After a wild youth in which he gained a reputation as a regular partygoer, Bush experienced a religious conversion in 1988, later becoming the first modern presidential candidate to specifically name Jesus Christ as the chief influence on his life. During the debates with Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, Bush handled the pressure by fingering a tiny cross in his pocket. Time and again, whether in the postelection recount turmoil, or the horrific days following 9/11, Bush’s religious faith was front and center. He had become, easily, the most publicly religious president since Lincoln.
In 1994, Bush ran for governor of Texas against a popular Democratic incumbent, Ann Richards, a silver-haired flamethrower who had lambasted the elder Bush at the 1992 Democratic campaign with the line, “Poor George! He was born with a silver foot in his mouth!” But two years later, “poor George’s” son exacted political revenge. Richards badly underestimated Bush, mocking him as an intellectual lightweight, but he won with 53 percent of the vote. Clinging to the Right on matters of economics and taxes, Bush gained a reputation for working with political opponents to advance important legislation. Equally surprising, he made sharp inroads into the traditionally Democratic Hispanic vote. In 1998, he ran for reelection, winning in a landslide.
Bush had learned one lesson quite well from Clinton: money overcomes myriad political sins. He committed himself to raising more money, from more small donors, than any other candidate in history. This allowed him to turn down federal campaign funds, thereby freeing him from federal election spending limits. Breaking new ground by soliciting funds through the Internet, Bush hauled in thousands in $50 increments, and within three months of his announcement, had raised an astonishing $36 million. He would later prove to be the greatest political fund-raiser in American history, dwarfing the-then record levels of cash pulled in by Bill Clinton.
Understanding the reality that defeating an incumbent party during a peacetime good economy was a Herculean task, Bush quietly worked to gain the support of the more than thirty Republican governors, including his brother, Jeb Bush of Florida, whose state support he would need in November 2000 if he got that far. Bush’s team also controlled the convention in Philadelphia, where the party was determined to shatter the image that it was for rich white men once and for all, with dozens of black, Hispanic, Asian, disabled, and women speakers. The only surprise was the selection of former Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney as the vice presidential nominee.
Gore looked forward to the televised debates, where his advisers were convinced their man’s experience would easily carry the day. To their horror, Bush not only held his own, but he won all three. Worse for Gore, the Green Party fielded a candidate in the election, Ralph Nader, who was certainly guaranteed to take votes from the Democrat. Unable to run far enough to the left to capture Nader’s supporters, Gore’s chances slipped away. With Bush clinging to a narrow lead in the polls, on the last weekend of the election, a Democratic operative in New Hampshire discovered an old arrest record of Bush from his college days for driving under the influence. Pollsters found the race tightening up rapidly in the forty-eight hours before the election, and what had appeared at one point to be a Bush electoral landslide became the tightest race in American history.
The night began poorly for Bush when Gore “won” a shocker in Florida. The networks called that key state before the polls had closed in its western part, by all accounts causing numerous Bush supporters en route to abandon their intention to vote. After all, Gore had won the state. Or had he? After a few hours, the networks backtracked, saying Florida was too close to call.5 In fact, Bush led in every tallied count in the state at the time, although he watched a large lead of more than 10,000 votes shrink to 537 in the final minutes of counting. By that time, every other state had been called (except Alaska and Hawaii, each of whose three electoral votes canceled the other out). With Florida’s 25 electoral votes, Bush had 271, or one more electoral vote than necessary to win the election. Without them, Gore, who had narrowly won the popular vote (50.15 million to Bush’s 49.82 million), would also take the electoral college.
