Democrats at a press conference in Miami Friday night
Whose election is it — the politicians or the lawyers?
Next week belongs to the lawyers, with Gore still trying to hold onto Miami-Dade and Bush still hoping Friday will see the Supremes turn back the clock to November 14. But Sunday is a politicians' day, with nothing stopping Katherine Harris from standing up at 5 p.m. and announcing a winner of the numbers war on the ground. A war that now won't settle much except giving America's cable-news hounds a new number to put a question mark after.
The Ground War
Broward County, now done with its ballot-by-ballot scrutiny of 1,800 disputed ballots, has turned up 583 net votes for Gore. Palm Beach, about half-done with its own stack of 9,500 questionables, has turned up a net of 46 for Gore. For a while, the canvassing board thought it wouldn't be done in time, and sent an extension request to Katherine Harris. Legally, Harris could play it cool by not showing up for work and just letting Palm Beach turn in its numbers Monday morning. Nobody's expecting her to do that, though, and the board now hopes to be finished by 5 p.m.
Whatever number they wind up with may not be good enough for Al Gore. David Boies, the veep's head lawyer and best spinner, says he'll get up early on Monday morning and add Palm Beach to next week's Miami-Dade fight — because he doesn't like the way the dimpled chads are being treated by the county's canvassing board. (They're being counted, but only if the voter poked some other dimples too.)
Bush, meanwhile, is taking full advantage of the Sunday, November 26 deadline he still claims is illegal. His legal team dropped their suit in Leon County Court on Saturday and will now go to GOP counties one by one to demand the addition of military-heavy stacks of disallowed absentee ballots to certified totals. Six have already gone along and added 44 net votes for Bush.
A new fight is brewing in Nassau County, in the state's northeastern corner, where the canvassing board voted to certify the returns announced on election night because they'd missed about 200 presidential ballots in the first recount. That's 52 votes for Bush, and a new lawsuit for Democratic lawyers.
The Hearts-and-Minds War
All this line-blurring subjectivity would be public-relations problem for Bush if the Supreme Court hadn't already relieved him of that soft spot in his normally well-forged message. Let them make sense of it all. In taking the case Friday, the Supremes brushed off Bush's flimsiest complaint, that non-hand-counted counties were somehow being deprived of their rights when it was his campaign that decided not to include them in the first place. And now Bush is free to drill for votes in promising places right along with Gore — if he wins in the Supreme Court, he'll happily toss them. If he loses, he'll definitely need them.
Bush's team had irony-watchers cackling when they took a state Supreme Court to federal courts for a scolding, but all they really wanted was to keep their victory in the hands of Florida's elected officials. And the convenient fact that those officials are staunchly Republican shouldn't deter the Supreme Court from doing its job: helping a confused country find the bottom line.
The bigger p.r. problem for the Republicans right now may be their good soldiers, who are already catching Democratic flak for reportedly strong-arming a timid Miami-Dade canvassing board into quitting its hand count on Wednesday. The board did not see fit to mention any thuggery in their official explanation, but when a brick gets thrown through the window of the Broward County Democratic party office with a note attached reading "We will not tolerate any illegal government," that is not the art of sweet democratic suasion.
The other Hobson's choice
It could go either way. A court obsessed with states' rights might find it quite natural to defend the right of the Florida legislature to write and enforce a body of election law that is, shall we say, eminently disputable. After all, there's nothing unconstitutional about confusing legislation. (Suggestion for the next state congress: Leave the deadlines in place, but make the hand counts more manageable by confining them to ballots not read by the machines. And if that doesn't work, buy new machines.) Then again, the high court might side with Gore's insistence that a state Supreme Court deserves the final say. And, by the way, the court still wants to know from both sides what they'd recommend as a solution.
We might know the outcome by Friday. Ninety minutes of arguments (which two Florida GOPers want to get in on) start at 10 a.m., and Rehnquist has a reputation for fast turnarounds. If the Justices go with Bush, it's all over; if they go with Gore it could start all over again, with Bush likely to turn to the lawmakers in Florida (and maybe Washington) for help and Gore continuing to ride Boies all the way to the White House.
The blessing of the Supremes pulls a lot of weight in this country, and their voice might be loud enough to force one of these guys to the sidelines. But the presidency is still an elected office, and both men will want the public's blessing too, no matter how badly those voters botched the job the first time around. And in a week, America will get to mull the same choice their highest court has: Lawyers or politicians.
Talk about the lesser of two evils. Or the evil of two lessers.