that they couldn’t vote, because they were convicted felons—even though they weren’t.
“The poll worker looked at the computer and said that there was something about me being a felon,” says Steen, who showed up at his polling place in Hillsborough County, young son in tow. Florida is one of just seven states that deny former felons the right to vote, but Steen wasn’t a felon.
“I’ve never been arrested before in my life,” Steen told the woman. A neighbor on line behind him heard the whole exchange. Steen tried to hide his embarrassment and quietly pleaded with the poll worker, How could I have ended up on the list? She couldn’t give him an answer. As the line lengthened, she grew impatient. “She brushed me off and said, ‘Hey, get to the side,’” recalls Steen. The alleged felony, Steen later learned, took place between 1991 and 1993—when he was stationed in the Persian Gulf.
Steen wasn’t the only upstanding black citizen named Willie on the list. So was Willie Dixon, a Tampa youth leader and pastor, and Willie Whiting, a pastor in Tallahassee. In Jacksonville, Roosevelt Cobbs learned through the mail that he, too, was a felon, though he wasn’t. The same thing happened to Roosevelt Lawrence. Throughout the state, scores of innocent people found themselves on the purge list.
The story got little attention at the time. Only Greg Palast, a fringe, old-school investigator, complete with fedora, was on its trail. With a background in racketeering investigation for the government, Palast broke part of the story while the recount was still going on, but he did it in England, in The Observer. None of the mainstream media in the U.S. would touch it. “Stories of black people losing rights is passé, it’s not discussed, no one cares,” says Palast, whose reporting on the subject appears in his 2002 book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. “A black person accused of being a felon is always guilty.”
How the state ended up with the “felon list” in the first place has its roots in one of the uglier chapters in American history. In 1868, Florida, as a way of keeping former slaves away from the polls, put in its constitution that prisoners would permanently be denied the right to vote unless they were granted clemency by the governor. In those days, and for nearly a hundred years after, a black man looking at a white woman was cause for arrest. The felony clause was just one of many measures taken to keep blacks off the rolls, including literacy tests, poll taxes, and “grandfather clauses,” by which a man could vote only if his grandfather had. All these other methods were effectively ended. But the constitutional provision about former felons remained.
In Florida, there are an estimated 700,000 ex-felons, and 1 in 4 is a black male. Six years ago, Florida state representative Chris Smith, of Fort Lauderdale, sat outside a local Winn-Dixie grocery store trying to get people to register. “A lot of black men that looked like me, around my age, would just walk past me and say, ‘Felony,’ ‘Felony,’ and not even attempt to register to vote,” Smith recalls. Why so many? In the past few years the majority-Republican legislature has upgraded certain misdemeanors to felonies and also created dozens of new felonies that disproportionately affect the urban poor. Intercepting police communications with a ham radio is a felony. So is the cashing of two unemployment checks after the recipient has gotten a new job. State senator Frederica Wilson, like other black lawmakers in Florida, believes these felonies are “aimed at African-American people.”
… black lawmakers have tried in vain to legislate rights restoration to some offenders who have served their sentences. …
…
… While some governors, such as Reubin Askew and Bob Graham, restored the rights of tens of thousands of felons who’d served their time, Jeb Bush allowed the backlog of applicants to grow to as many as 62,000 in 2002.
The law that disenfranchises felons took on a new life after the 1997 Miami mayoral race, in which a number of dead people “voted,” as did 105 felons. Seventy-one percent of those felons found on voter rolls were registered Democrats. Weeks later, the state legislature went to work on a sweeping anti-fraud bill. It called for stricter enforcement of the constitutional provision and stated that “the division shall annually contract with a private entity” to maintain a list of deceased individuals still on the rolls, those adjudicated “mentally incompetent” to vote, and, most important, felons. The appropriations committee allocated $4 million to the project; no money was appropriated from the state for voter education in 1998, 1999, or 2000.
When the state started soliciting bids for the high-tech felon hunt, at least three companies stepped up. One was Computer Business Services; another, Professional Analytical Systems & Software, bid under $10,000. After three rounds of bidding, Database Technologies, a Boca Raton company (since merged with ChoicePoint), emerged the winner. In its proposal, DBT estimated the cost at $4 million, knowing somehow that this was the exact amount the state had provided for the job. “There has been four million dollars allocated by the state for this project,” DBT senior vice president of operations George Bruder wrote to his boss, C.E.O. Chuck Lieppe, in an e-mail. “The bid we are constructing will have three different levels for price (a little bird told me this will help).” The little bird was correct.
From the start, there were questions about the felon list. “We were sent this purge list in August of 1998,” says Leon County elections supervisor Ion Sancho, moving feverishly through his cluttered office. “We started sending letters and contacting voters, [saying] that we had evidence that they were potential felons and that they contact us or they were going to be removed from the rolls. Boy, did that cause a firestorm.” One of those letters was sent to Sancho’s friend Rick Johnson, a civil-rights attorney, who was no felon. “Very few felons,” Sancho points out, “are members of the Florida bar.”
Sancho decided to get to the bottom of it. Early in 2000 he sat down with Emmett “Bucky” Mitchell, the Division of Elections’ assistant general counsel, and demanded to know why the list contained so many names of innocent people. “Bucky told me face-to-face that the Division of Elections was working on the problem,” recalls Sancho, “that it was the vendor’s [DBT’s] problem, and that they were telling the vendor to correct it.”
James Lee, chief marketing officer of ChoicePoint, the company that acquired DBT in the spring of 2000, says that the state did just the opposite. “Between the 1998 run and the 1999 run, the office of elections relaxed the criteria from 80 percent to 70 percent name match,” says Lee. “Because after the first year they weren’t getting enough names.”
And so, equipped with a database of felons supplied by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (F.D.L.E.), DBT programmers crouched at their computers and started scooping up names, many of which were only partial matches, from the Florida voter rolls and various other databases. Middle initials didn’t need to be the same; suffixes, such as Jr. and Sr., were ignored. Willie D. Whiting Jr., pastor, was caught because Willie J. Whiting was a felon. First and middle names could be switched around: Deborah Ann, Ann Deborah—same thing. Nicknames were fine—Robert, Bob, Bobby. The spelling of the last name didn’t have to be exact, either. The only thing Willie Steen was guilty of was having a name similar to that of a felon named Willie O’Steen.
DBT project manager Marlene Thorogood expressed concern in a March 1999 e-mail to the Division of Elections that the new parameters might result in “false positives” (i.e., wrongly included people). Bucky Mitchell wrote back, explaining the state’s position: “Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren’t matches and let the [elections] supervisors make a final determination rather than exclude certain matches altogether.” Guilty until proved innocent, in other words.
In May 2000, supervisors got a new list, for the upcoming election, and discovered that it included 8,000 names from Texas. But the Texans, now living in Florida, weren’t guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors. DBT took the blame, claiming a computer glitch, and hastily corrected the problem. How, though, had Texans gotten on the list in the first place? Texas was a state that automatically restored the rights of felons who had served their time.
According to two separate Florida court rulings rendered before the 2000 election, prisoners who’d had their rights restored in other states retained them when they moved across state lines to Florida. Instead, the Division of Elections was advised by the Office of Executive Clemency to have DBT include out-of-state ex-felons residing in Florida, even those from so-called automatic-restoration states. In order to vote, these ex-felons would have to show written proof of clemency from their former state, or re-apply for it in Florida. …
…
When the “corrected” list went out to all 67 supervisors in late May 2000, many were stunned. Linda Howell, elections supervisor of Madison County, found her own name on it. In Monroe County, the supervisor, Harry Sawyer, found his dad on the list, as well as one of his seven employees and the husband of another; none of them were felons. As a result of the mistakes, a couple of counties, including Broward and Palm Beach, decided not to use the list. Sancho, whose list had 697 names on it, went through them one by one, scrupulously checking. “We went for a five-for-five match,” says Sancho. “Those were criteria such as name, birth date, race, sex, Social Security number. When we applied that to this list of 697 that we got in 2000, I could verify only 33.”
Other elections supervisors did no such investigation. In Bay County, where the list contained approximately 1,000 names, elections officials essentially took it at face value. Once he got the list, says Larry Roxby, deputy elections supervisor, “it was pretty much a done deal.” In Miami-Dade, whose lists contained about 7,000 people, Supervisor David Leahy sent out letters, informing people of their felony status and advising that they could come in for a hearing if they wanted to appeal. If he didn’t hear back from them, these names were simply struck. Throughout the state, many of these letters came back “undeliverable.” Small wonder: the addresses provided by DBT were often out-of-date.
A few of the more dutiful supervisors found themselves taking on the extra role of citizens’ advocates. In Hillsborough County, Supervisor of Elections Pam Iorio, now the mayor of Tampa, sent out letters to all 3,258 people on her list. If they appealed, she worked with them to try to keep them on the rolls. Roosevelt Lawrence was one such person. “We were going back to the state and saying, ‘This gentleman has the following facts: here are the facts, this is what he is saying,’” Iorio recalls. “‘He lived a lawful life for over 40 years and he’s been employed here and done this.’ Twice they said, ‘No, that’s incorrect.’ In writing. . . . And he never voted in the 2000 election.” Lawrence continued to protest; finally, the F.D.L.E. realized its record on Roosevelt was wrong (Margolick17-27).
The NAACP sued Florida after the election for violating the Voting Rights Act (VRA). As a result of the settlement, the company that the Florida legislature entrusted with the purge—the Boca Raton–based Database Technologies (DBT)—ran the names on its 2000 purge list using stricter criteria. The exercise turned up 12,000 voters who shouldn’t have been labeled felons. That was 22 times Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory.
No one could ever determine precisely how many voters who were incorrectly labeled felons were turned away from the polls. But the US Civil Rights Commission launched a major investigation into the 2000 election fiasco, and its acting general counsel, Edward Hailes, did the math the best that he could. If 12,000 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls, and 44 percent of them were African-American, and 90 percent of African-Americans voted for Gore, that meant 4,752 black Gore voters—almost nine times Bush’s margin of victory—could have been prevented from voting. It’s not a stretch to conclude that the purge cost Gore the election. “We did think it was outcome-determinative,” Hailes said (Berman 2-3).
On January 11, 2001, Jeb Bush testified before the Civil Rights Commission during its investigation into the election problems in Florida. “What, if anything, did you do to ensure the election laws were faithfully executed?” general counsel Hailes asked the Florida governor. Bush said that he wasn’t responsible for the problems in Florida, including the voter purge. He blamed Katherine Harris. “It is the responsibility of the secretary of state as part of our Constitution,” Bush answered.
“You had no authority, no responsibilities, and took no actions with regard to the election?” Hailes pressed.
“No, the secretary of state and the 67 supervisors of election were responsible for that,” Bush said (Berman 8).
The suit ended in settlement agreements, in September 2002, that appeared to rectify the problem for the future. The state agreed to restore to its rolls the out-of-state felons from “automatic restoration” states. DBT agreed to run the names from the 1999 and 2000 purge lists using stricter criteria, and to provide to Florida’s elections supervisors the names of people who most likely shouldn’t have been on the list. The list of potentially wrongly targeted voters came to 20,000—more than a third of DBT’s May 2000 list. The supervisors, in turn, were supposed to restore these names to their voting rolls, had they been wrongly purged.
More than two years later, with the election of 2004 looming, Jeb Bush’s government has utterly failed to uphold its end of the bargain. Virtually none of the 20,000 people erroneously purged from Florida’s rolls have been reinstated in any formalized way. In September 2003, DBT and the state did manage to finish vetting the list and to send out a so-called filtered list to the elections supervisors to “re-evaluate.” No deadline was imposed for restoring the innocents, and little direction on the subject came from the state. If supervisors wanted to restore the names, they could; if they wanted to ignore the task, they could do that too.
Some supervisors have worked with the filtered list to restore names. But others have put it aside; as of June [2004], more than a few had no recollection of ever receiving it. (After prodding from advocacy groups, the state re-sent the list.) In Miami-Dade, the filtered list had more than 17,000 names. Of those, to date, only 14 voters wrongly identified as felons have been restored to the voting rolls.
These are just the snarls of the old ex-felon list. But in Florida, it seems, there’s always another angle. Last May the Division of Elections attempted a new purge, with a brand-new felon list. This list came to 48,000 names. Accompanying it was a memo to the supervisors from Ed Kast, director of the Division of Elections, informing them to start the purging process. For Ion Sancho it started another firestorm. “I asked my staff, ‘Look through [the list] and do a cursory exam. Nothing detailed. What can you tell me?’ They identified a dozen people who they recognized right off the bat weren’t felons,” Sancho says, storming about his office.
…
For weeks, liberal advocacy groups such as the A.C.L.U. and People for the American Way urged the supervisors to let them see the list so they could help vet it for accuracy, and avoid a repeat of the debacle of 2000. On May 12, in one of [Director of the Elections Division Ed] Kast’s last moves in his post, he sent a memo to the supervisors, detailing how to thwart the request, citing statutes about the privacy of voter-registration information and the will of the legislature—even though nothing in the law prevents the same information from going to political candidates to further their campaigns. “This is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to an intimidation letter to come out of the Division of Elections,” says Sancho.
As with many things concerning the Florida government, it would take a lawsuit to get any traction. In late May, CNN, with the support of Senator Bill Nelson, filed suit against the state for access to the list. Judge Nikki Clark ordered it released to the public.
It took The Miami Herald just a day to discover that the list, which the state had tried hard to keep under wraps, contained the names of at least 2,119 ex-felons who had been granted clemency in Florida, and thus had had their voting rights restored. Like the 2000 list, the new one turned out to be disproportionately Democrat.
…
In spite of the scrapping of the list, the state has informed the elections supervisors that it is still their legal obligation to bar ex-felons from voting in November (Margolick 28-34).
Works cited:
Berman, Ari, “How the 2000 Election in Florida Led to a New Wave of Voter Disenfranchisement.” The Nation, July 28, 2015. Web. https://www.thenation.com/article/arc...
Margolick, David, “The Path to Florida.” Vanity Fair, March 19, 2014. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/...
August 9, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2000 Election -- Character Assassination
In the 2000 presidential election campaign the Republican Party Noise Machine, which worked for years to convince Americans that the Clintons were criminally minded, used the same techniques of character assassination to turn the Democratic standard-bearer, Al Gore, for many years seen as an overly earnest Boy Scout, into a liar. When Republican National Committee polling showed that the Republicans would lose the election to the Democrats on the issues, a “skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy” was adopted, the New York Times reported. Republicans accused Gore of saying things he never said—most infamously, that he “invented” the Internet, a claim he never made that was first attributed to him in a GOP press release before it coursed through the media. Actually, Gore had said, “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet,” a claim that even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich verified as true (Brock 6).
The press didn't object to Gore's statement until Texas Republican congressman Dick Armey led the charge, saying, "If the vice president created the Internet, then I created the interstate highway system." Republican congressman James Sensenbrenner released a statement with the headline, delusions of grandeur: vice president gore takes credit for creating the internet. CNN's Lou Dobbs was soon calling Gore's remark "a case study … in delusions of grandeur." A few days later the word "invented" entered the narrative. On March 15, a USA Today headline about Gore read, inventing the internet. March 16 on Hardball, Chris Matthews derided Gore for his claim that he "invented the Internet." Soon the distorted assertion was in the pages of the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, and on the A.P. wire service. By early June, the word "invented" was actually being put in quotation marks, as though that were Gore's word of choice. Here's how Mimi Hall put it in USA Today: "A couple of Gore gaffes, including his assertion that he 'invented' the Internet, didn't help." And Newsday's Elaine Povich ridiculed "Gore's widely mocked assertion that he 'invented' the Internet." …
Belatedly attempting to defuse the situation, Gore joked about it on Imus in the Morning, saying that he "was up late the night before … inventing the camcorder." But it was too late—the damage had been done (Peretz 7).
