So it's important to remember that while Trump may be uniquely outrageous among Presidents, there were strong currents of interest, habit, and ideology that made a Trump Administration possible. The Presidential election of 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore is a major signpost on that road.
The 2000 election is the most infamous example of blatant election shenanigans around Presidential elections, with the notorious Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore (2000) prominently featuring in it.
That is the focus of this post. But it's also important to remember two other prominent cases in which illegal activity played an important result in a Presidential election victory for Republican Presidential candidates. The Watergate burglary and the larger set of illegal activities of which it was part were election-related. But it would be difficult to argue that they were decisive in the election results.
The same cannot be said for two other cases, the 1968 Nixon campaign's illegal intervention with the South Vietnamese government to sabotage peace talks in the Vietnam War and the 1980 Reagan campaign's "October Surprise" dealings with the Iranian government over the America hostages. (Andrew Schupak, Republican Presidential Heists Huffpost 03/14/2017)
The 1968 case is factually not in dispute. The Johnson Administration had taped evidence of it. The evidence for the 1980 case is largely circumstantial, but very persuasive. Gary Sick, a specialist on Iran during the Carter Administration, laid out the case in his October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan (1991). See also a C-SPAN interview (video and transcript) with Sick, October Surprise 11/12/1991. Investigative journalist Robert Perry also wrote about it in Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery (1993).
Both of those cases were instances of a campaign illegally dealing with foreign governments to manipulate events in such as a way as to affect the outcome of the US Presidential election. The 2000 case had to do with direct efforts to manipulate the election count itself. All three, of course, contributed to the sense among Republican insiders that they could get away with some serious skullduggery in manipulating Presidential elections.
A central part of the 2000 story was the dysfunction of the corporate media, both during and after the immediate events around the Florida recount. (Miranda Spencer, Who Won the Election? Who Cares? FAIR 01/01/2002) There are three critical elements involved in that series of events that are also very important parts of how the Republican Party wound up being a Trump cult functioning as a political party.
One is the ruthlessness and lack of scruples by the Republicans, and the Bush family in particular. Another is the unwillingness of the Democratic Party to recognize the seriousness of the problem combined with its unfortunately strong inclination to surrender to the Republican Party at key moments. The media dysfunction is the third one, which was striking before, during, and after the election was resolved in the manner it was.
Britannica Online has a concise summary of the events in its Bush v. Gore (12/05/2018). After the polls closed on Election Day November 7, it quickly became clear that the election would be decided by the outcome in Florida. FOX News was the first major news organization to call the Florida result and the national Electoral College count for George W. Bush, as Melinda Wittstock reported (Cousin John's calls tipped election tally Guardian 11/19/2000):
John Ellis is not unlike any other American journalist in wanting to be first with big news. At the helm of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Network's election night decision team, he achieved the now dubious distinction of being the first to call Florida - and the presidential election - for George W. Bush. The numbers he was working from were not official, but the viewers did not know that. Nor did they know that Ellis was very chummy with Bush - he's his first cousin.So, Bush family ruthlessness and lack of respect for democratic norms as well as the problems of not only FOX News (then as now a Republican propaganda channel) but of the "quality" press also were on very public display within hours after the election.
No one might have given Ellis much notice if the election was not still hanging by a chad almost two weeks later - or if he had not bragged to the New Yorker magazine that throughout what's come to be known as 'Indecision 2000' he was constantly on the phone with his cousins George and Florida's Governor 'Jebbie' [G.W. Bush's brother], tipping them off with the latest internal projections on the voting.
The revelation has caused disquiet within the more high-minded of media circles, not least because his decision to call it for 'Dubya' on Fox at 2:16am forced the hand of competing networks. CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS followed the Ellis lead within four minutes, only to be forced into embarrassing retractions less than two hours later. [my emphasis]
This was quickly followed by various dubious actions, including those of Florida's chief election official Secretary of State Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Republican who co-chaired the Bush-Cheney campaign in Florida. One of the more dramatic moments was what came to be known as the "Brooks Brothers Riot," in which a Republican mob that included Republican Congressional staffers forced a shutdown of a recount of Miami-Dade County votes. (John Latigua, Miami's rent-a-riot Salon 11/28/2000)
The Florida state supreme court ordered recounts in some areas to proceed. The Bush campaign went to the Supreme Court, which stopped the recount on December 12, and on a 5-4 decision rejected the Florida court's remedy of a recount. Al Gore announced the next day, "While I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it." And thereby conceded the election to Bush.
