Bleeding Florida. - Review - book review

Down and Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency, by Jake Tapper (Little, Brown, 514 pp., $24.95)

Bush v. Gore: The Court Cases and the Commentary, edited by E. J. Dionne Jr. and William Kristol (Brookings, 344 pp., $15.95)

The Florida election battle seems long gone, and yet still very much with us. If the details have gone fuzzy and one of its combatants is safely in the White House (turning in by 10 every night), the Florida controversy continues to have the gravitational force of a dark star, not always visible to the naked eye, but exerting a powerful pull nonetheless. If the Republicans lose Congress next year, the Florida recount will be an important subtext, as the Left rallies its rank and file by waving the bloody chad. Though most of us have "moved on," the Left's obsession with Florida has helped it cement an impression that the result was essentially larcenous, with the U.S. Supreme Court's fingerprints all over it.

Two new books, in very different ways, revisit the scene of the supposed crime. Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne have coedited a Florida primer, reproducing the court cases and journalistic commentary. Jake Tapper, a buzzy liberal political writer for Salon and quick-witted TV pundit, has written a 500-page book of original reportage. If Florida was stolen, evidence of the theft ought to show up somewhere in the pages of these books-but it never does. So hold the police tape.

If you want to know what Gore aide Michael Whouley's assistant Donnie Fowler ate at the Palm Beach Denny's at 12:20 a.m. the Thursday after the election, Tapper's book is for you. He has written an admirably substantial book, especially given the time constraints he was under. But 500 pages on, it's not clear why so much sheer reportorial detail is necessary. Tapper is guilty of Woodwardism run amok, reproducing conversations apparently for no reason other than that they are in his notebooks, but without Woodward's saving grace of at least reproducing dialogue from the highest levels of government or making a blockbuster revelation.

Here's a you-are-there snippet from Tapper, involving the date of a hearing early in the controversy:

"I think that's tomorrow," [one Gore lawyer] says. "Tuesday."

"Well, I've got a reporter on the phone here who says it's today" [says a Gore aide]. . . .

"Is the hearing today?" [the first Gore lawyer] asks.

"No, it's tomorrow," [another Gore lawyer] says.

"I think it's today," [the first Gore lawyer] disagrees. "Check it out."

[Yet another lawyer] calls the court clerk. The hearing is today, in half an hour.

Indeed, Tapper manages to tell us where just about every lawyer on either side was when he got the call to join the fight. To his credit, however, Tapper does turn up some interesting details. For instance, Gore honcho Bill Daley was driven nuts by Republicans' dumping on his father's record of-ahem-not-so-good government. After Republican representative Curt Weldon makes a disparaging reference to the paterfamilias, Daley places angry calls to the congressman's office for eleven days running (Weldon doesn't call back). After Bob Dole knocks the memory of the late, great mayor, Daley says of the Viagra pitchman, in a brutal but funny putdown: "We all knew he was dysfunctional from the waist down. Now we know he's dysfunctional from the shoulders up, too."

If it isn't newsy revelations every other page, you might suppose, it must be Tapper's freewheeling "gonzo journalism" that justifies his 500 pages. But his style is a tame thing, with no manic creativity or keyboard-rattling anger. His method boils down to five essential elements (follow them and perhaps you too can write for Salon): 1) don't write that people are "excited" or "angry"; write that they are "jazzed" or "pissed"; 2) use the word "bull****" liberally; 3) use lots of chapter headings with the F-word in them; 4) employ a two-word putdown, rendered as a full sentence-"But whatever"-for any spin or argument you find wanting; and 5) affect a world-weary, pox-on-all- their-houses detachment.

A 500-page book should have something to say. Tapper's only insight is that both the Gore and Bush teams are liars and hypocrites. To his credit, he nails both sides rather effectively. He doesn't buy the Gore "count-every-vote" mantra. The Gore team only wanted to pursue "undervotes"-punchcard ballots with no presidential vote recorded-in four selected Democratic counties. Critics of Bush could say that, in Florida, W. was attempting to preserve a legalistic artifact, a final count that didn't include every last vote cast in the state. But Gore was attempting to do exactly the same thing, except that his effort to achieve a particular legalistic result depended on defying and changing state law. As it turns out, Gore's narrow-gauge strategy-count all the votes, but just in four heavily Democratic counties-was a mistake, as subsequent media recounts have shown that the votes weren't there for him after all (at least if a reasonable standard for recounts was applied, which, of course, was never guaranteed).