The right-wing media broadcast this attack and similar attacks relentlessly, in effect giving the GOP countless hours of free political advertising every day for months leading up to the election. “Albert Arnold Gore Jr. is a habitual liar,” William Bennett, a Cabinet secretary in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, announced in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. “…Gore lies because he can’t help himself,” neoconservative pamphleteer David Horowitz wrote. “Liar, Liar,” screamed Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. The conservative columnist George F. Will pointed to Gore’s “serial mendacity” and warned that he is a “dangerous man.” “Gore may be quietly going nuts,” National Review’s Byron York concluded. The Washington Times agreed: “The real question is how to react to Mr. Gore’s increasingly bizarre utterings. Webster’s New World Dictionary defines ‘delusion’ thusly: ‘The apparent perception, in a nervous or mental disorder, of some thing external that is not actually present…a belief in something that is contrary to fact or reality, resulting from deception, misconception, or a mental disorder.’”
This impugning of Gore’s character and the questioning of his mental fitness soon surfaced in the regular media. The New York Times ran an article headlined tendency to embellish fact snags Gore, while the Boston Globe weighed in with Gore seen as “misleading.” On ABC’s This Week, former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos referred to Gore’s “Pinocchio problem.” For National Journal’s Stuart Taylor, the issue was “the Clintonization of Al Gore, who increasingly apes his boss in fictionalizing his life story and mangling the truth for political gain.” Washington Post editor Bob Woodward raised the question of whether Gore “could comprehend reality,” while MSNBC’s Chris Matthews compared Gore to “Zelig” and insisted, “Isn’t it getting to be delusionary” (Brock 7).
As he was running for president, Al Gore said he'd invented the Internet; announced that he had personally discovered Love Canal, the most infamous toxic-waste site in the country; and bragged that he and Tipper had been the sole inspiration for the golden couple in Erich Segal's best-selling novel Love Story (made into a hit movie with Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal). He also invented the dog, joked David Letterman, and gave mankind fire.
Could such an obviously intelligent man have been so megalomaniacal and self-deluded to have actually said such things? Well, that's what the news media told us, anyway. And on top of his supposed pomposity and elitism, he was a calculating dork: unable to get dressed in the morning without the advice of a prominent feminist (Naomi Wolf).
… in the bastions of the "liberal media" that were supposed to love Gore—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN—he was variously described as "repellent," "delusional," a vote-rigger, a man who "lies like a rug," "Pinocchio." Eric Pooley, who covered him for Time magazine, says, "He brought out the creative-writing student in so many reporters.… Everybody kind of let loose on the guy."
How did this happen? Was the right-wing attack machine so effective that it overwhelmed all competing messages? Was Gore's communications team outrageously inept? Were the liberal elite bending over backward to prove they weren't so liberal (Peretz 1)?
The media began the coverage of the 2000 election with an inclination not so different from that demonstrated in other recent elections—they were eager for simple, character-driven narratives that would sell papers and get ratings. "Particularly in presidential elections … we in the press tend to deal in caricatures," says Dan Rather, who was then anchoring for CBS.
…
In 2000, the media seemed to focus on a personality contest between Bush, the folksy Texas rogue, and, as The New York Times referred to Gore, "Eddie Haskell," the insincere brownnoser from “Leave It to Beaver.” ABC anchor Claire Shipman, who covered the 2000 campaign for NBC, says, "It was almost a drama that was cast before anyone even took a good look at who the candidates were."
George Bush made it easy—he handed them a character on a plate. He had one slogan—compassionate conservatism—and one promise aimed squarely at denigrating Bill Clinton: to restore honor and integrity to the White House. He was also perceived to be fun to be with. For 18 months, he pinched cheeks, bowled with oranges in the aisles of his campaign plane, and playacted flight attendant. Frank Bruni, now the restaurant critic for The New York Times but then a novice national political-beat reporter for the same newspaper, wrote affectionately of Bush's "folksy affability," "distinctive charm," "effortless banter," and the feather pillow that he traveled with.
But Gore couldn't turn on such charm on cue. "He doesn't pinch cheeks," says Tipper. "Al's not that kind of guy." With Gore still vice president, there was a certain built-in formality and distance that reporters had to endure. Having served the public for nearly 25 years in different roles—from congressman legislating the toxic-waste Superfund to vice president leading the charge to go into Bosnia—Gore could not be reduced to a sound bite. As one reporter put it, they were stuck with "the government nerd." "The reality is," says Eli Attie, who was Gore's chief speechwriter and traveled with him, "very few reporters covering the 2000 campaign had much interest in what really motivated Gore and the way he spent most of his time as vice president: the complexities of government and policy, and not just the raw calculus of the campaign trail."
Muddying the waters further was the fact that the Gore campaign early on was in a state of disarray—with a revolving door of staffers who didn't particularly see the value in happy chitchat. "We basically treated the press with a whip and a chair … and made no real effort to schmooze at all," says Gore strategist Carter Eskew. "I fault myself." It was plain to the reporters that this was not the tight ship of Bush's campaign, led by the "iron triangle" of Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Joe Allbaugh.
"The campaign went through several official slogans," says The New York Times's Katharine Seelye, who would become one of the more critical reporters who covered Gore. "They had a hard time latching onto a clear idea of what the campaign was about. [Democratic strategist] James Carville once said to me that if you want reporters to write about hamburger, you give them hamburger. You don't give them French fries and ice cream."
Gore needed to give them hamburger, as Carville put it—a simple, dramatic character; a simple, dramatic story line; a 10-word slogan. If Gore couldn't provide it, the press would. As the campaign wore on, the media found a groove they could settle into: wonk so desperate to become president he'll do or say anything, even make stuff up. It complemented perfectly the other son of a politician running for president: irresistible frat boy who, when it came to the presidency, could take it or leave it.
…
As with all campaigns, the coverage of the 2000 election would be driven by a small number of beat reporters. In this case, two women at the most influential newspapers in the country: Seelye from The New York Times and Ceci Connolly from The Washington Post.
A prominent Washington journalist describes them as "edgy, competitive, wanting to make their mark," and adds that they "reinforced each other's prejudices."
…
Building on the narrative established by the Love Story and Internet episodes, Seelye, her critics charge, repeatedly tinged what should have been straight reporting with attitude or hints at Gore's insincerity. Describing a stump speech in Tennessee, she wrote, "He also made an appeal based on what he described as his hard work for the state—as if a debt were owed in return for years of service." Writing how he encouraged an audience to get out and vote at the primary, she said, "Vice President Al Gore may have questioned the effects of the internal combustion engine, but not when it comes to transportation to the polls. Today he exhorted a union audience in Knoxville, Iowa, to pile into vans—not cars, but gas-guzzling vans—and haul friends to the Iowa caucuses on January 24." She would not just say that he was simply fund-raising. "Vice President Al Gore was back to business as usual today—trolling for money," she wrote. In another piece, he was "ever on the prowl for money."
The disparity between her reporting and Bruni's coverage of Bush for the Times was particularly galling to the Gore camp. "It's one thing if the coverage is equal—equally tough or equally soft," says Gore press secretary Chris Lehane. "In 2000, we would get stories where if Gore walked in and said the room was gray we'd be beaten up because in fact the room was an off-white. They would get stories about how George Bush's wing tips looked as he strode across the stage." Melinda Henneberger, then a political writer at the Times, says that such attitudes went all the way up to the top of the newspaper. … "… Al Gore was a laughline at the paper, while where Bush was concerned we seemed to suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations."
Connolly, too, at The Washington Post, wrote about Gore's "grubbing for dollars inside a monastery," and "stretching the [fund-raising] rules as far as he can." Her stories about the distortions extended the life of the distortions themselves. In one article, she knocked Gore for "the hullabaloo over the Internet—from [his] inflated claim to his slowness to tamp out the publicity brush fire." In another, co-written with David Von Drehle, she claimed, "From conservative talk radio titan Rush Limbaugh and the New York Post (headline: 'Liar, Liar') to neutral papers across the country, the attack on Gore's credibility is resonating."
…
On December 1, 1999, Connolly—and Seelye—misquoted Gore in a damning way. Their error was picked up elsewhere and repeated, and snowballed into a political nightmare. Gore was speaking to a group of students at Concord High School, in New Hampshire, about how young people could effect change. He described a letter he had received as a congressman in 1978 from a girl in Toone, Tennessee, about how her father and grandfather had gotten mysteriously ill. He had looked into the matter and found that the town was a toxic-waste site. He went on:
"I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue and Toone, Tennessee. That was the one you didn't hear of, but that was the one that started it all.… We passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dumpsites, and we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country.… It all happened because one high-school student got involved."
Jill Hoffman, a high-school senior in the audience who was helping to film the event, says, “I remember thinking, I really, really like what he has to say.” But what Seelye and Connolly zeroed in on was Gore yet again claiming credit for something he didn’t do— “discovering” Love Canal (which was, in fact, discovered by the people who lived there). In addition to mischaracterizing his somewhat ambiguous statement, they misquoted him, claiming he said, “I was the one that started it all,” instead of “that was the one that started it all.” The next day, Seelye offered a friendlier account of Gore’s visit to the school. Connolly repeated the misquote. In an article titled “First ‘Love Story,’ Now Love Canal,” she wrote:
The man who mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie "Love Story" and to have invented the Internet says he didn't quite mean to say he discovered a toxic waste site when he said at a high school forum Tuesday in New Hampshire: "I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal." Gore went on to brag about holding the "first hearing on that issue" and said "I was the one that started it all."
The story picked up steam. “I was the one that started it all” became a quote featured in U.S. News & World Report and was repeated on the chat shows. On ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos said, “Gore, again, revealed his Pinocchio problem. Says he was the model for Love Story, created the Internet. And this time he sort of discovered Love Canal.” On two consecutive nights of Hardball, Chris Matthews brought up this same trio as examples of Gore’s “delusionary” thinking. “What is it, the Zelig guy who keeps saying, ‘I was the main character in Love Story. I invented the Internet. I invented Love Canal.’ It reminds me of Snoopy thinking he’s the Red Baron.” “It became part of the vocabulary,” Matthews says today. “I don’t think it had a thunderous impact on the voters.” He concedes, however, that such stories were repeated too many times in the media.
…
A study conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 76 percent of stories about Gore in early 2000 focused on either the theme of his alleged lying or that he was marred by scandal, while the most common theme about Bush was that he was “a different kind of Republican.”
Al Gore suffered other forms of disparagement.
One obstacle course the press set up was which candidate would lure voters to have a beer with them at the local bar. "Journalists made it seem like that was a legitimate way of choosing a president," says Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. "They also wrongly presumed, based on nothing, that somehow Bush was more likable." Chris Matthews contends that "the likability issue was something decided by the viewers of the debates, not by the commentators," but adds, "The last six years have been a powerful bit of evidence that we have to judge candidates for president on their preparation for the office with the same relish that we assess their personalities."
Maureen Dowd boiled the choice between Gore and Bush down to that between the "pious smarty-pants" and the "amiable idler," and made it perfectly clear which of the presidential candidates had a better chance of getting a date. "Al Gore is desperate to get chicks," she said in her column. "Married chicks. Single chicks. Old chicks. Young chicks. If he doesn't stop turning off women, he'll never be president."
"I bet he is in a room somewhere right now playing Barry White CDs and struggling to get mellow," she wrote in another.
Meanwhile, though Dowd certainly questioned Bush's intellect in some columns, she seemed to be charmed by him—one of the "bad boys," "rascals," and a "rapscallion." …
As the Daily Howler noted, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams went after Gore's clothes at least five times in one week. "Here is a guy taking off his suits.… This is the casual sweater look—what's going on here?" … "He would have been in a suit a month ago." … "He's wearing these polo shirts that don't always look natural on him." Williams's frequent guest *Newsweek'*s Howard Fineman later chimed in: "I covered his last presidential campaign, in 1988. One day he was in the conservative blue suit, the next he was playing lumberjack at the V.F.W. hall in New Hampshire."
…
The trivial continued to dominate during the postmortem following Gore and Bush's first debate, on October 3, 2000. The television media were sure Gore won—at first. But then Republican operatives promptly spliced together a reel of Gore sighing, which was then sent to right-wing radio outlets. Eighteen hours later, the pundits could talk of little else. "They could hear you audibly sighing or sounding exasperated as Governor Bush was answering questions," Katie Couric scolded him the next day on the Today show. "Do you think that's presidential behavior?" For the *Times's Frank Bruni, the sighs weren't as galling as Gore's familiarity with the names of foreign leaders. "It was not enough for Vice President Al Gore to venture a crisp pronunciation of Milosevic, as in Slobodan," he wrote. "Mr. Gore had to go a step further, volunteering the name of Mr. Milosevic's challenger Vojislav Kostunica" (Peretz 7-17).
During my internet search to find material to write this post, I came upon the following notes written by a UCLA professor, who failed to disclose his name.
George W. Bush, whose surreal campaign compares to absolutely nothing that I have ever seen in my life, not even Richard Nixon's, not even George Bush Senior's, has been a fanatical practitioner of projection. The conscience-wrecking pundits constantly remark on what a clean campaign Bush has been running, and yet he and his people have been calling his opponent a liar just about every day since the campaign began. It's somehow in the nature of the new political jargon that nobody notices how routine and how offensive it is. In April, for example, Gore said that Bush's foreign policy proposals treat China and Russia as enemies. USA Today (5/1/00) quotes Condoleeza Rice as follows:
[Bush] has said that China is a competitor and we should reach out to Russia. It is very much like the vice president to distort [Bush's] record.
In other words, not just that Gore had distorted Bush's record, not just that Gore has often distorted Bush's record, but that "it is very much like" Gore to distort Bush's record -- an attack on his character, and on the thinnest of arguments. Of course, it's theoretically possible that these routine character attacks are right. But are they right in reality? The fact is, the Bush campaign is now preparing to broadcast television commercials that make two harsh
accusations against his opponent -- both of which are false. Not just arguably false but straightforwardly false. This commercial makes the grave claim that Mr. Bush's opponent raised funds at a Buddhist temple. This is not only unproven, but as even prominent Republicans have observed, it is simply not true. The evidence is overwhelming -- it's not even a close call. Yet the media routinely refer to the Buddhist temple thing as a "fund-raiser", even though it was not any such thing. Most of the basic facts of the case are never reported, and those that are reported are routinely spun in the most deceptive fashion.
The Bush advertisement's other claim is that Al Gore falsely claimed to have invented the Internet. This, too, is false. It simply never happened. The advertisement quotes half of a sentence, the first half of which makes clear what Mr. Gore plainly and obviously meant
-- the accurate, true claim, forcefully acknowledged by the Internet's scientific leadership, that he did the pioneering legislative work that made the Internet possible.
This is it: this is the Bush campaign's best shot, and all they've got is lies. And not just any lies, but projective lies: in order to lie about their opponent, they are accusing him of being a liar. Everything they say about their opponent is actually true about them. …
…
… now, in the darkest of all possible projections, we're hearing the first media rumblings that maybe Gore's mental health is suspect, given that he and his family went into therapy after his son was hit by a car (Some 6).
The well-orchestrated media cacophony had its intended effect: The election was far more competitive than it should have been—and, indeed, was decided before the Supreme Court stepped in—because of negative voter perceptions of Gore’s honesty and trustworthiness. In the final polls before the election and in exit polls on Election Day, voters said they favored Gore’s program over George W. Bush’s. Gore won substantial majorities not only for his position on most specific issues but also for his overall thrust. The conservative Bush theme of tax cuts and small government was rejected by voters in favor of the more liberal Gore theme of extending prosperity more broadly and standing up to corporate interests. Yet while Bush shaded the truth and misstated facts throughout the campaign on everything from the size of Gore’s federal spending proposals to his own record as governor of Texas, by substantial margins voters thought Bush was more truthful than Gore. According to an ABC exit poll, of personal qualities that mattered most to voters, 24 percent ranked “honest/trustworthy” first—and they went for Bush over Gore by a margin of 80 percent to 15 percent. Seventy-four percent of voters said “Gore would say anything,” while 58 percent thought Bush would. Among white, college-educated, male voters, Gore’s “untruthfulness” was cited overwhelmingly as a reason not to vote for him, far more than any other reason (Brock 7).
Works cited:
Brock, David, “The Republican Noise Machine.” Center for American Progress Action Fund. June 30, 2004. Web. https://www.americanprogressaction.or...
