Florida Comes Up Clean

by Emmett Hogan

Jake Tapper must have been on the moon during the Florida recount drama of last year’s election. Only this can explain how his book Down and Dirty: the Plot to Steal the Presidency could have been so fraught with error, speculation, and insinuation.

Mr. Tapper, a Dartmouth grad (class of ’91), is the Washington, DC correspondent for Salon.com, a onetime respectable online journal noted for its sad decline into partisan foofery during the last few months of the presidential election. In the manner of Hunter S. Thompson and others, Mr. Tapper raced to put out a book on the election as soon as the last chad fell. Down and Dirty, however, focuses merely on the Florida recount, not on the election as a whole (and, truth be told, the real story came after election day anyway). It is based on the author’s experiences traipsing around the Sunshine State for those thirty-six bizarre days, and makes no excuses for his own impressions of the whole business. But gonzo journalism this ain’t; in his rush to press, Mr. Tapper has ended up with a book that is short on dispassionate analysis, short even on reflective contemplation, and long on tabloid-esque sensationalism. Mr. Tapper is a mudslinger extraordinaire.

Evidence of the author’s sensationalism can be found in the very title of the book. Nowhere in his tome does he provide any evidence to suggest that there was a ‘plot’ at all – on any side. That very word is poorly applied to the Florida recount. A plot suggests a coordinated plan and hints at a certain degree of subversiveness. But neither Bush nor Gore, nor their respective delegates, was really in the driver’s seat. The whirl of events caught all sides by surprise, and – though they tried desperately to snatch at the reins – both camps were generally at the mercy of events as they unfolded.

The majority of Mr. Tapper’s mud is flung at the GOP. He barely disguises his disdain for many of the main Republican actors in this affair. Ari Fleischer has an "on-again, off-again relationship with the truth" (a comment that doesn’t seem to warrant mentioning for Chris Lahane, Bill Daley, or even Gore himself). The GOP primary battle in South Carolina was "one of the dirtiest personal smear campaigns in modern American political history" – which suggests that Mr. Tapper knows little to nothing about the Kennedy/Nixon race in 1960 or the Bush/Dukakis race in 1988. Former secretary of state and GOP éminence grise James Baker was a "chief antagonist of the American Jewish community [under] President George H. W. Bush." And Mr. Tapper spends almost five pages detailing the irrelevant history of Katherine Harris – more words than he spent on David Boies, Warren Christopher, or even the candidates themselves. His opinion of Republicans is clear.

Mr. Tapper’s idea of impartiality leads him to tear down the other side, too, for good measure. His attacks on the Bush camp involve cries of "Daddy’s boy", charges of ruthlessness, and other such playground drivel that barely concede his loathing of Dubya. His attacks on the Gore camp revolve primarily around the assertions that the Dems are sloppy and disorganized, and that Al Gore himself is about as compelling a figure as a slab of meat. In Mr. Tapper’s world, the Republicans are conniving, and the Democrats are stupid.

But the author is also willing to let the Dems get away with a lot of shady business. The infamous ‘Herron memo’, sent out to Gore operatives by attorney Mark Herron, is not attacked with the gusto it deserves. The memo articulated "how you knock out ballots from military people overseas" – by way of missing postmarks, signatures, and so on. "Poor Mark Herron" was roundly denounced by the media for this shameless and hypocritical bit of chicanery, but Mr. Tapper only refers to it as a "PR jackpot" for the Republicans.

Most importantly, his display of journalistic impartiality suddenly resurrects itself when the two Florida Supreme Court decisions come down. The first of these decisions – a unanimous decision - overturned Harris’ legal duty to certify the returns a week after the election and granted an inexplicable extension of twelve days to the Gore camp’s recount efforts. The second decision, a 4-3 split with a biting dissent from Chief Justice Wells, overturned the ruling of circuit court judge N. Sanders Sauls during the contest phase, and ordered recounts throughout the state. Each of these decisions breathed new life into the frequently moribund Gore campaign; each decision was subsequently overruled by the US Supreme Court. Although he concedes that the decisions were of questionable legality, he never attacks them to the degree that he attacks the US Supreme Court’s decisions. In fairness, though, he does do better on this count than many other left-leaning pundits, whose hypocrisy on this matter is rank.

