Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election - Hardcover

Toobin, Jeffrey

 
9780375507083: Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375507086 ISBN 13: 9780375507083
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

A study of the 2000 presidential election sheds light on the personalities and the complex issues of race, sex, and power involved in the post-election battle.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeffrey Toobin is a staff writer at The New Yorker, the legal analyst at ABC News, and the author of the critically acclaimed bestsellers A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President and The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson. He served as an assistant United States attorney in Brooklyn and as an associate counsel in the office of independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh--which provided the basis for his book Opening Arguments: A Young Lawyer's First Case--United States Supreme Court v. Oliver North. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School. Toobin lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

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t-selling author of A Vast Conspiracy and The Run of His Life comes Too Close to Call--the definitive story of the Bush-Gore presidential recount. A political and legal analyst of unparalleled journalistic skill, Jeffrey Toobin is the ideal writer to distill the events of the thirty-six anxiety-filled days that culminated in one of the most stunning Supreme Court decisions in history.

Packed with news-making disclosures and written with the drive of a legal thriller, Too Close to Call takes us inside James Baker's private jet, through the locked gates to Al Gore's mansion, behind the covered-up windows of Katherine Harris's office, and even into the secret conference room of the United States Supreme Court. As the scene shifts from Washington to Austin and into the remote corners of the enduringly strange Sunshine State, Toobin's book will transform what you thought you knew about the most extraordinary political drama in American histor

Aus dem Klappentext

t-selling author of <b>A Vast Conspiracy</b> and <b>The Run of His Life</b> comes <b>Too Close to Call</b>--the definitive story of the Bush-Gore presidential recount. A political and legal analyst of unparalleled journalistic skill, Jeffrey Toobin is the ideal writer to distill the events of the thirty-six anxiety-filled days that culminated in one of the most stunning Supreme Court decisions in history.<br><br>Packed with news-making disclosures and written with the drive of a legal thriller, <b>Too Close to Call</b> takes us inside James Baker's private jet, through the locked gates to Al Gore's mansion, behind the covered-up windows of Katherine Harris's office, and even into the secret conference room of the United States Supreme Court. As the scene shifts from Washington to Austin and into the remote corners of the enduringly strange Sunshine State, Toobin's book will transform what you thought you knew about the most extraordinary political drama in American histor

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Prologue
Florida Sunrise

The sun rising over the Atlantic casts a peach glow on the Lake Ida Shopping Plaza. Its architectural motif is typical of the lesser strip malls in Florida’s Palm Beach County-ersatz stucco, with a roof of battered tiles. The first rays of dawn land on Good Stuff Furniture, where factory-closeout sofas and love seats are sold on layaway. One storefront over, engineers and hard hats arrive early at the construction office for the job of widening I-95, the truck-choked superhighway whose low rumble and smoggy haze never entirely leave this commercial square. The medical office of Dr. Jean-Claude Tabuteau is open only at night, to serve his working-class Haitian clientele, men and women who spend their days changing sheets and watering lawns at the resorts on the other side of the highway.

On the morning of November 7, 2000-Election Day-the mall had none of its usual subtropical torpor. One of the storefronts was home to the Democratic Party of Palm Beach County, and its offices served as the base for the biggest get-out-the-vote operation that anyone could remember. The plan called for one group of volunteers to work the phones in the party offices and another to disperse to the precincts. The poll workers were to be given their assignments, as well as their leaflets and signs, at a long folding table just outside the front door. A woman named Liz Hyman was in charge of the table.

Hyman had spent a few years as a junior lawyer in the Clinton administration and was now a young associate at a prominent law firm in Washington. She had taken a few days off to help the Democrats try to retain the White House. The plan in Palm Beach County called for the volunteers to vote in their own precincts as soon as the polls opened at seven and then to report to party headquarters for instruction and deployment. It was only a few minutes after the hour when the first of them pulled into the parking lot.

Several-many-were distraught. There was something confusing about the ballot, they said. They weren’t sure if they had actually voted for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman. In keeping with the demographics of Delray Beach, the town where the mall was located, virtually all of the volunteers were elderly and many were Jewish. They had been especially motivated to support Lieberman, who was the first Jew to be nominated by a major party for vice president. What made the problem especially upsetting was that some of the volunteers thought they had voted for Pat Buchanan, a man they regarded as an anti-Semite. What, they wondered, could they do?