Peretz, Evgenia, “Going after Gore.” Vanity Fair, September 4, 2007. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/...
“Some Notes on the Campaign Before I Disappear for a While.” Web. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/...
The press didn't object to Gore's statement until Texas Republican congressman Dick Armey led the charge, saying, "If the vice president created the Internet, then I created the interstate highway system." Republican congressman James Sensenbrenner released a statement with the headline, delusions of grandeur: vice president gore takes credit for creating the internet. CNN's Lou Dobbs was soon calling Gore's remark "a case study … in delusions of grandeur." A few days later the word "invented" entered the narrative. On March 15, a USA Today headline about Gore read, inventing the internet. March 16 on Hardball, Chris Matthews derided Gore for his claim that he "invented the Internet." Soon the distorted assertion was in the pages of the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, and on the A.P. wire service. By early June, the word "invented" was actually being put in quotation marks, as though that were Gore's word of choice. Here's how Mimi Hall put it in USA Today: "A couple of Gore gaffes, including his assertion that he 'invented' the Internet, didn't help." And Newsday's Elaine Povich ridiculed "Gore's widely mocked assertion that he 'invented' the Internet." …
Belatedly attempting to defuse the situation, Gore joked about it on Imus in the Morning, saying that he "was up late the night before … inventing the camcorder." But it was too late—the damage had been done (Peretz 7).
The right-wing media broadcast this attack and similar attacks relentlessly, in effect giving the GOP countless hours of free political advertising every day for months leading up to the election. “Albert Arnold Gore Jr. is a habitual liar,” William Bennett, a Cabinet secretary in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, announced in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. “…Gore lies because he can’t help himself,” neoconservative pamphleteer David Horowitz wrote. “Liar, Liar,” screamed Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. The conservative columnist George F. Will pointed to Gore’s “serial mendacity” and warned that he is a “dangerous man.” “Gore may be quietly going nuts,” National Review’s Byron York concluded. The Washington Times agreed: “The real question is how to react to Mr. Gore’s increasingly bizarre utterings. Webster’s New World Dictionary defines ‘delusion’ thusly: ‘The apparent perception, in a nervous or mental disorder, of some thing external that is not actually present…a belief in something that is contrary to fact or reality, resulting from deception, misconception, or a mental disorder.’”
This impugning of Gore’s character and the questioning of his mental fitness soon surfaced in the regular media. The New York Times ran an article headlined tendency to embellish fact snags Gore, while the Boston Globe weighed in with Gore seen as “misleading.” On ABC’s This Week, former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos referred to Gore’s “Pinocchio problem.” For National Journal’s Stuart Taylor, the issue was “the Clintonization of Al Gore, who increasingly apes his boss in fictionalizing his life story and mangling the truth for political gain.” Washington Post editor Bob Woodward raised the question of whether Gore “could comprehend reality,” while MSNBC’s Chris Matthews compared Gore to “Zelig” and insisted, “Isn’t it getting to be delusionary” (Brock 7).
As he was running for president, Al Gore said he'd invented the Internet; announced that he had personally discovered Love Canal, the most infamous toxic-waste site in the country; and bragged that he and Tipper had been the sole inspiration for the golden couple in Erich Segal's best-selling novel Love Story (made into a hit movie with Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal). He also invented the dog, joked David Letterman, and gave mankind fire.
Could such an obviously intelligent man have been so megalomaniacal and self-deluded to have actually said such things? Well, that's what the news media told us, anyway. And on top of his supposed pomposity and elitism, he was a calculating dork: unable to get dressed in the morning without the advice of a prominent feminist (Naomi Wolf).
… in the bastions of the "liberal media" that were supposed to love Gore—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN—he was variously described as "repellent," "delusional," a vote-rigger, a man who "lies like a rug," "Pinocchio." Eric Pooley, who covered him for Time magazine, says, "He brought out the creative-writing student in so many reporters.… Everybody kind of let loose on the guy."
How did this happen? Was the right-wing attack machine so effective that it overwhelmed all competing messages? Was Gore's communications team outrageously inept? Were the liberal elite bending over backward to prove they weren't so liberal (Peretz 1)?
The media began the coverage of the 2000 election with an inclination not so different from that demonstrated in other recent elections—they were eager for simple, character-driven narratives that would sell papers and get ratings. "Particularly in presidential elections … we in the press tend to deal in caricatures," says Dan Rather, who was then anchoring for CBS.
…
In 2000, the media seemed to focus on a personality contest between Bush, the folksy Texas rogue, and, as The New York Times referred to Gore, "Eddie Haskell," the insincere brownnoser from “Leave It to Beaver.” ABC anchor Claire Shipman, who covered the 2000 campaign for NBC, says, "It was almost a drama that was cast before anyone even took a good look at who the candidates were."
George Bush made it easy—he handed them a character on a plate. He had one slogan—compassionate conservatism—and one promise aimed squarely at denigrating Bill Clinton: to restore honor and integrity to the White House. He was also perceived to be fun to be with. For 18 months, he pinched cheeks, bowled with oranges in the aisles of his campaign plane, and playacted flight attendant. Frank Bruni, now the restaurant critic for The New York Times but then a novice national political-beat reporter for the same newspaper, wrote affectionately of Bush's "folksy affability," "distinctive charm," "effortless banter," and the feather pillow that he traveled with.
But Gore couldn't turn on such charm on cue. "He doesn't pinch cheeks," says Tipper. "Al's not that kind of guy." With Gore still vice president, there was a certain built-in formality and distance that reporters had to endure. Having served the public for nearly 25 years in different roles—from congressman legislating the toxic-waste Superfund to vice president leading the charge to go into Bosnia—Gore could not be reduced to a sound bite. As one reporter put it, they were stuck with "the government nerd." "The reality is," says Eli Attie, who was Gore's chief speechwriter and traveled with him, "very few reporters covering the 2000 campaign had much interest in what really motivated Gore and the way he spent most of his time as vice president: the complexities of government and policy, and not just the raw calculus of the campaign trail."
Muddying the waters further was the fact that the Gore campaign early on was in a state of disarray—with a revolving door of staffers who didn't particularly see the value in happy chitchat. "We basically treated the press with a whip and a chair … and made no real effort to schmooze at all," says Gore strategist Carter Eskew. "I fault myself." It was plain to the reporters that this was not the tight ship of Bush's campaign, led by the "iron triangle" of Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Joe Allbaugh.
"The campaign went through several official slogans," says The New York Times's Katharine Seelye, who would become one of the more critical reporters who covered Gore. "They had a hard time latching onto a clear idea of what the campaign was about. [Democratic strategist] James Carville once said to me that if you want reporters to write about hamburger, you give them hamburger. You don't give them French fries and ice cream."
Gore needed to give them hamburger, as Carville put it—a simple, dramatic character; a simple, dramatic story line; a 10-word slogan. If Gore couldn't provide it, the press would. As the campaign wore on, the media found a groove they could settle into: wonk so desperate to become president he'll do or say anything, even make stuff up. It complemented perfectly the other son of a politician running for president: irresistible frat boy who, when it came to the presidency, could take it or leave it.
…
As with all campaigns, the coverage of the 2000 election would be driven by a small number of beat reporters. In this case, two women at the most influential newspapers in the country: Seelye from The New York Times and Ceci Connolly from The Washington Post.
A prominent Washington journalist describes them as "edgy, competitive, wanting to make their mark," and adds that they "reinforced each other's prejudices."
…
Building on the narrative established by the Love Story and Internet episodes, Seelye, her critics charge, repeatedly tinged what should have been straight reporting with attitude or hints at Gore's insincerity. Describing a stump speech in Tennessee, she wrote, "He also made an appeal based on what he described as his hard work for the state—as if a debt were owed in return for years of service." Writing how he encouraged an audience to get out and vote at the primary, she said, "Vice President Al Gore may have questioned the effects of the internal combustion engine, but not when it comes to transportation to the polls. Today he exhorted a union audience in Knoxville, Iowa, to pile into vans—not cars, but gas-guzzling vans—and haul friends to the Iowa caucuses on January 24." She would not just say that he was simply fund-raising. "Vice President Al Gore was back to business as usual today—trolling for money," she wrote. In another piece, he was "ever on the prowl for money."
The disparity between her reporting and Bruni's coverage of Bush for the Times was particularly galling to the Gore camp. "It's one thing if the coverage is equal—equally tough or equally soft," says Gore press secretary Chris Lehane. "In 2000, we would get stories where if Gore walked in and said the room was gray we'd be beaten up because in fact the room was an off-white. They would get stories about how George Bush's wing tips looked as he strode across the stage." Melinda Henneberger, then a political writer at the Times, says that such attitudes went all the way up to the top of the newspaper. … "… Al Gore was a laughline at the paper, while where Bush was concerned we seemed to suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations."
Connolly, too, at The Washington Post, wrote about Gore's "grubbing for dollars inside a monastery," and "stretching the [fund-raising] rules as far as he can." Her stories about the distortions extended the life of the distortions themselves. In one article, she knocked Gore for "the hullabaloo over the Internet—from [his] inflated claim to his slowness to tamp out the publicity brush fire." In another, co-written with David Von Drehle, she claimed, "From conservative talk radio titan Rush Limbaugh and the New York Post (headline: 'Liar, Liar') to neutral papers across the country, the attack on Gore's credibility is resonating."
…
On December 1, 1999, Connolly—and Seelye—misquoted Gore in a damning way. Their error was picked up elsewhere and repeated, and snowballed into a political nightmare. Gore was speaking to a group of students at Concord High School, in New Hampshire, about how young people could effect change. He described a letter he had received as a congressman in 1978 from a girl in Toone, Tennessee, about how her father and grandfather had gotten mysteriously ill. He had looked into the matter and found that the town was a toxic-waste site. He went on:
"I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue and Toone, Tennessee. That was the one you didn't hear of, but that was the one that started it all.… We passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dumpsites, and we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country.… It all happened because one high-school student got involved."
Jill Hoffman, a high-school senior in the audience who was helping to film the event, says, “I remember thinking, I really, really like what he has to say.” But what Seelye and Connolly zeroed in on was Gore yet again claiming credit for something he didn’t do— “discovering” Love Canal (which was, in fact, discovered by the people who lived there). In addition to mischaracterizing his somewhat ambiguous statement, they misquoted him, claiming he said, “I was the one that started it all,” instead of “that was the one that started it all.” The next day, Seelye offered a friendlier account of Gore’s visit to the school. Connolly repeated the misquote. In an article titled “First ‘Love Story,’ Now Love Canal,” she wrote:
The man who mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie "Love Story" and to have invented the Internet says he didn't quite mean to say he discovered a toxic waste site when he said at a high school forum Tuesday in New Hampshire: "I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal." Gore went on to brag about holding the "first hearing on that issue" and said "I was the one that started it all."
The story picked up steam. “I was the one that started it all” became a quote featured in U.S. News & World Report and was repeated on the chat shows. On ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos said, “Gore, again, revealed his Pinocchio problem. Says he was the model for Love Story, created the Internet. And this time he sort of discovered Love Canal.” On two consecutive nights of Hardball, Chris Matthews brought up this same trio as examples of Gore’s “delusionary” thinking. “What is it, the Zelig guy who keeps saying, ‘I was the main character in Love Story. I invented the Internet. I invented Love Canal.’ It reminds me of Snoopy thinking he’s the Red Baron.” “It became part of the vocabulary,” Matthews says today. “I don’t think it had a thunderous impact on the voters.” He concedes, however, that such stories were repeated too many times in the media.
…
A study conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 76 percent of stories about Gore in early 2000 focused on either the theme of his alleged lying or that he was marred by scandal, while the most common theme about Bush was that he was “a different kind of Republican.”
Al Gore suffered other forms of disparagement.
One obstacle course the press set up was which candidate would lure voters to have a beer with them at the local bar. "Journalists made it seem like that was a legitimate way of choosing a president," says Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. "They also wrongly presumed, based on nothing, that somehow Bush was more likable." Chris Matthews contends that "the likability issue was something decided by the viewers of the debates, not by the commentators," but adds, "The last six years have been a powerful bit of evidence that we have to judge candidates for president on their preparation for the office with the same relish that we assess their personalities."
Maureen Dowd boiled the choice between Gore and Bush down to that between the "pious smarty-pants" and the "amiable idler," and made it perfectly clear which of the presidential candidates had a better chance of getting a date. "Al Gore is desperate to get chicks," she said in her column. "Married chicks. Single chicks. Old chicks. Young chicks. If he doesn't stop turning off women, he'll never be president."
"I bet he is in a room somewhere right now playing Barry White CDs and struggling to get mellow," she wrote in another.
Meanwhile, though Dowd certainly questioned Bush's intellect in some columns, she seemed to be charmed by him—one of the "bad boys," "rascals," and a "rapscallion." …
As the Daily Howler noted, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams went after Gore's clothes at least five times in one week. "Here is a guy taking off his suits.… This is the casual sweater look—what's going on here?" … "He would have been in a suit a month ago." … "He's wearing these polo shirts that don't always look natural on him." Williams's frequent guest *Newsweek'*s Howard Fineman later chimed in: "I covered his last presidential campaign, in 1988. One day he was in the conservative blue suit, the next he was playing lumberjack at the V.F.W. hall in New Hampshire."
…
The trivial continued to dominate during the postmortem following Gore and Bush's first debate, on October 3, 2000. The television media were sure Gore won—at first. But then Republican operatives promptly spliced together a reel of Gore sighing, which was then sent to right-wing radio outlets. Eighteen hours later, the pundits could talk of little else. "They could hear you audibly sighing or sounding exasperated as Governor Bush was answering questions," Katie Couric scolded him the next day on the Today show. "Do you think that's presidential behavior?" For the *Times's Frank Bruni, the sighs weren't as galling as Gore's familiarity with the names of foreign leaders. "It was not enough for Vice President Al Gore to venture a crisp pronunciation of Milosevic, as in Slobodan," he wrote. "Mr. Gore had to go a step further, volunteering the name of Mr. Milosevic's challenger Vojislav Kostunica" (Peretz 7-17).
During my internet search to find material to write this post, I came upon the following notes written by a UCLA professor, who failed to disclose his name.
George W. Bush, whose surreal campaign compares to absolutely nothing that I have ever seen in my life, not even Richard Nixon's, not even George Bush Senior's, has been a fanatical practitioner of projection. The conscience-wrecking pundits constantly remark on what a clean campaign Bush has been running, and yet he and his people have been calling his opponent a liar just about every day since the campaign began. It's somehow in the nature of the new political jargon that nobody notices how routine and how offensive it is. In April, for example, Gore said that Bush's foreign policy proposals treat China and Russia as enemies. USA Today (5/1/00) quotes Condoleeza Rice as follows:
[Bush] has said that China is a competitor and we should reach out to Russia. It is very much like the vice president to distort [Bush's] record.
In other words, not just that Gore had distorted Bush's record, not just that Gore has often distorted Bush's record, but that "it is very much like" Gore to distort Bush's record -- an attack on his character, and on the thinnest of arguments. Of course, it's theoretically possible that these routine character attacks are right. But are they right in reality? The fact is, the Bush campaign is now preparing to broadcast television commercials that make two harsh
accusations against his opponent -- both of which are false. Not just arguably false but straightforwardly false. This commercial makes the grave claim that Mr. Bush's opponent raised funds at a Buddhist temple. This is not only unproven, but as even prominent Republicans have observed, it is simply not true. The evidence is overwhelming -- it's not even a close call. Yet the media routinely refer to the Buddhist temple thing as a "fund-raiser", even though it was not any such thing. Most of the basic facts of the case are never reported, and those that are reported are routinely spun in the most deceptive fashion.
The Bush advertisement's other claim is that Al Gore falsely claimed to have invented the Internet. This, too, is false. It simply never happened. The advertisement quotes half of a sentence, the first half of which makes clear what Mr. Gore plainly and obviously meant
-- the accurate, true claim, forcefully acknowledged by the Internet's scientific leadership, that he did the pioneering legislative work that made the Internet possible.