The pro-Bush Justices who provided the five votes stopping the recount knew their legal reasoning was dubious in the extreme. Thus, the decision included the qualifier, "Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances..." In other words, it wasn't supposed to be used as a precedent in future cases. (Bush v. Gore, Library of Congress text)
The Democrats' political stance during the post-election Florida standoff wasn't remotely commensurate with the Republicans' shrilly partisan approach. But if Gore's statement, "While I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it," sounds meek in retrospect, it sounded at the time like a roaring condemnation of the Supreme Court's partisanship in comparison to the tone of other leading Democratic spokespeople, who generally tried to strike a tone of hand-ringing statesmanly concern.
Al Gore at the time was both the formal and de facto head of the Democratic Party. And he was the Presidential candidate. So he bears some responsibility for the inadequate level of the response. His selection of Joe Lieberman as his Vice Presidential candidate looks very unfortunate in retrospect, not least because Lieberman was clearly opposed to an aggressive political response on the recount while the Republicans were in a Brooks Brothers Riot mode. David Margolick, The Path to Florida Vanity Fair Oct 2004 (online date: 03/19/2014) recounts this incident:
Mark Herron, a Gore-team lawyer in Tallahassee, inadvertently made matters worse for his own side. On November 15, he sent out a long memo on rules governing absentee ballots to the Democratic lawyers positioned at each of the 67 county canvassing boards. A copy of the memo somehow found its way to a Republican law firm across the street from Herron’s office. Next thing he knew, the Republicans were quoting his careful recitation of Florida election law to support their claim that Democrats wanted to disenfranchise brave Americans in uniform.It's by no means certain that a different response would have produced a different election outcome. But it would have very likely have helped the Democratic Party to be far more skeptical and critical of the new Cheney-Bush Administration and more agfressive in opposing its destructive policies. (It's worth noting that a lot of Democrats to this day blame Ralph Nader's third-party candidacy that year for the Florida loss, though the polling data provides little evidence for that.)
Panicked, the Gore team put Joe Lieberman on the Sunday television talk shows to declare that the Democrats would never do that, and that he, for one, thought the most liberal standard should be applied to all incoming absentee ballots. Herron was appalled when he heard that: he knew that the western Panhandle counties were thick with U.S. military bases. By letting any post-election absentee votes count, including those with late—or no—postmarks, the presidency might well be lost.
I'll admit that I'm reluctant to blame Gore for the outcome of the post-election decision, in no small part because I admire his accomplishments in educating people on the climate crisis and also because, unlike Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and John Kerry, Gore straightforwardly opposed the Iraq War. His Current TV project also provided a limited but important television platform for liberal and progressive news coverage. Earlier in his political career, Gore was a stalwart of the neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). And has moved away from that position in very significant ways. His 2007 book The Assault on Reason was an important critical analysis of the disinformation techniques practiced on the public by the Cheney-Bush Administration, including around the Iraq War:
... the current White House has engaged in an unprecedented and sustained campaign of mass deception - especially where its policies in Iraq are concerned. Active deception by those in power makes true deliberation and meaingful debate by the people themselves virtually impossible. When any administration lies to the people, it weakens America's ability to make wise collective decisions about our Republic.Gore, unlike most other Democratic leaders, could see and articulate clearly the radical, anti-democratic course on which the Republican Party was traveling.