Liz Hyman had no idea. Indeed, she didn’t really understand what these people were talking about, and neither did anyone else at campaign headquarters. The local staff of the party had all voted by absentee ballot, so they had not seen the same voting machines as the volunteers who were arriving this morning. Like most politically attuned people, Hyman had a vague sense that voters were sometimes confused at the polls, but this seemed . . . different. These were experienced voters, indeed political veterans. Shouldn’t they have understood what they were doing? It was puzzling.

So Liz Hyman called her dad.

Lester Hyman had been a successful, if not famous, Washington lawyer for several decades. He had a bustling commercial practice, but he also offered discreet volunteer assistance to Democrats in the White House. He helped vet potential nominees for high-profile positions, reviewing their disclosure statements and personal histories for possible areas of embarrassment. Hyman had helped screen candidates for Bill Clinton’s first appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States-the seat that ultimately went to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. During that assignment, Hyman had met a young lawyer on the White House staff who was shepherding the nominee through the process. Now, when Hyman heard the peculiar report from his daughter in Palm Beach County, he remembered that the White
House lawyer had gone on to work for Al Gore. “I’ll give him a call,” Lester Hyman said.

Ron Klain’s cell phone rang just as he was pulling into the parking lot of Gore headquarters in Nashville. It was 8 a.m.

Eleven hours later (twelve in parts of the Panhandle), the polls closed in Florida and the presidential election came to its scheduled conclusion in that state. As it turned out, however, the race for president was so exquisitely close in Florida that no winner could be determined with assurance on election night. Because the electoral-vote margin between the candidates was so narrow across the nation, it quickly became apparent that the victor in
the Sunshine State would win the presidency. The battle raged in and over Florida for thirty-six more days, until Vice President Gore conceded the race to his Republican opponent, Governor George W. Bush, of Texas.

It is impossible to discuss the presidential election of 2000 without superlatives. The race between Bush and Gore was the closest presidential election in the modern history of the Electoral College. It prompted the greatest and fastest mobilization of legal and political talent that the nation had ever seen. It featured the most dramatic and numerous swings of fortune-not only during the post-Election Day period, but often over the course of single days. It included the most unlikely cast of characters for a major national drama-from once-obscure judges who held the fates of the candidates in their hands to the governor of Florida, who happened to be the younger brother of the Republican candidate for president. Even considering the infamous 1876 contest between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden, the race of 2000 was the most extended period of true uncertainty about the winner of a presidential election. And, of course, the battle between Bush and Gore was fought for the highest political stakes.

\The election of 2000 also produced the most sprawling and complex political and legal drama. In Florida, the cynosure was the state capital of Tallahassee, where the chief strategists for both sides plotted their appeals to the governor and secretary of state as well as to trial judges and the state supreme court. At the same time that the candidates were making their cases in the capital, there were equally tortuous and significant skirmishes being fought at the county level. Three of them were so dramatic that the counties themselves seemed almost to take on human qualities-the bumbling and childish Palm Beach, the efficient and mature Broward, the mysterious and sinister Miami-Dade. And yet this contest stretched far beyond the borders of Florida, consuming the entire country and concluding behind the closed doors of the United States Supreme Court.

The election of 2000 also produced the greatest controversy about the “true” result and the “real” winner-in Florida and thus in the election as a whole. This dispute gave rise to still another superlative. The ballots in Florida received more extensive scrutiny from outside-non-governmental-organizations than in any other American election. Alas, even those elaborate inquiries did not produce definite answers; indeed, the recounts conducted by the news media only deepened the confusion about who “really won.” Moreover, the news-media recounts, while understandable and worthwhile enterprises, at some level misconceived and misportrayed the way this election was really decided. Those recounts were based on the notion that the goal of the thirty-six-day battle was to identify an objective truth locked within the state’s ballot boxes. Under this approach, the election was over on November 7, and the candidates’ subsequent efforts were devoted to counting the votes that had already been cast.

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Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375507086
ISBN 13 
9780375507083
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
297
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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