This is it: this is the Bush campaign's best shot, and all they've got is lies. And not just any lies, but projective lies: in order to lie about their opponent, they are accusing him of being a liar. Everything they say about their opponent is actually true about them. …
…
… now, in the darkest of all possible projections, we're hearing the first media rumblings that maybe Gore's mental health is suspect, given that he and his family went into therapy after his son was hit by a car (Some 6).
The well-orchestrated media cacophony had its intended effect: The election was far more competitive than it should have been—and, indeed, was decided before the Supreme Court stepped in—because of negative voter perceptions of Gore’s honesty and trustworthiness. In the final polls before the election and in exit polls on Election Day, voters said they favored Gore’s program over George W. Bush’s. Gore won substantial majorities not only for his position on most specific issues but also for his overall thrust. The conservative Bush theme of tax cuts and small government was rejected by voters in favor of the more liberal Gore theme of extending prosperity more broadly and standing up to corporate interests. Yet while Bush shaded the truth and misstated facts throughout the campaign on everything from the size of Gore’s federal spending proposals to his own record as governor of Texas, by substantial margins voters thought Bush was more truthful than Gore. According to an ABC exit poll, of personal qualities that mattered most to voters, 24 percent ranked “honest/trustworthy” first—and they went for Bush over Gore by a margin of 80 percent to 15 percent. Seventy-four percent of voters said “Gore would say anything,” while 58 percent thought Bush would. Among white, college-educated, male voters, Gore’s “untruthfulness” was cited overwhelmingly as a reason not to vote for him, far more than any other reason (Brock 7).
Works cited:
Brock, David, “The Republican Noise Machine.” Center for American Progress Action Fund. June 30, 2004. Web. https://www.americanprogressaction.or...
Peretz, Evgenia, “Going after Gore.” Vanity Fair, September 4, 2007. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/...
“Some Notes on the Campaign Before I Disappear for a While.” Web. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/...
August 5, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2000 Election -- Results, The Campaigns
The 2000 presidential election pitted Republican George W. Bush, governor of Texas and son of former US president George H.W. Bush, against Democrat Al Gore, former senator from Tennessee and vice president in the administration of Bill Clinton. Because Clinton had been such a popular president, Gore had no difficulty securing the Democratic nomination, though he sought to distance himself from the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Clinton’s impeachment trial.
Bush won the Republican nomination after a heated battle against Arizona Senator John McCain in the primaries. He chose former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney as his running mate.
On election day, Gore won the popular vote by over half a million votes. Bush carried most states in the South, the rural Midwest, and the Rocky Mountain region, while Gore won most states in the Northeast, the upper Midwest, and the Pacific Coast. Gore garnered 255 electoral votes to Bush’s 246, but neither candidate won the 270 electoral votes necessary for victory. Election results in some states, including New Mexico and Oregon, were too close to call, but it was Florida, with its 25 electoral votes, on which the outcome of the election hinged.
The Campaigns
In their presidential campaigns, both candidates focused primarily on domestic issues, such as economic growth, the federal budget surplus, health care, tax relief, and reform of social insurance and welfare programs, particularly Social Security and Medicare (Election 1).
The election of 2000 merged or obliterated many of [the previous divisions between the two parties]. During the Clinton years, Democrats overcame their losing reputation on moralistic issues, as Clinton became identified with such stands as harsh treatment of criminals (including support for the death penalty) and welfare reform. The president maintained his popularity even after revelation of his sexual immorality, as seen in the failure of the Republican effort to impeach and remove him from office.
In 2000 Republicans also moved away from previous unattractive positions. On the economic dimension, no longer opposed to all government programs, the party under Governor Bush proposed new policies to improve education, expand health care, and add funds and programs to Social Security and Medicare. Still conservative, the Bush Republicans now modified their ideology by proclaiming a new "compassionate" outlook and reduced their emphasis on moral issues, particularly abortion. Without overt change in his pro-life stance, George W. Bush gave only fleeting attention to the previously divisive issue, promising no more than a ban on unpopular and rare late-term ("partial birth") abortions.
Differences remained significant, but the election campaign was notable for the similarity of the issues stressed by the candidates and for the disappearance of older conflicts. A generation earlier, in 1972, Republicans had accused Democrats of favoring "acid, amnesty, and abortion"; that bitter campaign would be later remembered for Richard Nixon's efforts to destroy his opponents and subvert the Constitution in the Watergate break-in.
The old controversies were gone or had become consensual policies. Drug usage was condemned, and abortion was ignored. Vietnam, the conflict that had defined a generation and its lifestyle, was now a country to be visited by Clinton, once a draft resister and now the U.S. commander-in-chief. Emblematic of the change was that the Democratic party, once the arena for the greatest antiwar protests, nominated Gore, a volunteer who had actually served briefly in the war zone, while the Republicans nominated Bush, who had found a safe billet in the Texas Air National Guard.
There remained a basic philosophic difference between the parties and their leaders. Republicans' instincts still led them first to seek solutions through private actions or through the marketplace, while Democrats consistently looked for government solutions. That difference was evident in such fundamental questions as allocation of the windfall surpluses in the federal budget: Bush sought a huge across-the-board cut in taxes, while Gore proposed a panoply of new government programs and tax cuts targeted for specific policy purposes.
Similar differences could be seen on other issues emphasized during the campaign. To improve education, Bush relied on state programs and testing, while hinting at his support for government vouchers that parents might use for private-school tuition; Gore proposed new federal programs to recruit teachers and rebuild schools. To provide funds for Social Security, Bush proposed that individuals invest part of their tax payments in private investment accounts, while Gore would transfer other governmental funds into the Social Security trust fund. This philosophical difference could be seen even in the most intimate matters, such as teenage pregnancy, where Republicans relied on individual morality, namely, sexual abstinence by adolescents, while Democrats supported sex education programs, which might include distribution of condoms in public schools.
…
Bush had made some efforts to gain more minority votes, giving blacks prominent roles in the party convention and arguing that some of his programs, such as educational testing, would particularly benefit this group. These appeals turned out to be fruitless, however, given the Republican's conservative position on welfare issues and affirmative action. Black groups, such as the N.A.A.C.P., mounted a multimillion-dollar campaign to increase minority turnout, expecting that the mobilized voters would be Democrats. Although the black proportion of the electorate remained essentially unchanged at 10 percent, these efforts probably were decisive in close northern states. It would require more than televised black faces to win black votes for the Republicans.
…
Other ethnic minorities also supported the Democrats. Both parties paid special attention to Latinos, knowing that they would soon be the largest nonwhite group in the population and that they already comprised a significant voting bloc in critical states such as California, Texas, and Florida.
…
Gore's policy agenda was a more "female" agenda, in a political rather than biological sense: the vice president focused on questions likely to be of more concern to women because of their social situation. The social reality in the United States is that women bear a greater responsibility for children's education and for health care of their families and parents, and that women constitute a disproportionate number of the aged. This reality was reflected in political concerns, as women saw education, health care, and Medicare as the principal issues of the election. For these reasons, Gore's greater readiness to use government to solve these problems might appeal particularly to women.
A gender gap has two sides, however, and in 2000 it reflected men's preferences even more than women's. Bush's appeal, too, can be found in particular issues. The social reality is that men are more likely to be the principal source of family income and to assume greater responsibility for family finances. This reality was again mirrored in issue emphases, with men making the state of the economy and taxes their leading priorities, with defense and Social Security of lesser importance.
The gender difference in issue focus was the foundation of gender difference in the vote. Gore was favored among voters who emphasized the "female" issues of health care (an advantage of 31 percent), education (8 percent), and Social Security (18 percent), and Medicare (21 percent). But Bush was favored far more strongly on taxes (a huge advantage of 63 percent) and on world affairs and defense (14 percent), as well as on lesser issues that brought male attention, such as the stereotypically gendered issue of gun ownership.
The presidential race should have been a runaway, according to precampaign estimates. In the end, to be sure, the outcome came down to miscounting or manipulation of the last few ballots. Analytically, however, the puzzling question is why Gore did so badly, not why Bush won.
The economy, usually the largest influence on voters, had evidenced the longest period of prosperity in American history, over a period virtually identical with the Democratic administration. A second predictor, the popularity of the incumbent president, also pointed to a Gore victory, for President Clinton was holding to 60-percent approval of his job performance. In elaborate analyses just as the campaign formally began on Labor Day, academic experts unanimously predicted a Gore victory. Their only disagreements came on the size of his expected victory, with predictions of Gore's majority ranging from 51 to 60 percent of the two-party popular vote.
The academic models failed. It is simpler to explain Clinton's inability to transfer his popularity to his selected successor. Vice presidents always labor under a burden of appearing less capable than the sitting chief executive, and there is a normal inclination on the part of the electorate to seek a change. Previous incumbent vice presidents, such as the original George Bush in 1988 and Richard Nixon in 1960, had borne this burden in their own White House campaigns, but Gore's burden was even heavier, because he needed to avoid contact with the ethical stain of Clinton's affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.
There are at least three possible explanations. First, because prosperity had gone on so long, voters may have come to see it as "natural" and unrelated to the decisions and policies of elected politicians. Second, voters might not know whom to praise and reward for their economic fortunes, since both parties in their platforms claimed credit for the boom. These explanations seem weak, however, because two out of three voters believed Clinton was either "somewhat" or "very" responsible for the nation's rosy conditions.
A third explanation, better supported by the opinion data, finds that Gore did not properly exploit the advantages offered by his administration's economic record. In his campaign appeals, Gore would briefly mention the record of prosperity but then emphasize his plans for the future. The approach was typified by his convention acceptance speech:
[O]ur progress on the economy is a good chapter in our history. But now we turn the page and write a new chapter.... This election is not an award for past performance. I'm not asking you to vote for me on the basis of the economy we have. Tonight, I ask for your support on the basis of the better, fairer, more prosperous America we can build together.
Rhetorically and politically, Gore conceded the issue of prosperity to Bush. …
…
Gender may also have played a role in undermining Gore's inherited advantage on the economy. Although voters who emphasized this vital factor did favor the vice president (59 to 37 percent), he gained far fewer votes (a 15-percent gain) on the issue than Clinton had four years earlier (34 percent), even though the economy had strengthened during the period. Here, too, as on issues generally, Gore emphasized the "female" side of his policy positions, such as targeting tax cuts toward education or home care of the elderly. He offered little for men who would not benefit from affirmative action in the workplace or who would use money returned from taxes for other purposes. As a result, he gained far less from men (57 percent) than from women (68 percent) who gave priority to economic issues.
In theoretical terms, the vice president turned the election away from an advantageous retrospective evaluation of the past eight years to an uncertain prospective choice based on future expectations. Because the future is always clouded, voters often use past performance to evaluate the prospective programs offered by candidates, but Gore did little to focus voters' attention on the Democratic achievements. As the academic literature might have warned him, even in good times "there is still an opponent who may succeed in stimulating even more favorable future expectations. And he may win."
More generally, Gore neglected to put the election into a broader context – of the administration's record, of party, or of the Republican record in Congress. All of these elements might have been used to bolster his chances, but he, along with Bush, instead made the election a contest between two individuals and their personal programs. In editing his own message so severely, Gore made it less persuasive. If the campaign were to be only a choice of future programs, with their great uncertainties, a Bush program might be as convincing to the voters as a Gore program. If the election were to be only a choice of the manager of a consensual agenda, Bush's individual qualities might well be more attractive.
The Democratic candidate had the advantage of leadership of the party that held a thin plurality of voters' loyalties. His party was historically identified with the popular programs that were predominant in voters' minds – Social Security, Medicare, education, and health care – and the Democrats were still regarded in 2000 as more capable to deal with problems in those areas. Yet Gore eschewed a partisan appeal. In the three television debates, illustratively, he mentioned his party only four times, twice citing his disagreement with other Democrats on the Gulf War, and twice incidentally. Only Bush would ever commend the Democratic party, claiming a personal ability to deal effectively with his nominal opposition.
Gore neither challenged this argument, nor attacked the Republicans who had controlled Congress for the past six years, although promising targets were available. The vice president might have blamed Republicans for inaction on his priority programs, such as Social Security and the environment. He might have drawn more attention to differences on issues on which his position was supported by public opinion, such as abortion rights or gun control. He could even have revived the impeachment controversy, blaming Republicans for dragging out a controversy that Americans had found wearying. The public had certainly disapproved of Clinton's personal conduct, but it had also steadily approved of the president's job performance. That distinction could have been the basis for renewed criticism of the Republicans. Yet Gore stayed silent.
Gore's strategy was based on an appeal to the political center and to the undecided voters gathered there. At the party convention and in his acceptance speech, he did try to rouse Democrats by pointing to party differences – and the effort brought him a fleeting lead in opinion polls. From that point on, however, moving in a different direction, he usually attempted to mute those differences, and his lead disappeared. If there were no important differences, then Democratic voters had little reason to support a candidate whose personal traits were less than magnetic. Successful campaigns "temporarily change the basis of political involvement from citizenship to partisanship." By underplaying his party, Gore lost a vital margin of votes, as more Democrats than Republicans defected.
…
When it came to individual character traits, however, Bush was deemed superior on most traits, particularly honesty and strength of leadership. He was also viewed as less likely "to say anything to get elected" and less prone to engage in unfair attacks. … (Pomper 201).
Works cited:
“The Election of 2000.” The Khan Academy. Web. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanitie...
Pomper, Gerald M., “The 2000 Presidential Election: Why Gore Lost.” Political Science Quarterly, Summer 2001, volume 116, issue 2. Web. https://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS125/a...
Bush won the Republican nomination after a heated battle against Arizona Senator John McCain in the primaries. He chose former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney as his running mate.
On election day, Gore won the popular vote by over half a million votes. Bush carried most states in the South, the rural Midwest, and the Rocky Mountain region, while Gore won most states in the Northeast, the upper Midwest, and the Pacific Coast. Gore garnered 255 electoral votes to Bush’s 246, but neither candidate won the 270 electoral votes necessary for victory. Election results in some states, including New Mexico and Oregon, were too close to call, but it was Florida, with its 25 electoral votes, on which the outcome of the election hinged.
The Campaigns
In their presidential campaigns, both candidates focused primarily on domestic issues, such as economic growth, the federal budget surplus, health care, tax relief, and reform of social insurance and welfare programs, particularly Social Security and Medicare (Election 1).
The election of 2000 merged or obliterated many of [the previous divisions between the two parties]. During the Clinton years, Democrats overcame their losing reputation on moralistic issues, as Clinton became identified with such stands as harsh treatment of criminals (including support for the death penalty) and welfare reform. The president maintained his popularity even after revelation of his sexual immorality, as seen in the failure of the Republican effort to impeach and remove him from office.
In 2000 Republicans also moved away from previous unattractive positions. On the economic dimension, no longer opposed to all government programs, the party under Governor Bush proposed new policies to improve education, expand health care, and add funds and programs to Social Security and Medicare. Still conservative, the Bush Republicans now modified their ideology by proclaiming a new "compassionate" outlook and reduced their emphasis on moral issues, particularly abortion. Without overt change in his pro-life stance, George W. Bush gave only fleeting attention to the previously divisive issue, promising no more than a ban on unpopular and rare late-term ("partial birth") abortions.
Differences remained significant, but the election campaign was notable for the similarity of the issues stressed by the candidates and for the disappearance of older conflicts. A generation earlier, in 1972, Republicans had accused Democrats of favoring "acid, amnesty, and abortion"; that bitter campaign would be later remembered for Richard Nixon's efforts to destroy his opponents and subvert the Constitution in the Watergate break-in.
The old controversies were gone or had become consensual policies. Drug usage was condemned, and abortion was ignored. Vietnam, the conflict that had defined a generation and its lifestyle, was now a country to be visited by Clinton, once a draft resister and now the U.S. commander-in-chief. Emblematic of the change was that the Democratic party, once the arena for the greatest antiwar protests, nominated Gore, a volunteer who had actually served briefly in the war zone, while the Republicans nominated Bush, who had found a safe billet in the Texas Air National Guard.
There remained a basic philosophic difference between the parties and their leaders. Republicans' instincts still led them first to seek solutions through private actions or through the marketplace, while Democrats consistently looked for government solutions. That difference was evident in such fundamental questions as allocation of the windfall surpluses in the federal budget: Bush sought a huge across-the-board cut in taxes, while Gore proposed a panoply of new government programs and tax cuts targeted for specific policy purposes.