At three o’clock in the morning, after the final votes in Florida had certified Bush the winner by 950 votes, Gore telephoned Bush with his concession. Under Florida’s laws, however, the closeness of the vote triggered an automatic recount, so Gore, sensing he still had a chance, called Bush back an hour later to retract the concession. The recount cost Bush a few votes, but he still emerged with a 327-vote lead. Meanwhile, in Palm Beach County some residents claimed that they had been confused by the county’s ballots.6 Gore’s advisers saw an opportunity to selectively use a hand recount in only Democratic strongholds where they could “find” the necessary votes to overcome Bush’s slim lead.7
Like their Reconstruction Republican counterparts, the modern Democrats thought they had an edge because they controlled the voting machines in the local districts that would ultimately be involved in any recount, so naturally Bush petitioned a federal court to block selected hand recounts. By then, Bush had assembled a top-flight legal team, directed on the ground by former secretary of state and Reagan adviser James Baker. Bush, meanwhile, stayed behind the scenes at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Gore assembled his own “dream team” of liberal lawyers, including Laurence Tribe and the protagonist in the Microsoft lawsuit, David Boies. Their strategy was simple: “Do everything you can to put numbers on the board. Whether they’re erased or chiseled in granite, get them on the board.”8 To counter that, the Bush team emphasized the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Counting (or recounting) some votes and not others violated the principle of one man, one vote.
For days, panels of election officials stared blankly at ballots, trying to determine if a ballot had been punched or not. Determining intent in such circumstances was impossible. This painstaking process took time, but Florida law required that the secretary of state, Katherine Harris, certify the final results from all counties on the seventh day following the general election. Although the Florida Supreme Court prohibited Harris from certifying the results, giving the recount process still more time, overseas ballots had pushed Bush’s lead to 930. Secretary of State Harris followed the Florida constitution and certified the election on November twenty-sixth, whereupon she declared Bush the winner. With the ballots counted three times, and the result each time in his favor, Bush made a national television appearance to claim victory.
Gore realized that he had seriously miscalculated the public relations fallout caused by calling for only a partial recount, and that the Constitution had put in place a ticking electoral college clock.9 He then shifted gears, calling for a statewide recount. A key ruling by Florida Circuit Judge N. Sander Sauls rejected the request for a hand recount of selected (disputed) counties, and at the same time, the Republican-controlled Florida legislature prepared to appoint its own slate of federal electors if the dispute was not settled by the December twelfth constitutional deadline. By then, Gore realized he had shot himself in the foot by demanding selected initial recounts from three precincts in the state of Florida, which chewed a valuable amount of time off the clock, which might have permitted a statewide recount later. He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to extend Florida deadlines and to allow hand recounts. That same day, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated (set aside) the November twenty-first Florida Supreme Court ruling; in essence, ruling that the Florida Supreme Court had delivered a purely partisan decision. Yet the state justices responded by ordering a statewide recount of all ballots where no vote was detectable—some 43,000 ballots—essentially claiming that no choice was not an acceptable choice, and that all ballots, in essence, must have chosen a presidential candidate. When Leon County Judge Terry Lewis ordered the local boards to determine what constituted a vote, the Bush team told Gore lead attorney David Boies, “We just won this case.”10 Any variance by any local board in accepting votes after the fact constituted a violation of due process for all those who had already voted in all the other cou
nties and whose votes were not going to be reinterpreted. Bush’s victory may have been apparent to the Bush lawyers, though not to Gore’s team, when on Tuesday, December twelfth—the federal deadline for the submission of all presidential electors’ names—the United States Supreme Court reversed the Florida Supreme Court decision by a 5–4 vote. But the actual decision on key points was not that close. The key Supreme Court ruling was 7–2 that the hand-counting process violated federal equal protection clauses because of the absence of objective standards on the dimpled chads and other ballots. Five justices also stated that there was not enough time to count the votes (with the results due that day according to the Constituton). Gore conceded. Polls showed that people thought the Supreme Court had reached its decision on the merits of the case, not out of partisan leanings toward Bush.11 Numerous media-sponsored recounts occurred in the wake of the election, well into May 2001. Most concluded that Bush would have won under almost any standard. A USA Today/Miami Herald survey of 61,000 ballots, followed by a broader review of 111,000 overvotes (where voters marked more than one candidate’s name, and thus were disallowed), found that if Gore had received the manual recounts he had requested in four counties, Bush would have gained yet another 152 votes; and if the Supreme Court had not stopped the hand counting of the undervotes (ballots where a hole had not been punched cleanly through), Bush would have won under three of four standards for determining voter intent.12
More ominous overtones emerged from the election, which revealed a division in America identified by the colors of a countrywide county map. The counties Bush carried were colored red and Gore’s blue. Gore carried only 677 counties in the United States, whereas Bush won 2,434, encompassing more than 2.4 million square miles to the blue states’ 580,000 square miles. Most striking, with few exceptions, from New York to California, the entire map is red: Gore won some border areas, the coasts, and a thin line stretching from Minnesota down the Mississippi River. The visual representation of the election was stunning, with virtually all of the interior United States (or what elites often derisively refer to as “flyover country”) voting for Bush. Symbolically, it appeared that the Democrats had been isolated into a few urban coastal cities, increasingly divorced from middle America.