Down and Dirty is not really a partisan book; as noted, the author happily knocks the Gore camp as well as the Bush camp. But what makes it a bad book is his predilection for seediness. Mr. Tapper, who seems to be one of those journalists who are incurably disillusioned about politics, sees conspiracy around every corner. For this reason, he is frequently disgusted by what he sees. His ire is rightly roused by the slanderous suggestion from an unnamed high-ranking Gore aide – made personally to him – that Katherine Harris and Governor Jeb Bush were having an affair. But by the same token, he has his own conspiratorial bent. He sees the handiwork of Jeb Bush around every corner (Florida, in his terminology, is the ‘Jeberglades’); in his mind, decisions are made because no one wants to cross the don of Florida politics. In fact, Jeb Bush conducted himself admirably throughout the whole ordeal, recusing himself from the state Elections Board, and generally keeping quiet as the storm raged around him. His behavior is to be commended, not attacked because of baseless speculation.

With the supposed Republican ‘riot’ in the recount headquarters in Miami-Dade, too, the author waxes conspiratorial. The Republican demonstrators, whom he calls "geeks," "wimps and fatties", and "socially wanting", supposedly intimidated the canvassing board into halting its recount. Their ‘riot’ in the building, he insinuates, was designed to stop, by force, the counting of ballots. When the board decides to stop counting, Mr. Tapper concludes that the protesters "have accomplished what they came to do." The author draws these conclusions despite the fact that his own book contradicts them. He himself does not think that the rioters were that intimidating at all, as seen by the aforementioned choice words he used to describe them. He barely comments on their reason for being agitated: the canvassing board had decided to move the count to a higher floor, out of sight of the media and observers. This was a flagrant violation of Florida’s Sunshine Laws, which requires all such processes to be held publicly. He notes, but gives no credence to, the fact that each of the counting board triumvirate denied being intimidated, and that they all cited the lack of sufficient time – even under the extension granted by the Florida Supreme Court – to finish the job. But riots make for a better story than logistics, and so Mr. Tapper goes with the former.

More scandalously, however, is Mr. Tapper’s repeated insinuation that the Republicans were up to no good with certain military ballots. He tells the tale of a conference call on or around Veteran’s Day, where one low-ranking GOP aide suggested contacting servicemen and women who had not yet voted and having them send in ballots after the deadline. This did indeed happen, and Mr. Tapper gleefully makes hay from it throughout the book. But what Mr. Tapper omits is that the suggestion was immediately denounced by those involved in the conference call as a ludicrous idea, and it was never brought up again. In Mr. Tapper’s mind, the brainstorming by a low-level peon becomes the basis for a possible conspiracy. This is simply absurd.

A last point – and not a minor one, at that – is the shoddy quality of the book itself. Mr. Tapper has a taste for tastelessness, that seems in many parts to be fed by his aforementioned taste for scandal and innuendo. His style is filled to the brim with sarcasm – you can almost see his eyes rolling in disbelief. He has an appalling propensity for foul language; barely a page goes by without some four-letter word cropping up. The table of contents itself has four swear words. Combine with this the persistent use of the present tense, and the book reads like a drunken bar-room tirade. It is not eloquent; it is not poignant. It is a five-hundred page aimless rant.

Perhaps most disturbingly, Mr. Tapper falls woefully short on documenting his sources. In his preface, he thanks the scores of people – including many very important players – who granted him interviews. Yet his list of citations includes only 23 (!) footnotes for the entire book. Given that many parts of the book recount entire conversations, this is substantial grounds for skepticism. Given, furthermore, that Mr. Tapper thrives on conspiracy, this is also substantial grounds for concern. Apparently, the ideals of the Dartmouth Honor Code did not stick with him after graduation. (A relevant point: Mr. Tapper was a contributor for the Daily Dartmouth during his time in Hanover. Draw your own conclusions.)

Mr. Tapper’s skepticism about politics should not be fueled by the Florida recount affair. It was a messy affair, to be sure. But it was never really dirty. Both sides did what they could—who could expect any different?—under extremely unique and extremely frustrating circumstances. The vote was so very close, and the terrain so very confused; who could expect anything pro forma from such circumstances? The real story of the Florida drama is what didn’t happen: no riots, no fraud, no descent into a maelstrom of anarchy that one would expect in many other democracies, even supposedly strong ones. The real story is that we survived, in excellent shape. This is the story that Jake Tapper ignores.