Similar differences could be seen on other issues emphasized during the campaign. To improve education, Bush relied on state programs and testing, while hinting at his support for government vouchers that parents might use for private-school tuition; Gore proposed new federal programs to recruit teachers and rebuild schools. To provide funds for Social Security, Bush proposed that individuals invest part of their tax payments in private investment accounts, while Gore would transfer other governmental funds into the Social Security trust fund. This philosophical difference could be seen even in the most intimate matters, such as teenage pregnancy, where Republicans relied on individual morality, namely, sexual abstinence by adolescents, while Democrats supported sex education programs, which might include distribution of condoms in public schools.
…
Bush had made some efforts to gain more minority votes, giving blacks prominent roles in the party convention and arguing that some of his programs, such as educational testing, would particularly benefit this group. These appeals turned out to be fruitless, however, given the Republican's conservative position on welfare issues and affirmative action. Black groups, such as the N.A.A.C.P., mounted a multimillion-dollar campaign to increase minority turnout, expecting that the mobilized voters would be Democrats. Although the black proportion of the electorate remained essentially unchanged at 10 percent, these efforts probably were decisive in close northern states. It would require more than televised black faces to win black votes for the Republicans.
…
Other ethnic minorities also supported the Democrats. Both parties paid special attention to Latinos, knowing that they would soon be the largest nonwhite group in the population and that they already comprised a significant voting bloc in critical states such as California, Texas, and Florida.
…
Gore's policy agenda was a more "female" agenda, in a political rather than biological sense: the vice president focused on questions likely to be of more concern to women because of their social situation. The social reality in the United States is that women bear a greater responsibility for children's education and for health care of their families and parents, and that women constitute a disproportionate number of the aged. This reality was reflected in political concerns, as women saw education, health care, and Medicare as the principal issues of the election. For these reasons, Gore's greater readiness to use government to solve these problems might appeal particularly to women.
A gender gap has two sides, however, and in 2000 it reflected men's preferences even more than women's. Bush's appeal, too, can be found in particular issues. The social reality is that men are more likely to be the principal source of family income and to assume greater responsibility for family finances. This reality was again mirrored in issue emphases, with men making the state of the economy and taxes their leading priorities, with defense and Social Security of lesser importance.
The gender difference in issue focus was the foundation of gender difference in the vote. Gore was favored among voters who emphasized the "female" issues of health care (an advantage of 31 percent), education (8 percent), and Social Security (18 percent), and Medicare (21 percent). But Bush was favored far more strongly on taxes (a huge advantage of 63 percent) and on world affairs and defense (14 percent), as well as on lesser issues that brought male attention, such as the stereotypically gendered issue of gun ownership.
The presidential race should have been a runaway, according to precampaign estimates. In the end, to be sure, the outcome came down to miscounting or manipulation of the last few ballots. Analytically, however, the puzzling question is why Gore did so badly, not why Bush won.
The economy, usually the largest influence on voters, had evidenced the longest period of prosperity in American history, over a period virtually identical with the Democratic administration. A second predictor, the popularity of the incumbent president, also pointed to a Gore victory, for President Clinton was holding to 60-percent approval of his job performance. In elaborate analyses just as the campaign formally began on Labor Day, academic experts unanimously predicted a Gore victory. Their only disagreements came on the size of his expected victory, with predictions of Gore's majority ranging from 51 to 60 percent of the two-party popular vote.
The academic models failed. It is simpler to explain Clinton's inability to transfer his popularity to his selected successor. Vice presidents always labor under a burden of appearing less capable than the sitting chief executive, and there is a normal inclination on the part of the electorate to seek a change. Previous incumbent vice presidents, such as the original George Bush in 1988 and Richard Nixon in 1960, had borne this burden in their own White House campaigns, but Gore's burden was even heavier, because he needed to avoid contact with the ethical stain of Clinton's affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.
There are at least three possible explanations. First, because prosperity had gone on so long, voters may have come to see it as "natural" and unrelated to the decisions and policies of elected politicians. Second, voters might not know whom to praise and reward for their economic fortunes, since both parties in their platforms claimed credit for the boom. These explanations seem weak, however, because two out of three voters believed Clinton was either "somewhat" or "very" responsible for the nation's rosy conditions.
A third explanation, better supported by the opinion data, finds that Gore did not properly exploit the advantages offered by his administration's economic record. In his campaign appeals, Gore would briefly mention the record of prosperity but then emphasize his plans for the future. The approach was typified by his convention acceptance speech:
[O]ur progress on the economy is a good chapter in our history. But now we turn the page and write a new chapter.... This election is not an award for past performance. I'm not asking you to vote for me on the basis of the economy we have. Tonight, I ask for your support on the basis of the better, fairer, more prosperous America we can build together.
Rhetorically and politically, Gore conceded the issue of prosperity to Bush. …
…
Gender may also have played a role in undermining Gore's inherited advantage on the economy. Although voters who emphasized this vital factor did favor the vice president (59 to 37 percent), he gained far fewer votes (a 15-percent gain) on the issue than Clinton had four years earlier (34 percent), even though the economy had strengthened during the period. Here, too, as on issues generally, Gore emphasized the "female" side of his policy positions, such as targeting tax cuts toward education or home care of the elderly. He offered little for men who would not benefit from affirmative action in the workplace or who would use money returned from taxes for other purposes. As a result, he gained far less from men (57 percent) than from women (68 percent) who gave priority to economic issues.
In theoretical terms, the vice president turned the election away from an advantageous retrospective evaluation of the past eight years to an uncertain prospective choice based on future expectations. Because the future is always clouded, voters often use past performance to evaluate the prospective programs offered by candidates, but Gore did little to focus voters' attention on the Democratic achievements. As the academic literature might have warned him, even in good times "there is still an opponent who may succeed in stimulating even more favorable future expectations. And he may win."
More generally, Gore neglected to put the election into a broader context – of the administration's record, of party, or of the Republican record in Congress. All of these elements might have been used to bolster his chances, but he, along with Bush, instead made the election a contest between two individuals and their personal programs. In editing his own message so severely, Gore made it less persuasive. If the campaign were to be only a choice of future programs, with their great uncertainties, a Bush program might be as convincing to the voters as a Gore program. If the election were to be only a choice of the manager of a consensual agenda, Bush's individual qualities might well be more attractive.
The Democratic candidate had the advantage of leadership of the party that held a thin plurality of voters' loyalties. His party was historically identified with the popular programs that were predominant in voters' minds – Social Security, Medicare, education, and health care – and the Democrats were still regarded in 2000 as more capable to deal with problems in those areas. Yet Gore eschewed a partisan appeal. In the three television debates, illustratively, he mentioned his party only four times, twice citing his disagreement with other Democrats on the Gulf War, and twice incidentally. Only Bush would ever commend the Democratic party, claiming a personal ability to deal effectively with his nominal opposition.
Gore neither challenged this argument, nor attacked the Republicans who had controlled Congress for the past six years, although promising targets were available. The vice president might have blamed Republicans for inaction on his priority programs, such as Social Security and the environment. He might have drawn more attention to differences on issues on which his position was supported by public opinion, such as abortion rights or gun control. He could even have revived the impeachment controversy, blaming Republicans for dragging out a controversy that Americans had found wearying. The public had certainly disapproved of Clinton's personal conduct, but it had also steadily approved of the president's job performance. That distinction could have been the basis for renewed criticism of the Republicans. Yet Gore stayed silent.
Gore's strategy was based on an appeal to the political center and to the undecided voters gathered there. At the party convention and in his acceptance speech, he did try to rouse Democrats by pointing to party differences – and the effort brought him a fleeting lead in opinion polls. From that point on, however, moving in a different direction, he usually attempted to mute those differences, and his lead disappeared. If there were no important differences, then Democratic voters had little reason to support a candidate whose personal traits were less than magnetic. Successful campaigns "temporarily change the basis of political involvement from citizenship to partisanship." By underplaying his party, Gore lost a vital margin of votes, as more Democrats than Republicans defected.
…
When it came to individual character traits, however, Bush was deemed superior on most traits, particularly honesty and strength of leadership. He was also viewed as less likely "to say anything to get elected" and less prone to engage in unfair attacks. … (Pomper 201).
Works cited:
“The Election of 2000.” The Khan Academy. Web. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanitie...
Pomper, Gerald M., “The 2000 Presidential Election: Why Gore Lost.” Political Science Quarterly, Summer 2001, volume 116, issue 2. Web. https://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS125/a...
August 2, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- GOP's Ugly Evolution -- Part Two
The airwaves used by radio stations to broadcast their programs belong to the public. Since 1934, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has regulated radio and television. For a number of years, the FCC imposed a "fairness doctrine" on broadcasters. Under this rule, stations had to provide programs on public issues and also opportunities for people with different views to be heard. The idea was to promote free speech by encouraging diversity.
In 1987, however, the FCC abolished the fairness doctrine, as part of the Reagan administration's drive to deregulate industries. The FCC stated that the doctrine was no longer necessary because technology had created many more stations, which provided diversity of opinions. The fairness doctrine, concluded the FCC, actually inhibited public discussion by intimidating broadcasters.
Since then, the FCC has further eased its regulation of the broadcasting industry except in the area of obscenity. Talk radio uses tape delay to screen for this. During this period, talk radio has become a national phenomenon (Talk 2).
The Republican Party has been fomenting anger and discontent in the base of its own party for years. The mechanism through which this hate has been disseminated has been the network of extremist media of right-wing talk radio and the Fox News Channel, which is essentially talk radio transposed onto television.
Just think of all the right-wing “superstars” who spew messages of anger and hate every single day throughout the land over this enormous megaphone. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Ben Shapiro, Dana Loesch, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, to name a few.
And make no mistake, spewing hate has a significant impact upon society. It is the equivalent of modern-day propaganda where the population is barraged with a stream of consistent messaging. As ordinary people go about their daily lives, they are exposed repeatedly, day in and day out, to the same messages in numerous forms and by numerous people. Pretty soon, these messages begin to sink in and take effect. The audience begins to adopt a worldview consistent with these messages, regardless of the degree of truth. It is a remarkable phenomenon.
Propaganda is powerful stuff. Many people are susceptible to it and can be swayed by it, especially the less educated.
In America today, right-wing media is engaged in this very same activity through Fox News and extremist talk radio. This network is constantly barraging its audience with a stream of consistent messaging. And this messaging is overwhelmingly negative and destructive.
The messaging consists of common themes that recur in various forms. One central theme is a fierce opposition to government, especially so-called “big government.” This reappears in various sub-forms as well, such as rage against bureaucracy, regulations, Washington, D.C., the IRS, the Environmental Protection Agency, and federal politicians.
Another big theme is fear and victimization. You had better watch out because government is gonna getcha! “They,” whoever that may be, are about to take away your rights. Your freedom is about to disappear. Your religious liberties will be stripped away. You won’t be able to make your own healthcare decisions. Free choice will be gone. Your children will suffer. Even though you are just an innocent person minding your own business, you are about to be victimized!
Another common theme is the fear of foreigners, or outsiders. We must protect our own in-group from the vague and mysterious threats posed by those who are a little bit different from us. The particular targeted group changes with the times, but the concept remains the same.
And, of course, someone from the Democratic Party, or some “liberal,” is to blame for all of this wreckage. Demonizing a specific target is powerful. If a Democrat is in the White House, then the president becomes the favorite bullseye. Otherwise the demon is some other Democratic politician, typically from Congress.
… politicians in the Republican Party could not resist. The extremist right-wing network of Fox News and talk radio had built up an audience that could easily be exploited for political support. Even though the extremist media network was fomenting anger and hatred that is disastrous for society overall, the network could also be used to deliver political votes to Republican politicians.
An unholy alliance was formed. The Republican Party would allow the extremist right-wing network to promulgate its destructive propaganda throughout society in order to generate its enormous profits, and in exchange, the network would direct its audience to vote for the Republican Party.
So for years and years, the extremist right-wing media network spewed out content full of anger, hate, and division. And Republican politicians jumped on the bandwagon. They began preaching the same destructive messages and appearing on the extremist right-wing network all across the nation.
And guess what? It worked.
The base of the Republican Party grew more and more angry. Their resentment against our very own government grew ever greater. Their sense of victimization became ever more acute. Their fury at the establishment boiled over (Cain 1-3).
Rush Limbaugh is being held accountable for a business model that relies on using sexist attacks, preying on racial anxieties, peddling hate, and promoting downright lies to generate controversy and ratings. For years, Limbaugh had a perverse incentive to bully, lie, and smear because he knew he'd be rewarded. The more outrageous his show was, the higher his ratings and revenues would climb.
Every day, he takes to the airwaves to peddle remarkable new slurs, smears, and conspiracy theories (Join 1).
Having spent half of my professional career as a radio host, I [Bill Press] consider talk radio the most influential of all media platforms with the power to entertain, to inform and to inspire. Unfortunately, Limbaugh has used his bully pulpit to do nothing but bully.
Believe me, I know. For years I followed Limbaugh on KFI-AM in Los Angeles. He spewed so much bile, his personal attacks were so ugly, I felt like the guy walking behind the elephants in the circus parade, sweeping up the stink they left behind (Press 1).
With a handful of other big national names, and hundreds more on local AM talk stations across the US, they spew forth a daily diet of real and manufactured anger at those accused of wrecking America. The primary targets are Democrats and anyone liberal on immigration, race or abortion, or taking seriously global warming.
"They claim that they're just entertainers and yet they deliver this toxic mix of pseudo journalism, misinformation, hate-filled speech, jokes," said Rory O'Connor, author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio. "It's all bound together so when it's convenient for them to be entertainers they say, hey, it's all just a joke. But when it's not, they say they're giving you information that you need."
O'Connor says conservative talk radio taps in to a disaffected but vocal minority. "This movement was born 20 years ago out of a sense of victimization and voicelessness by a reasonably large segment of the population, and clearly Limbaugh and the people who followed him tapped in to some real sentiments of people who felt they weren't being heard," he said. "There is a minority of the American populace which is angry about these issues. [Michael] Savage has 8 million listeners but we are a country of 300 million people. It's a large niche audience but there is no way a majority of the people agree with him. But does it make a difference? Yes. They succeeded so widely that the conservatives they backed ended up controlling the [Bush] presidency, both houses of Congress and the supreme court" (McGriel 2).
When Fox News was founded in 1996, the ostensible goal was to create a conservative-leaning cable news network that would counteract the perceived left-wing bias in existing televised news sources. The creator of Fox News was Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media mogul and billionaire, who, like most rich people, wanted to keep his money instead of giving it to the government. Fox News, in part, was borne out of a mogul’s desire to help advance policies that would work to that effect.
The man in charge of Fox News from 1996 until his harassment-related departure two decades later was Roger Ailes, a television executive and former Republican campaign operative. Ailes came by his conservative leanings honestly, but he was also a propagandist par excellence. As a young man, he had worked on Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, producing TV spots designed to make the fulminating, beetle-browed Nixon seem not just palatable but benevolent. Over the course of his tenure at Fox News, Ailes worked to perform the same magic trick on countless conservative policies and personalities that primarily served the interests of a very wealthy few (Peters 3).
The purpose of Fox News, aside from the billions it brings in for Murdoch, is to push a right-wing agenda. To take just one example, nearly every Murdoch property—but especially Fox News—amplified and exaggerated the dishonest case that George W. Bush’s administration made for its allegedly preemptive war against Iraq in 2003. Back then, The New York Times reported that “Mr. Murdoch’s creation of the Fox News Channel has shifted the entire spectrum of American cable news to the right.” Two years later, political scientist Jonathan S. Morris analyzed the data from the Pew Research Center’s Biennial Media Consumption surveys in order to “identify demographic and behavioral factors that predict Americans’ exposure to cable and broadcast nightly news.” Alarmingly, he found that Fox News viewers were “more likely than non-watchers to underestimate rather than overestimate the number of American casualties in Iraq.”