Grand Corruption and Petty Larceny
Had Clinton chosen to view it in such a manner, Gore’s defeat would not have meant a rebuke for his own presidency. After all, it could be reasoned, Gore had won a majority of the popular vote. But Clinton took the election as a plebiscite on his two terms and fumed that Gore had bungled a gift-wrapped package. But America had not seen the last of the Clintons.
In 1999, Hillary had already decided to run for the U.S. Senate seat held by the retiring Patrick Moynihan of New York. Along with Massachusetts and, perhaps, California, New York is one of the safest Democratic states in the United States. Having never lived in the state, and with little understanding of issues important to New Yorkers, Hillary donned a New York Yankees cap and purchased a mansion in Chappaqua, a posh New York City suburb that would permit her to claim residency. She faced a tough campaign against New York City Mayor Rudolph “Rudy” Giuliani, but he developed prostate cancer and, at the same time, his failing marriage was being splashed across tabloid pages. He handed over the nomination to Congressman Rick Lazio, who lost to Hillary heavily (53 percent to 45 percent).
With Hillary’s November 2000 victory, the Clintons had a house. To furnish it, Hillary—who had just signed a massive, controversial $8 million book deal for her memoirs—registered with major stores in New York and Washington, almost as a newlywed couple would. Friends were asked by party loyalists to furnish the house as an appreciation of the eight years of service.13
An avalanche of gifts rolled in from the Clintons’ registries (many, it was noted, from individuals or companies that still stood to gain from Senator Clinton’s access to power): Glen Eden Carpets in Georgia gave two $6,000 carpets; Lynn Forester of New York City gave Hillary a $1,300 cashmere sweater; Arthur Athis in Los Angeles provided $2,400 in dining chairs; Walter Kaye of New York City donated more than $9,000 in gifts; and the Georgetown alumni, class of 1968, gave a designer $38,000 basket set.14 Other presidents, especially the Reagans, had refurbished the presidential mansion and received gifts for redecorating, but all the gifts stayed at the White House, becoming gifts to the nation. Not with the Clintons. In January 2001, Hillary Clinton began shipping furniture from the White House to her New York home. These items had all been donated as part of the $396,000 redecoration undertaken by the Clintons in 1993 and were not private, but public, property. Under intense criticism, the Clintons returned four items clearly marked “National Park Service,” and in another return, sent back a “truckload of couches, lamps and other furnishings.”15
That was fairly insignificant next to some of the other actions by the departing president, most notably an orgy of pardons and commutations. Every president has an unlimited pardon power: there is no review, and it is absolute. On his last day alone, Clinton issued 140 pardons and 36 sentence commutations. One television commentator said, “Not since the opening of the gates of the Bastille have so many criminals been liberated on a single day.”16 Among those pardoned was a group of Puerto Rican terrorists responsible for 130 bombing attacks in Chicago, New York, and other locations. Perhaps more offensive was the pardon of Marc Rich, an international arms runner indicted in the United States for tax evasion and counts of fraud. Rich had fled to Europe, where he peddled (illegal) Libyan oil past embargoes and paid for the oil with grain (again illegal because it was embargoed).17
When he boarded the marine helicopter for the last time on January 20, 2001, to leave for his new life, Bill Clinton was departing as only the second president to be impeached; the first ever to have been charged with lying to a grand jury; the first ever to be disbarred; the first judged guilty of perjury against a federal court and forced to pay a fine; and the first sued in a civil suit for sexual harassment. His failure to earn the respect of the military could be seen in a small detail when the marine guards who stood by the presidential helicopter failed to execute a right face to stand facing the president’s back as he walked away from the chopper. Yet these marine guards managed to relearn the maneuver after George W. Bush took office on January 20.