Now that the full extent of this historic fiasco is becoming clear, it is important to understand how such a horrible set of mistakes could have been made in a great democracy. And it is already obvious that the administration's abnormal and un-American approach to secrecy, censorship, and massive systematic deception is the principal explanation for how America embraced this catastrophe. [my emphasis]
The corporate press treatment of the Clintons on the Whitewater and assorted other pseudoscandals during the 1990s involved some epic journalistic malpractice. Gene Lyons and Joe Conason are two of the journalists who did excellent work documenting and critiquing that experience. This continued during the 2000 campaign, which was full of silly tropes like "Al Gore claimed he invented the internet." Maureen Dowd's New York Times columns on how Al Gore was a sissy provided several examples of how bizarre this Beltway Village press practice had become.
And it continued after Bush's inauguration, even when more responsible journalists undertook intensive review of the 2000 Florida vote count. We can't say that a more thorough vote count of the entire state would definitely have produced a Gore victory, because the detailed studies had to make assumptions about how the recount would have taken place. There is good reason to think it would have produced a Gore win. But that central finding was in turn badly blurred by the corporate press coverage of those studies. It didn't help in that regard that the studies were completed after the 911 attack and much of the press was too busy promoting hurrah-patriotism to spend a lot of time fretting over, or even reporting responsibly, on anything so trivial (to the Villagers) as the integrity of the 2000 Presidential election.
But, however much or little blame one may choose to Gore's personal account, Edward Foley's account in George W. Bush vs. Al Gore, 15 years later: We really did inaugurate the wrong guy Salon 12/19/2015 is also an accurate description of events:
Bush v. Gore, the court case, is often used interchangeably as shorthand for Bush-versus-Gore, the entirety of the dispute over the outcome of the election.He goes on to explain how the situation made any alternative attempt at a recount after the December 13 decision was problematic as a practical matter:
But that dispute encompassed much more than just the US Supreme Court’s decision, which in truth did not even end the fight. Rather, the end came the next day, December 13, when Gore announced he would not attempt to renew the recount through additional proceedings in Florida’s courts. Had he done so, he and Bush conceivably might have pursued their fight all the way to Congress, as Hayes and Tilden had over the 1876 election. If Bush-versus-Gore had reached Congress it would have been the first real test of the impenetrably ambiguous Electoral Count Act of 1887, with unpredictable consequences. Thus it was Gore’s concession of December 13, and not the Court’s ruling of the previous day, that truly ended the fight for the presidency as a practical matter. [my emphasis]
Gore’s lawyers understandably concluded that Florida law provided no judicial remedy for a mistaken electoral outcome caused by the butterfly ballot. In a suit filed on behalf of affected voters, the Florida Supreme Court unanimously concluded the ballot’s design, however problematic and consequential it was, did not violate state law. Even if it had, it is unclear what remedy the state court should have provided. There was insufficient time to hold a whole new election in Florida, since the state’s presidential electors were constitutionally required to cast their official Electoral College votes on the same day as the electors in all other states, which Congress had specified as Monday, December 18. Limiting a revote to just Palm Beach County would have raised grave constitutional questions, especially if Palm Beach voters who had not participated in the initial election were permitted to participate in the revote, but Florida voters elsewhere were not similarly given a second chance to cast a ballot.Additional reporting on the 2000 election travesty:
- Jonathan Chait, Yes, Bush v. Gore Did Steal the Election New York 06/25/2019
- Ford Fessenden and John Broder, EXAMINING THE VOTE. THE OVERVIEW; Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote New York Times 11/12/2001
- Lisa Getter, Jeb Bush’s Recount Role Examined Los Angeles Times 07/14/2019
- Mickey Kaus, Everything the New York Times Thinks About the Florida Recount Is Wrong! Slate 11/13/2001
- Mickey Kaus, Update: Hot Recount Docs! Slate 11/19/2001
- Michael Miller, ‘It’s insanity!’: How the ‘Brooks Brothers Riot’ killed the 2000 recount in Miami Washington Post 11/15/2018
- David Moore, How to Steal an Election: The Inside Story of How George Bush's Brother and FOX Network Miscalled the 2000 Election and Changed the Course of History (2006)
- Wade Payson-Denney, So, who really won? What the Bush v. Gore studies showed CNN 10/31/2015
- Jon Schwarz, Democrats Should Remember Al Gore Won Foria in 2000 But Lost the Presidency With a Pre-Emptive Surrender The Intercept 11/10/2018
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