…
Fox News’ dishonesty has been crucial in shaping our politics. Examining the voting data for 9,256 towns in the 2000 elections, Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan found that Republicans did better in places where the network was carried by cable providers. They discovered “a significant effect of Fox News on Senate vote share and on voter turnout. [The] estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its viewers to vote Republican.” And that was just the beginning: A more recent study by Gregory Martin and Ali Yurukoglu showed that Fox News increased Republican support by 3.59 points in 2004 and 6.34 points in 2008 (Alterman 2-3).
Dean Lacy, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, traces America’s political rearrangement as far back as the emergence of “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s — working-class whites who switched to the Republican Party largely because of social issues like affirmative action and abortion. But he also notes that to the Democrats’ old working-class base, the Clinton administration’s embrace of international trade eventually felt like a sellout.
At the same time, the Democratic Party increasingly presented itself as the vanguard of a “knowledge economy” premised on the advent of a postindustrial age. That new order held rewards for the well educated, but little future for the manufacturing jobs that had long been a path to economic security.
“It is not one cause but a series of events that have moved the Democratic Party to win white college-educated voters that might have voted for the Republican Party 30 years ago,” Professor Lacy said.
White blue-collar voters were left without an economic champion. “They don’t know who is on their side on economic issues, so they look for who is on their side on guns and other cultural issues,” he added.
As blue-collar union jobs disappeared, the institutional glue that unions provided, tying the party to the working class, lost its hold (Porter 1-3).
… one of the most consistent political science findings is that few Americans are actually ideologues. A narrow slice of high-information elites (maybe 15 to 20 percent of the population overall ...) has a consistent set of political principles that come ahead of partisan identity. But most people don’t pay as close attention to politics. For most people, partisanship is the cue to help them figure out where they stand on the issues.
It would be exhausting to evaluate all policy proposals independently by reading extensively on all sides of the argument and then formulating your own unique set of issue positions and choosing candidates based on which ones agree with you more. Most sensible people have better things to do with their time. And this is precisely why political parties exist in the first place — so that people who have real jobs and families and other interests don’t have to master the intricacies of health care policy in order to figure out whether a single-payer system (for example) is going to work well for them or not.
At heart, when we vote, we ask the question: “Who represents people like me?” We support candidates who we think share our values. And here, party is a very strong cue.
We vote Republican or Democrat because at some point in our lives, we decided that either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party was our party, and it became part of our self-identity. Or maybe we didn’t even decide. Most partisan identities are inherited.
…
The stickiness of these identities gives partisan elites an incredible amount of power to shape and define what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat. Most Republicans and most Democrats will support the positions their party leaders advise. Give voters something to chant and they’ll chant it. This gives partisan leaders incredible power — power they can easily abuse when not checked by other mediating forces (Drutman 1-4).
A recent study out of Belgium scientifically supports the notion that people who scored lower on emotional ability tests tend to have right-wing and racist views.
Emotional intelligence is the capability of individuals to recognize their own emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, and manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve one's goal.
The results of the study found that those who scored lower on the emotional ability tests also scored higher on measures of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation.
People who have a right-wing authoritarian disposition are especially willing to subject themselves to authority figures (political leaders, police, religious leaders) and have hostility towards those who are outside of their in-groups.
This type of person is attracted to authoritarian leaders like Donald Trump.
Psychologist Erich Fromm, author of the seminal book on authoritarianism, "Escape From Freedom," explains the orientation:
The passive-authoritarian, or in other words, the masochistic and submissive character aims — at least subconsciously — to become a part of a larger unit, a pendant, a particle, at least a small one, of this "great" person, this "great" institution, or this "great" idea. The person, institution, or idea may actually be significant, powerful, or just incredibly inflated by the individual believing in them. What is necessary, is that — in a subjective manner — the individual is convinced that "his" leader, party, state, or idea is all-powerful and supreme, that he himself is strong and great, that he is a part of something "greater." The paradox of this passive form of the authoritarian character is: the individual belittles himself so that he can — as part of something greater — become great himself. The individual wants to receive commands, so that he does not have the necessity to make decisions and carry responsibility.
According to the study, those who scored lower on emotional intelligence also scored high in social dominance orientation [SDO]. People with these qualities prefer inequality and are uncomfortable with egalitarianism.
…
"The results of this study were univocal. People who endorse authority and strong leaders and who do not mind inequality — the two basic dimensions underlying right-wing political ideology — show lower levels of emotional abilities," study author Alain Van Hiel, a professor at the University of Ghent told PsyPost (Perry 1-3).
There was a recent article in the Guardian titled, “What does it mean to be a liberal?” in which liberalism is described as adaptability to a changing environment. If you look at liberalism as adaptability, and conservativism as stability, the party reactions to various events such as gay marriage (liberals want acceptance and change to new ways of thinking, conservatives want stability of previously held values), war (liberals are willing to adapt to shifting world views, while conservatives see war as a means of “preserving the stability of the homeland”), or even the current financial crisis—all make perfect sense.
Liberals … would be likely to engage in more flexible thinking, working through alternate possibilities before committing to a choice. Even after committing, if alternate contradicting data comes along, they would be more likely to consider it.
Conservatives … would tend to process information initially using emotion ...,
…
Conservatives respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do liberals and are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions. This heightened sensitivity to emotional faces suggests that individuals with conservative orientation might exhibit differences in brain structures associated with emotional processing such as the amygdala.
So, when faced with an ambiguous situation, conservatives would tend to process the information initially with a strong emotional response. This would make them less likely to lean towards change, and more likely to prefer stability. Stability means more predictability, which means more expected outcomes, and less of a trigger for anxiety.
In order for a person to embrace a cause or idea, it needs to be meaningful for them. Each type of person has a different way that they assign meaning and relevance to ideas. Let’s take liberals and conservatives, since we are theorizing that they are two distinct thinking styles: liberals would be more flexible and reliant on data, proof, and analytic reasoning, and conservatives are more inflexible (prefer stability), emotion-driven, and connect themselves intimately with their ideas, making those beliefs a crucial part of their identity (we see this in more high-empathy-expressing individuals). This fits in with the whole “family values” platform of the conservative party, and also why we see more religious folks that identify as conservatives, and more skeptics, agnostics, and atheists that are liberal. Religious people are more unshakable in their belief of a higher power, and non-religious people are more open to alternate explanations, i.e., don’t rely on faith alone.
So—for liberals to make a case for an idea or cause, they come armed with data, research studies, and experts. They are convinced of an idea if all the data checks out–basically they assign meaning and value to ideas that fit within the scientific method, because that’s their primary thinking style. Emotion doesn’t play as big of a role in validation. Not to say that liberals are unfeeling, but just more likely to set emotion aside when judging an idea initially, and factor it in later. Checks out scientifically = valuable. Liberals can get just as emotionally attached to an idea, but it’s usually not the primary trigger for acceptance of an idea.
…
When we speak of “liberal and conservative thinking styles” the most important thing to keep in mind: we are talking about group differences, not individual differences. The people that fit into this two-category model described here are generally the most active and hard core members of the parties. This doesn’t account for moderates, nor does it take into account extreme fanatics of both wings, where we start to see mental instability confounding the group traits. Both sides have a little extremity and their fair share of imbalanced individuals in the fringes, so don’t assume any one party is immune (Mooney 1-4).
Works cited:
Alterman, Eric, “Fox News Has Always Been Propaganda.” The Nation, March 14, 2019. Web.
https://www.thenation.com/article/arc...
Cain, Cody, “Spreading Hate Has Backfired on Right-Wing Media: How Fox News Unwittingly Destroyed the Republican Party.” Salon, April 9, 2016. Web. https://www.salon.com/2016/04/08/spre...
Drutman, Lee, “Yes, the Republican Party Has Become Pathological. But Why?
We’re Not Going to Fix American Democracy until We Can Explain Why the GOP Went Crazy.” Vox,
September 22, 2017. Web. https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2017/9/...
“Join the Fight to Stop Rush,” Media Matters. Web. https://www.mediamatters.org/join-fig...
McGriel, Chris, “Shock Jocks: Voice of America or Voice of Hate?” US News, May 8, 2009. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...
Mooney, Chris, “Your Brain on Politics: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Liberals and Conservatives.” Discover, September 7, 2011. Web. https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind...
Perry, Ted, “People with Low Emotional Intelligence Are More Likely To Vote Republican.” Good, September 12, 2019. Web. https://www.good.is/a-new-study-shows...
Peters, Justin, “Fox News Set the Stage for America’s Poor Coronavirus Response.” Slate, April 9, 2020. Web. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2...
Porter, Eduardo, “How the G.O.P. Became the Party of the Left Behind.” New York Times, January 27, 2020. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...
Press, Bill, “Press: Rush Limbaugh Is the Worst of America.” The Hill, February 11, 2020. Web. https://thehill.com/opinion/bill-pres...
“Talk Radio: Playground for Free Speech or a Forum for Hate?” Constitutional Rights Foundation. Web. https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-right...
In 1987, however, the FCC abolished the fairness doctrine, as part of the Reagan administration's drive to deregulate industries. The FCC stated that the doctrine was no longer necessary because technology had created many more stations, which provided diversity of opinions. The fairness doctrine, concluded the FCC, actually inhibited public discussion by intimidating broadcasters.
Since then, the FCC has further eased its regulation of the broadcasting industry except in the area of obscenity. Talk radio uses tape delay to screen for this. During this period, talk radio has become a national phenomenon (Talk 2).
The Republican Party has been fomenting anger and discontent in the base of its own party for years. The mechanism through which this hate has been disseminated has been the network of extremist media of right-wing talk radio and the Fox News Channel, which is essentially talk radio transposed onto television.
Just think of all the right-wing “superstars” who spew messages of anger and hate every single day throughout the land over this enormous megaphone. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Ben Shapiro, Dana Loesch, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, to name a few.
And make no mistake, spewing hate has a significant impact upon society. It is the equivalent of modern-day propaganda where the population is barraged with a stream of consistent messaging. As ordinary people go about their daily lives, they are exposed repeatedly, day in and day out, to the same messages in numerous forms and by numerous people. Pretty soon, these messages begin to sink in and take effect. The audience begins to adopt a worldview consistent with these messages, regardless of the degree of truth. It is a remarkable phenomenon.
Propaganda is powerful stuff. Many people are susceptible to it and can be swayed by it, especially the less educated.
In America today, right-wing media is engaged in this very same activity through Fox News and extremist talk radio. This network is constantly barraging its audience with a stream of consistent messaging. And this messaging is overwhelmingly negative and destructive.
The messaging consists of common themes that recur in various forms. One central theme is a fierce opposition to government, especially so-called “big government.” This reappears in various sub-forms as well, such as rage against bureaucracy, regulations, Washington, D.C., the IRS, the Environmental Protection Agency, and federal politicians.
Another big theme is fear and victimization. You had better watch out because government is gonna getcha! “They,” whoever that may be, are about to take away your rights. Your freedom is about to disappear. Your religious liberties will be stripped away. You won’t be able to make your own healthcare decisions. Free choice will be gone. Your children will suffer. Even though you are just an innocent person minding your own business, you are about to be victimized!
Another common theme is the fear of foreigners, or outsiders. We must protect our own in-group from the vague and mysterious threats posed by those who are a little bit different from us. The particular targeted group changes with the times, but the concept remains the same.
And, of course, someone from the Democratic Party, or some “liberal,” is to blame for all of this wreckage. Demonizing a specific target is powerful. If a Democrat is in the White House, then the president becomes the favorite bullseye. Otherwise the demon is some other Democratic politician, typically from Congress.
… politicians in the Republican Party could not resist. The extremist right-wing network of Fox News and talk radio had built up an audience that could easily be exploited for political support. Even though the extremist media network was fomenting anger and hatred that is disastrous for society overall, the network could also be used to deliver political votes to Republican politicians.
An unholy alliance was formed. The Republican Party would allow the extremist right-wing network to promulgate its destructive propaganda throughout society in order to generate its enormous profits, and in exchange, the network would direct its audience to vote for the Republican Party.
So for years and years, the extremist right-wing media network spewed out content full of anger, hate, and division. And Republican politicians jumped on the bandwagon. They began preaching the same destructive messages and appearing on the extremist right-wing network all across the nation.
And guess what? It worked.
The base of the Republican Party grew more and more angry. Their resentment against our very own government grew ever greater. Their sense of victimization became ever more acute. Their fury at the establishment boiled over (Cain 1-3).
Rush Limbaugh is being held accountable for a business model that relies on using sexist attacks, preying on racial anxieties, peddling hate, and promoting downright lies to generate controversy and ratings. For years, Limbaugh had a perverse incentive to bully, lie, and smear because he knew he'd be rewarded. The more outrageous his show was, the higher his ratings and revenues would climb.
Every day, he takes to the airwaves to peddle remarkable new slurs, smears, and conspiracy theories (Join 1).
Having spent half of my professional career as a radio host, I [Bill Press] consider talk radio the most influential of all media platforms with the power to entertain, to inform and to inspire. Unfortunately, Limbaugh has used his bully pulpit to do nothing but bully.
Believe me, I know. For years I followed Limbaugh on KFI-AM in Los Angeles. He spewed so much bile, his personal attacks were so ugly, I felt like the guy walking behind the elephants in the circus parade, sweeping up the stink they left behind (Press 1).
With a handful of other big national names, and hundreds more on local AM talk stations across the US, they spew forth a daily diet of real and manufactured anger at those accused of wrecking America. The primary targets are Democrats and anyone liberal on immigration, race or abortion, or taking seriously global warming.
"They claim that they're just entertainers and yet they deliver this toxic mix of pseudo journalism, misinformation, hate-filled speech, jokes," said Rory O'Connor, author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio. "It's all bound together so when it's convenient for them to be entertainers they say, hey, it's all just a joke. But when it's not, they say they're giving you information that you need."
O'Connor says conservative talk radio taps in to a disaffected but vocal minority. "This movement was born 20 years ago out of a sense of victimization and voicelessness by a reasonably large segment of the population, and clearly Limbaugh and the people who followed him tapped in to some real sentiments of people who felt they weren't being heard," he said. "There is a minority of the American populace which is angry about these issues. [Michael] Savage has 8 million listeners but we are a country of 300 million people. It's a large niche audience but there is no way a majority of the people agree with him. But does it make a difference? Yes. They succeeded so widely that the conservatives they backed ended up controlling the [Bush] presidency, both houses of Congress and the supreme court" (McGriel 2).
When Fox News was founded in 1996, the ostensible goal was to create a conservative-leaning cable news network that would counteract the perceived left-wing bias in existing televised news sources. The creator of Fox News was Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media mogul and billionaire, who, like most rich people, wanted to keep his money instead of giving it to the government. Fox News, in part, was borne out of a mogul’s desire to help advance policies that would work to that effect.
The man in charge of Fox News from 1996 until his harassment-related departure two decades later was Roger Ailes, a television executive and former Republican campaign operative. Ailes came by his conservative leanings honestly, but he was also a propagandist par excellence. As a young man, he had worked on Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, producing TV spots designed to make the fulminating, beetle-browed Nixon seem not just palatable but benevolent. Over the course of his tenure at Fox News, Ailes worked to perform the same magic trick on countless conservative policies and personalities that primarily served the interests of a very wealthy few (Peters 3).
The purpose of Fox News, aside from the billions it brings in for Murdoch, is to push a right-wing agenda. To take just one example, nearly every Murdoch property—but especially Fox News—amplified and exaggerated the dishonest case that George W. Bush’s administration made for its allegedly preemptive war against Iraq in 2003. Back then, The New York Times reported that “Mr. Murdoch’s creation of the Fox News Channel has shifted the entire spectrum of American cable news to the right.” Two years later, political scientist Jonathan S. Morris analyzed the data from the Pew Research Center’s Biennial Media Consumption surveys in order to “identify demographic and behavioral factors that predict Americans’ exposure to cable and broadcast nightly news.” Alarmingly, he found that Fox News viewers were “more likely than non-watchers to underestimate rather than overestimate the number of American casualties in Iraq.”