Clinton’s legacy to his party was no less destructive than his imprint on the presidency. When he came to the office in 1992, the Democrats held both the House and the Senate and the governorship of New York as well as the mayoralities of New York City and Los Angeles. Within a decade, the Republicans held the House, the Senate, and the presidency, and conservative ideals were held by a slim majority of the United States Supreme Court justices. In states with a “pure” two-party legislature after 2002, there were twenty-five Republican chambers, twenty-two Democratic chambers, and two that were tied. Despite the perception that he was good for the party, most of the candidates Clinton personally campaigned for had lost, and few Democrats (except in the absolutely safest seats) could afford to be seen with him.
Team Bush
Although the transition was delayed by the Gore election challenge, Bush had his cabinet lined up even before the election. Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was secretary of state, and a former secretary of defense in the Ford administration. Donald Rumsfeld was tapped to be the secretary of defense. Not only did Bush appoint the highest-ranking African American in American history in the person of Powell, but he also named black Stanford professor Condoleezza Rice as his national security adviser, making her the highest-ranking black woman in the United States and the first woman or black named to the national security post. Rod Paige, Bush’s secretary of education, became the first African American in that post. By the time Bush finished his appointments, he had more African Americans, women, and minorities in positions of power than any other administration.
Bush knew he would need some Democratic support. In the House, Republicans had lost a few seats in 2
000, but they still held a slim majority. A number of incumbent Republican senators had lost close races, leaving the Republicans only the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Cheney (as Senate president) to retain their majority. This portended difficulty for Bush’s program, which included a tax cut, partial privatization of Social Security, education reform, and deployment of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Pressing ahead with his agenda, Bush advanced a broad tax-cut plan to revive the economy, which had begun to turn down even before the election. The tax cuts involved a popular tax rebate for every American as well as longer-term tax reductions. With support from several Senate Democrats, the package passed. An education reform bill also emerged from Congress, emphasizing teacher accountability and test scores.
But then a surprise defection handed the Senate back to the Democrats. Vermont senator Jim Jeffords, a long-time liberal Republican, in May 2001 suddenly caucused with the Democrats, making South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle the majority leader. Jeffords’s defection essentially blocked all further legislation for the rest of the year. The Democrats stalled Bush’s judicial nominations, effectively blocked any discussion of Social Security privatization, and nipped at the edges of the tax cut (without publicly favoring a tax increase). American politics seemed bogged in a morass of obstructionism and delay, with Bush’s popularity hovering in the low 50 percent range and the public nearly evenly split on policy prescriptions. No American had a clue that the world was about to change as surely as it had on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor.
9/11
On the morning of September 10, 2001, the Washington Times carried the latest criticism by the National Academy of Sciences on the Bush administration’s directives for controversial stem-cell research, and the New York Post carried the latest news about California Congressman Gary Condit, who was under investigation in the disappearance of a Washington intern, Chandra Levy, with whom he had a sexual relationship. CBS reported that pressure was mounting on Bush to do something about the deepening economic gloom. The Republicans in Congress had delayed immigration reform legislation until the White House plan to fix the Immigration and Naturalization Service had been submitted. Concerned groups had been warning that immigration policies were too liberal and immigrants too poorly screened. New doubts had surfaced about a controversial study of early American gun ownership (a thinly disguised attack on the National Rifle Association), leading to an investigation of the scholar who had produced it, and jury selection was proceeding in the murder case of Andrea Yates, who was accused of drowning her five children. All in all, September tenth seemed like just another day in America. Everything would change in less than twenty-four hours.
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror Page 133