…
Fox News’ dishonesty has been crucial in shaping our politics. Examining the voting data for 9,256 towns in the 2000 elections, Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan found that Republicans did better in places where the network was carried by cable providers. They discovered “a significant effect of Fox News on Senate vote share and on voter turnout. [The] estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its viewers to vote Republican.” And that was just the beginning: A more recent study by Gregory Martin and Ali Yurukoglu showed that Fox News increased Republican support by 3.59 points in 2004 and 6.34 points in 2008 (Alterman 2-3).
Dean Lacy, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, traces America’s political rearrangement as far back as the emergence of “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s — working-class whites who switched to the Republican Party largely because of social issues like affirmative action and abortion. But he also notes that to the Democrats’ old working-class base, the Clinton administration’s embrace of international trade eventually felt like a sellout.
At the same time, the Democratic Party increasingly presented itself as the vanguard of a “knowledge economy” premised on the advent of a postindustrial age. That new order held rewards for the well educated, but little future for the manufacturing jobs that had long been a path to economic security.
“It is not one cause but a series of events that have moved the Democratic Party to win white college-educated voters that might have voted for the Republican Party 30 years ago,” Professor Lacy said.
White blue-collar voters were left without an economic champion. “They don’t know who is on their side on economic issues, so they look for who is on their side on guns and other cultural issues,” he added.
As blue-collar union jobs disappeared, the institutional glue that unions provided, tying the party to the working class, lost its hold (Porter 1-3).
… one of the most consistent political science findings is that few Americans are actually ideologues. A narrow slice of high-information elites (maybe 15 to 20 percent of the population overall ...) has a consistent set of political principles that come ahead of partisan identity. But most people don’t pay as close attention to politics. For most people, partisanship is the cue to help them figure out where they stand on the issues.
It would be exhausting to evaluate all policy proposals independently by reading extensively on all sides of the argument and then formulating your own unique set of issue positions and choosing candidates based on which ones agree with you more. Most sensible people have better things to do with their time. And this is precisely why political parties exist in the first place — so that people who have real jobs and families and other interests don’t have to master the intricacies of health care policy in order to figure out whether a single-payer system (for example) is going to work well for them or not.
At heart, when we vote, we ask the question: “Who represents people like me?” We support candidates who we think share our values. And here, party is a very strong cue.
We vote Republican or Democrat because at some point in our lives, we decided that either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party was our party, and it became part of our self-identity. Or maybe we didn’t even decide. Most partisan identities are inherited.
…
The stickiness of these identities gives partisan elites an incredible amount of power to shape and define what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat. Most Republicans and most Democrats will support the positions their party leaders advise. Give voters something to chant and they’ll chant it. This gives partisan leaders incredible power — power they can easily abuse when not checked by other mediating forces (Drutman 1-4).
A recent study out of Belgium scientifically supports the notion that people who scored lower on emotional ability tests tend to have right-wing and racist views.
Emotional intelligence is the capability of individuals to recognize their own emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, and manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve one's goal.
The results of the study found that those who scored lower on the emotional ability tests also scored higher on measures of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation.
People who have a right-wing authoritarian disposition are especially willing to subject themselves to authority figures (political leaders, police, religious leaders) and have hostility towards those who are outside of their in-groups.
This type of person is attracted to authoritarian leaders like Donald Trump.
Psychologist Erich Fromm, author of the seminal book on authoritarianism, "Escape From Freedom," explains the orientation:
The passive-authoritarian, or in other words, the masochistic and submissive character aims — at least subconsciously — to become a part of a larger unit, a pendant, a particle, at least a small one, of this "great" person, this "great" institution, or this "great" idea. The person, institution, or idea may actually be significant, powerful, or just incredibly inflated by the individual believing in them. What is necessary, is that — in a subjective manner — the individual is convinced that "his" leader, party, state, or idea is all-powerful and supreme, that he himself is strong and great, that he is a part of something "greater." The paradox of this passive form of the authoritarian character is: the individual belittles himself so that he can — as part of something greater — become great himself. The individual wants to receive commands, so that he does not have the necessity to make decisions and carry responsibility.
According to the study, those who scored lower on emotional intelligence also scored high in social dominance orientation [SDO]. People with these qualities prefer inequality and are uncomfortable with egalitarianism.
…
"The results of this study were univocal. People who endorse authority and strong leaders and who do not mind inequality — the two basic dimensions underlying right-wing political ideology — show lower levels of emotional abilities," study author Alain Van Hiel, a professor at the University of Ghent told PsyPost (Perry 1-3).
There was a recent article in the Guardian titled, “What does it mean to be a liberal?” in which liberalism is described as adaptability to a changing environment. If you look at liberalism as adaptability, and conservativism as stability, the party reactions to various events such as gay marriage (liberals want acceptance and change to new ways of thinking, conservatives want stability of previously held values), war (liberals are willing to adapt to shifting world views, while conservatives see war as a means of “preserving the stability of the homeland”), or even the current financial crisis—all make perfect sense.
Liberals … would be likely to engage in more flexible thinking, working through alternate possibilities before committing to a choice. Even after committing, if alternate contradicting data comes along, they would be more likely to consider it.
Conservatives … would tend to process information initially using emotion ...,
…
Conservatives respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do liberals and are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions. This heightened sensitivity to emotional faces suggests that individuals with conservative orientation might exhibit differences in brain structures associated with emotional processing such as the amygdala.
So, when faced with an ambiguous situation, conservatives would tend to process the information initially with a strong emotional response. This would make them less likely to lean towards change, and more likely to prefer stability. Stability means more predictability, which means more expected outcomes, and less of a trigger for anxiety.
In order for a person to embrace a cause or idea, it needs to be meaningful for them. Each type of person has a different way that they assign meaning and relevance to ideas. Let’s take liberals and conservatives, since we are theorizing that they are two distinct thinking styles: liberals would be more flexible and reliant on data, proof, and analytic reasoning, and conservatives are more inflexible (prefer stability), emotion-driven, and connect themselves intimately with their ideas, making those beliefs a crucial part of their identity (we see this in more high-empathy-expressing individuals). This fits in with the whole “family values” platform of the conservative party, and also why we see more religious folks that identify as conservatives, and more skeptics, agnostics, and atheists that are liberal. Religious people are more unshakable in their belief of a higher power, and non-religious people are more open to alternate explanations, i.e., don’t rely on faith alone.
So—for liberals to make a case for an idea or cause, they come armed with data, research studies, and experts. They are convinced of an idea if all the data checks out–basically they assign meaning and value to ideas that fit within the scientific method, because that’s their primary thinking style. Emotion doesn’t play as big of a role in validation. Not to say that liberals are unfeeling, but just more likely to set emotion aside when judging an idea initially, and factor it in later. Checks out scientifically = valuable. Liberals can get just as emotionally attached to an idea, but it’s usually not the primary trigger for acceptance of an idea.
…
When we speak of “liberal and conservative thinking styles” the most important thing to keep in mind: we are talking about group differences, not individual differences. The people that fit into this two-category model described here are generally the most active and hard core members of the parties. This doesn’t account for moderates, nor does it take into account extreme fanatics of both wings, where we start to see mental instability confounding the group traits. Both sides have a little extremity and their fair share of imbalanced individuals in the fringes, so don’t assume any one party is immune (Mooney 1-4).
Works cited:
Alterman, Eric, “Fox News Has Always Been Propaganda.” The Nation, March 14, 2019. Web.
https://www.thenation.com/article/arc...
Cain, Cody, “Spreading Hate Has Backfired on Right-Wing Media: How Fox News Unwittingly Destroyed the Republican Party.” Salon, April 9, 2016. Web. https://www.salon.com/2016/04/08/spre...
Drutman, Lee, “Yes, the Republican Party Has Become Pathological. But Why?
We’re Not Going to Fix American Democracy until We Can Explain Why the GOP Went Crazy.” Vox,
September 22, 2017. Web. https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2017/9/...
“Join the Fight to Stop Rush,” Media Matters. Web. https://www.mediamatters.org/join-fig...
McGriel, Chris, “Shock Jocks: Voice of America or Voice of Hate?” US News, May 8, 2009. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...
Mooney, Chris, “Your Brain on Politics: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Liberals and Conservatives.” Discover, September 7, 2011. Web. https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind...
Perry, Ted, “People with Low Emotional Intelligence Are More Likely To Vote Republican.” Good, September 12, 2019. Web. https://www.good.is/a-new-study-shows...
Peters, Justin, “Fox News Set the Stage for America’s Poor Coronavirus Response.” Slate, April 9, 2020. Web. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2...
Porter, Eduardo, “How the G.O.P. Became the Party of the Left Behind.” New York Times, January 27, 2020. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...
Press, Bill, “Press: Rush Limbaugh Is the Worst of America.” The Hill, February 11, 2020. Web. https://thehill.com/opinion/bill-pres...
“Talk Radio: Playground for Free Speech or a Forum for Hate?” Constitutional Rights Foundation. Web. https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-right...
July 26, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- GOP's Ugly Evolution -- Part One
The Republican Party today is not what it was 50 years ago. Nor even 30 years ago.
Since the 1980s, Republicans have held together a coalition around a woolly vision of “limited-government conservatism” that could mean different things to different people. Libertarian-minded business owners saw it as low taxes and deregulation. Conservative Christians saw it in terms of religious liberty or not extending rights to LGBTQ citizens. Middle-class whites who scored high on racial resentment scales saw it as government not taking their money to give free things to freeloading black and brown people.
These different groups can be kept in the same big-tent coalition because they all understood that on the values they cared about most, the Democratic Party was not the party for people like them. Over time, as they identified as conservatives and Republicans, they learned the orthodoxies that “people like them” stood for, and were pulled along for the sake of keeping the governing coalition together, understanding that any defection would spell defeat in a two-party system.
Prior to the ’80s, both parties represented much broader coalitions, which cut much more across racial, cultural, and regional identities. Parties were moderate because after the New Deal, they really were national parties, but with different identities in different regions. Even 30 years ago, you could be a culturally conservative Democrat or a culturally liberal Republican. These overlaps made the parties less distinct. They also made it easier to find common ground with opposing partisans based on other shared identities.
These overlaps were the foundation for a political center and multiple coalitions. Moderation existed not because politicians and voters had identified as “moderates” but because they faced cross-pressure from competing and overlapping values and identities, and the center was the place where these values overlapped.
But as partisan identity has become more closely linked with racial, cultural, and regional identities in the wake of the post-civil rights party realignment, these overlaps have vanished. Our collective sense of cultural, regional, and ethnic status is now more and more linked to the status of our two political parties.
Broadly speaking, the wealthy and corporations have used money (through campaign contributions and lobbying) to shape economic policy so that it disproportionately benefits the rich and corporations. This money has made it harder for the Democratic Party to truly be the party of the working class (one reason … that Democrats have remained moderate).
But its more consequential effect was that it pulled the Republican Party very far right on economic issues. And because many of these far-right economic positions are broadly unpopular on their own, the Republican Party has had to work even harder to disqualify Democrats, turning up negative partisanship to ever higher levels and having to rely more and more on anti-elite/anti-government and now increasingly overt racial demagoguery in order to keep Republicans voting Republican (Drutman 5-7).
… it's not just a matter [today] of different opinions on policy, says Robert Jones, CEO of PRRI, a nonpartisan group that studies politics, culture and religion. People have largely picked a side, and they really don't like the other one.
Nearly half the country (48%) thinks the Republican Party has been taken over by racists, a view held by 80% of Democrats. And the Democratic Party? Nationally, 44% think it's been taken over by socialists – and 82% of Republicans share that opinion, according to the extensive study, "Fractured Nation: Widening Partisan Polarization and Key Issues in 2020 Presidential Elections."
The two major parties themselves, Jones says, have largely come to reflect the two Americas, with Republicans encompassing white Christians who feel victimized by the cultural and social changes, and Democrats, the African-Americans, Latinos and women who are driving many of those demographic and social changes.
White evangelicals flocked to the GOP after the civil rights movement took hold in the late 1960s, Jones says, and the Democratic Party became identified with the civil rights movement. That started a "sorting out" that mingles party identification with race and religion, he says.
The trend really took hold during the Reagan years, but "we're seeing it hit at an extreme level," Jones says. "The partisan polarization is driven less by the fact that people love their own party as much as that they hate the other one. They really see each other as the enemy."
More than two-thirds (69%) of Republicans believe discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks, compared to 21% of Democrats who feel that way, according to PRRI. For Republicans who cite Fox News as their primary news source, the number rises to 77%.
Asked if they agreed that "immigrants are invading the country and changing American culture," 63% of Republicans said yes, and 20% of Democrats agreed. When it comes to gender roles and the MeToo movement, Republicans felt threatened: a majority of Republicans (53%) believe men are punished "just for being men," and 65% of GOPers think society as a whole has become "too soft and feminine." Among Democrats, 23% agreed men were being punished for being male, and 26% agreed the nation was becoming "too soft and feminine."
More than half of Republicans (55%) believe it's necessary to believe in God to be a moral person, compared with 35% of Democrats who think that way (Milligan 1-2).
The Republican Party today is basically a coalition of grievances united by one thing: hatred. Hatred of immigrants, hatred of minorities, hatred of intellectuals, hatred of gays, feminists and many other groups too numerous to mention. What binds them together is hatred of Democrats because they are welcoming to every group that Republicans reject.
I do not know exactly when hatred became the binding force in the Republican Party, but its takeover of the once “Solid South” of the Democratic Party was the key turning point. When the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts broke the Democratic Party’s hold on that region, the G.O.P. moved in to replace it. But in the process, Republicans absorbed the traditions of racism, bigotry, populism and rule by plutocrats called “Bourbons” that defined the politics of the South after the Civil War. They also inherited an obsession with self-defense, allegiance to evangelical Christianity, chauvinism, xenophobia and other cultural characteristics long cultivated in the South.
The Bourbons maintained their power by dividing the poor and working classes along racial lines so that they would not unify for their mutual betterment by raising taxes on the wealthy, improving schools and making government responsive to the needs of the masses rather than protecting the wealth and position of the Bourbons.
The Southern states have long followed what are now doctrinaire Republican policies: minuscule taxes, no unions, aggressive pro-business policies, privatized public services and strong police forces that kept minorities in their place. Yet the South is and always has been our poorest region and shows no sign of converging with the Northeast, which has long followed progressive policies opposite those in the South and been the wealthiest region as well (Bartlett 1-2).
The few Republicans and conservatives tut-tutting Trump’s rampage of racist rancor ought to know that the history is clear: Their party has been exploiting bigotry and acrimony for decades. There was Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which aimed to attract white voters opposed to civil rights advances. Ronald Reagan famously campaigned against “welfare queens” and hailed “states’ rights”—barely coded language deployed to achieve the same results (Corn 1).
Lee Atwater, party chairman, aide to Ronald Reagan and campaign manager for George H.W. Bush, explained this in a 1981 interview with political scientist Alexander Lamis: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff …”
For half a century, then, the GOP has taught white voters racial resentment, taught them to prioritize concerns about white prerogative over concerns about shuttered factories, dirty water, lack of health care, foreclosed futures. It did this in code — “Willie Horton,” “tax cuts,” “welfare queen” — which, while obvious to all but the most gullible, still allowed respectable white men and women to maintain fig leaves of deniability.
So politicians accepted the votes, but never had to acknowledge the means of their manufacture. White voters gave them the votes, but never had to confront the reasons they did so (Pitts Jr. 1).
The pattern is obvious: The guys at the top of the Republican Party have long tried to take advantage of racial conflict and political divisiveness. At times, they have even encouraged it, believing that would help them win elections. And there’s no better example than Newt Gingrich.
Decades before Gingrich was a Trump-adoring Fox News bloviator, he was speaker of the House. And before that he was a bomb-thrower. In fact, he became speaker partly because he weaponized hate. Elected in 1978, Gingrich was a back-bencher in the House of Representatives when the Republicans appeared to be in a permanent minority. His strategy was to blow up his own party so he could take control and lead it to the majority—and one of his big ideas was that the GOP, in order to succeed, had to create more division within the national discourse.
He established a political action committee called GOPAC to help Republican candidates across the country become more effective campaigners. And in 1990, the group distributed to GOP contenders a pamphlet called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” which encouraged the candidates to “speak like Newt”—that is, to rely upon sharp and divisive rhetoric. It presented a list of 30 “optimistic positive” words to use, including “freedom,” “truth,” and “family.” It also provided a list of “contrasting” words: “crisis,” “decay,” and “red tape.” And this second list recommended going to extremes. Republican candidates, it noted, should call Democrats “shallow,” “radical,” “incompetent,” “pathetic,” “sick,” “bizarre,” and “traitors.” Gingrich’s group was urging GOPers to engage in all-out rhetorical war, going beyond arguing over policies to engaging in the politics of personal destruction. Which was one of Gingrich’s own favorite tools. (The good Newt loved to talk about policy; the bad Newt embraced and relished hostile name-calling and discordant combat.)
And the nastiness paid off. The belligerent Gingrich led his Republicans to the majority in the House in 1994.
Not every Republican candidate has adopted this memo as his or her playbook in the past three decades. But its spirit has certainly imbued a significant amount of GOP action. … (Corn 1-3).
The year 1994 … was a major moment in politics. After a rocky start to Bill Clinton's presidency, Republicans were looking to capitalize in the midterm elections. Newt Gingrich, then the House minority whip, began the 1994 campaign by releasing the "Contract With America," a list of 10 bills congressional Republicans pledged to pass if they regained the House majority.
The document was loaded with buzzwords influenced by President Ronald Reagan's 1985 State of the Union address. It talked about "tax relief," "job creation," and "personal responsibility." It proposed "taking back our streets" by toughening the death penalty and building more prisons, and it suggested imposing term limits on "career politicians" so they could be replaced with "citizen legislators."
The campaign worked — Republicans routed Democrats for a 54-seat swing in the House of Representatives, giving the GOP its first majority in the House since the 1950s. Political messaging had changed.
One of the main architects of the "Contract With America" was a Republican pollster named Frank Luntz, who has been at the forefront of political messaging for 30 years. Luntz is credited inside and outside Washington, DC, with teaching a generation of Republican politicians that "it might not matter what we say so much as how we say it," ...
Throughout the '90s, Luntz developed theories on political messaging and engineered countless phrases that subtly promote conservative ideals. Those ideas have since been absorbed into classes at the Leadership Institute, a conservative nonprofit that it says teaches "political technology" to prospective politicians and activists. His rhetorical tips and phrases are regularly distributed among Republican circles. …
Luntz's greatest contributions to Republican messaging can be found in "The New American Lexicon," a playbook published annually by Luntz since the early 1990s. A leaked copy of the 2006 edition provides fascinating insight into Luntz's rhetorical strategy. In a section titled "14 Words Never To Use," Luntz instructs to never say "government" when one could say "Washington" instead.
"Most Americans appreciate their local government that picks up their trash, cleans their streets, and provides police and transportation services," Luntz said. "Washington is the problem. Remind voters again and again about Washington spending, Washington waste, Washington taxation, Washington bureaucracy, Washington rules and Washington regulations."
Luntz suggested replacing "drilling for oil" with "exploring for energy;" "undocumented workers" with "illegal aliens;" and "estate tax" with "death tax." The substitutions often work — an April Ipsos/NPR poll found that support for abolishing the estate tax jumps to 76% from 65% when you call it the death tax.
"It was completely revolutionary," Republican consultant Jim Dornan told Business Insider. "He detected phrases and single words that could change how people thought about the issues" (Abadi 1).
Cited Works:
Abadi, Mark, “Democrats and Republicans Speak Different Languages — and It Helps Explain Why We're So Divided.” Business Insider, August 11, 2017. Web. https://www.businessinsider.com/polit...
Bartlett, Bruce, “The Republican Party Has Become the Party of Hate. New York Times, July 21, 2016. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate...
Corn, David, “Donald Trump’s Politics of Hate Began with a ‘Cynical and Evil’ GOP Memo,” Mother Jones, July 18, 2019. Web. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/...
Drutman, Lee, “Yes, the Republican Party Has Become Pathological. But Why?
We’re Not Going to Fix American Democracy until We Can Explain Why the GOP Went Crazy.” Vox,
September 22, 2017. Web. https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2017/9/...
Milligan, Susan, “Democrats, Republicans and the New Politics of Hate. In a Deeply Divided Nation, Democrats and Republicans Don’t Just Disagree, They Hate Each Other.” US News, October 21, 2019. Web.
https://www.usnews.com/news/elections...
Pitts Jr., Leonard, “Is the GOP a Hate Group?” Seattle Times, July 21, 2019. Web. https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/...
Since the 1980s, Republicans have held together a coalition around a woolly vision of “limited-government conservatism” that could mean different things to different people. Libertarian-minded business owners saw it as low taxes and deregulation. Conservative Christians saw it in terms of religious liberty or not extending rights to LGBTQ citizens. Middle-class whites who scored high on racial resentment scales saw it as government not taking their money to give free things to freeloading black and brown people.
These different groups can be kept in the same big-tent coalition because they all understood that on the values they cared about most, the Democratic Party was not the party for people like them. Over time, as they identified as conservatives and Republicans, they learned the orthodoxies that “people like them” stood for, and were pulled along for the sake of keeping the governing coalition together, understanding that any defection would spell defeat in a two-party system.
Prior to the ’80s, both parties represented much broader coalitions, which cut much more across racial, cultural, and regional identities. Parties were moderate because after the New Deal, they really were national parties, but with different identities in different regions. Even 30 years ago, you could be a culturally conservative Democrat or a culturally liberal Republican. These overlaps made the parties less distinct. They also made it easier to find common ground with opposing partisans based on other shared identities.
These overlaps were the foundation for a political center and multiple coalitions. Moderation existed not because politicians and voters had identified as “moderates” but because they faced cross-pressure from competing and overlapping values and identities, and the center was the place where these values overlapped.
But as partisan identity has become more closely linked with racial, cultural, and regional identities in the wake of the post-civil rights party realignment, these overlaps have vanished. Our collective sense of cultural, regional, and ethnic status is now more and more linked to the status of our two political parties.
Broadly speaking, the wealthy and corporations have used money (through campaign contributions and lobbying) to shape economic policy so that it disproportionately benefits the rich and corporations. This money has made it harder for the Democratic Party to truly be the party of the working class (one reason … that Democrats have remained moderate).
But its more consequential effect was that it pulled the Republican Party very far right on economic issues. And because many of these far-right economic positions are broadly unpopular on their own, the Republican Party has had to work even harder to disqualify Democrats, turning up negative partisanship to ever higher levels and having to rely more and more on anti-elite/anti-government and now increasingly overt racial demagoguery in order to keep Republicans voting Republican (Drutman 5-7).
… it's not just a matter [today] of different opinions on policy, says Robert Jones, CEO of PRRI, a nonpartisan group that studies politics, culture and religion. People have largely picked a side, and they really don't like the other one.
Nearly half the country (48%) thinks the Republican Party has been taken over by racists, a view held by 80% of Democrats. And the Democratic Party? Nationally, 44% think it's been taken over by socialists – and 82% of Republicans share that opinion, according to the extensive study, "Fractured Nation: Widening Partisan Polarization and Key Issues in 2020 Presidential Elections."
The two major parties themselves, Jones says, have largely come to reflect the two Americas, with Republicans encompassing white Christians who feel victimized by the cultural and social changes, and Democrats, the African-Americans, Latinos and women who are driving many of those demographic and social changes.
White evangelicals flocked to the GOP after the civil rights movement took hold in the late 1960s, Jones says, and the Democratic Party became identified with the civil rights movement. That started a "sorting out" that mingles party identification with race and religion, he says.
The trend really took hold during the Reagan years, but "we're seeing it hit at an extreme level," Jones says. "The partisan polarization is driven less by the fact that people love their own party as much as that they hate the other one. They really see each other as the enemy."
More than two-thirds (69%) of Republicans believe discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks, compared to 21% of Democrats who feel that way, according to PRRI. For Republicans who cite Fox News as their primary news source, the number rises to 77%.
Asked if they agreed that "immigrants are invading the country and changing American culture," 63% of Republicans said yes, and 20% of Democrats agreed. When it comes to gender roles and the MeToo movement, Republicans felt threatened: a majority of Republicans (53%) believe men are punished "just for being men," and 65% of GOPers think society as a whole has become "too soft and feminine." Among Democrats, 23% agreed men were being punished for being male, and 26% agreed the nation was becoming "too soft and feminine."
More than half of Republicans (55%) believe it's necessary to believe in God to be a moral person, compared with 35% of Democrats who think that way (Milligan 1-2).
The Republican Party today is basically a coalition of grievances united by one thing: hatred. Hatred of immigrants, hatred of minorities, hatred of intellectuals, hatred of gays, feminists and many other groups too numerous to mention. What binds them together is hatred of Democrats because they are welcoming to every group that Republicans reject.
I do not know exactly when hatred became the binding force in the Republican Party, but its takeover of the once “Solid South” of the Democratic Party was the key turning point. When the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts broke the Democratic Party’s hold on that region, the G.O.P. moved in to replace it. But in the process, Republicans absorbed the traditions of racism, bigotry, populism and rule by plutocrats called “Bourbons” that defined the politics of the South after the Civil War. They also inherited an obsession with self-defense, allegiance to evangelical Christianity, chauvinism, xenophobia and other cultural characteristics long cultivated in the South.
The Bourbons maintained their power by dividing the poor and working classes along racial lines so that they would not unify for their mutual betterment by raising taxes on the wealthy, improving schools and making government responsive to the needs of the masses rather than protecting the wealth and position of the Bourbons.
The Southern states have long followed what are now doctrinaire Republican policies: minuscule taxes, no unions, aggressive pro-business policies, privatized public services and strong police forces that kept minorities in their place. Yet the South is and always has been our poorest region and shows no sign of converging with the Northeast, which has long followed progressive policies opposite those in the South and been the wealthiest region as well (Bartlett 1-2).
The few Republicans and conservatives tut-tutting Trump’s rampage of racist rancor ought to know that the history is clear: Their party has been exploiting bigotry and acrimony for decades. There was Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which aimed to attract white voters opposed to civil rights advances. Ronald Reagan famously campaigned against “welfare queens” and hailed “states’ rights”—barely coded language deployed to achieve the same results (Corn 1).
Lee Atwater, party chairman, aide to Ronald Reagan and campaign manager for George H.W. Bush, explained this in a 1981 interview with political scientist Alexander Lamis: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff …”
For half a century, then, the GOP has taught white voters racial resentment, taught them to prioritize concerns about white prerogative over concerns about shuttered factories, dirty water, lack of health care, foreclosed futures. It did this in code — “Willie Horton,” “tax cuts,” “welfare queen” — which, while obvious to all but the most gullible, still allowed respectable white men and women to maintain fig leaves of deniability.
So politicians accepted the votes, but never had to acknowledge the means of their manufacture. White voters gave them the votes, but never had to confront the reasons they did so (Pitts Jr. 1).
The pattern is obvious: The guys at the top of the Republican Party have long tried to take advantage of racial conflict and political divisiveness. At times, they have even encouraged it, believing that would help them win elections. And there’s no better example than Newt Gingrich.
Decades before Gingrich was a Trump-adoring Fox News bloviator, he was speaker of the House. And before that he was a bomb-thrower. In fact, he became speaker partly because he weaponized hate. Elected in 1978, Gingrich was a back-bencher in the House of Representatives when the Republicans appeared to be in a permanent minority. His strategy was to blow up his own party so he could take control and lead it to the majority—and one of his big ideas was that the GOP, in order to succeed, had to create more division within the national discourse.
He established a political action committee called GOPAC to help Republican candidates across the country become more effective campaigners. And in 1990, the group distributed to GOP contenders a pamphlet called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” which encouraged the candidates to “speak like Newt”—that is, to rely upon sharp and divisive rhetoric. It presented a list of 30 “optimistic positive” words to use, including “freedom,” “truth,” and “family.” It also provided a list of “contrasting” words: “crisis,” “decay,” and “red tape.” And this second list recommended going to extremes. Republican candidates, it noted, should call Democrats “shallow,” “radical,” “incompetent,” “pathetic,” “sick,” “bizarre,” and “traitors.” Gingrich’s group was urging GOPers to engage in all-out rhetorical war, going beyond arguing over policies to engaging in the politics of personal destruction. Which was one of Gingrich’s own favorite tools. (The good Newt loved to talk about policy; the bad Newt embraced and relished hostile name-calling and discordant combat.)
And the nastiness paid off. The belligerent Gingrich led his Republicans to the majority in the House in 1994.
Not every Republican candidate has adopted this memo as his or her playbook in the past three decades. But its spirit has certainly imbued a significant amount of GOP action. … (Corn 1-3).
The year 1994 … was a major moment in politics. After a rocky start to Bill Clinton's presidency, Republicans were looking to capitalize in the midterm elections. Newt Gingrich, then the House minority whip, began the 1994 campaign by releasing the "Contract With America," a list of 10 bills congressional Republicans pledged to pass if they regained the House majority.
The document was loaded with buzzwords influenced by President Ronald Reagan's 1985 State of the Union address. It talked about "tax relief," "job creation," and "personal responsibility." It proposed "taking back our streets" by toughening the death penalty and building more prisons, and it suggested imposing term limits on "career politicians" so they could be replaced with "citizen legislators."
The campaign worked — Republicans routed Democrats for a 54-seat swing in the House of Representatives, giving the GOP its first majority in the House since the 1950s. Political messaging had changed.
One of the main architects of the "Contract With America" was a Republican pollster named Frank Luntz, who has been at the forefront of political messaging for 30 years. Luntz is credited inside and outside Washington, DC, with teaching a generation of Republican politicians that "it might not matter what we say so much as how we say it," ...
Throughout the '90s, Luntz developed theories on political messaging and engineered countless phrases that subtly promote conservative ideals. Those ideas have since been absorbed into classes at the Leadership Institute, a conservative nonprofit that it says teaches "political technology" to prospective politicians and activists. His rhetorical tips and phrases are regularly distributed among Republican circles. …
Luntz's greatest contributions to Republican messaging can be found in "The New American Lexicon," a playbook published annually by Luntz since the early 1990s. A leaked copy of the 2006 edition provides fascinating insight into Luntz's rhetorical strategy. In a section titled "14 Words Never To Use," Luntz instructs to never say "government" when one could say "Washington" instead.
"Most Americans appreciate their local government that picks up their trash, cleans their streets, and provides police and transportation services," Luntz said. "Washington is the problem. Remind voters again and again about Washington spending, Washington waste, Washington taxation, Washington bureaucracy, Washington rules and Washington regulations."
Luntz suggested replacing "drilling for oil" with "exploring for energy;" "undocumented workers" with "illegal aliens;" and "estate tax" with "death tax." The substitutions often work — an April Ipsos/NPR poll found that support for abolishing the estate tax jumps to 76% from 65% when you call it the death tax.
"It was completely revolutionary," Republican consultant Jim Dornan told Business Insider. "He detected phrases and single words that could change how people thought about the issues" (Abadi 1).
Cited Works:
Abadi, Mark, “Democrats and Republicans Speak Different Languages — and It Helps Explain Why We're So Divided.” Business Insider, August 11, 2017. Web. https://www.businessinsider.com/polit...
Bartlett, Bruce, “The Republican Party Has Become the Party of Hate. New York Times, July 21, 2016. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate...
Corn, David, “Donald Trump’s Politics of Hate Began with a ‘Cynical and Evil’ GOP Memo,” Mother Jones, July 18, 2019. Web. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/...
Drutman, Lee, “Yes, the Republican Party Has Become Pathological. But Why?
We’re Not Going to Fix American Democracy until We Can Explain Why the GOP Went Crazy.” Vox,
September 22, 2017. Web. https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2017/9/...
Milligan, Susan, “Democrats, Republicans and the New Politics of Hate. In a Deeply Divided Nation, Democrats and Republicans Don’t Just Disagree, They Hate Each Other.” US News, October 21, 2019. Web.
https://www.usnews.com/news/elections...
Pitts Jr., Leonard, “Is the GOP a Hate Group?” Seattle Times, July 21, 2019. Web. https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/...
