The key node is Baker to Cheney - the former Secretaries of State and Defense under President Bush, two men who fought the Gulf War together in 1991 and are fighting the Florida war together now. On the day after the election, Baker, who has been an occasional adviser to the son this year, was all set to go hunting in Spain with an eclectic group: Bush's father, the former President, along with Schwarzkopf, former Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight and King Juan Carlos. Then Baker got a call from Bush campaign chairman Don Evans. "I hope you don't think this is a crazy idea," Evans said, "but would you be open to leading our Florida team?" Baker said sure. He's used to getting the we-need-you call from the Bushes, and though he expects no role in a possible Bush Administration, he's pleased to be helping. "Cheney and Baker are running this show," says an official. "They are making decisions and telling W., 'This is the deal.' I'm not saying it's bad. That's how Reagan did it."
Gore is far more connected than Bush - an adviser describes sending Gore an e-mail and being floored when the reply came back "in about 10 seconds." And Gore manages his team in a far more controlling manner. Aides receive several e-mails a day from the boss, asking, What's new? What's going on? What are you hearing? Although he didn't personally recruit Microsoft slayer David Boies to his legal team (he didn't have a conversation with Boies until the lawyer was on the ground in Tallahassee), he attends to most everything else. Says a senior adviser: "He has to own this thing."
In so doing, Gore has finally pulled off something he couldn't manage during the campaign: corralling people from all the far-flung provinces of his party and harnessing them into an effective team. In his final lunge for the White House, he has put aside his doubts about all the people whose complete loyalty he could never count on. He has brought in Bob Bauer, the best election-law mind in America (and a Bill Bradley guy); Boies, one of the few players who appears to be thoroughly enjoying himself but with whom Gore has no prior relationship; and onetime archrivals Jack Corrigan and John Sasso, cutthroat campaign operators with whom Gore tangled in 1988. "We finally got the best people to do their jobs irrespective of their drawbacks," says an aide. "We never got that done in the campaign."
Gore, who can often be moody and stressed, has been eerily confident amid the pressure, "ridiculously upbeat," as an aide puts it. "He thinks he's gonna win. He has very little doubt." Instead of doing what he normally does in meetings - sucking the oxygen out of the room - Gore has been energizing the conference calls and emergency strategy sessions. When an adviser says, "Gore has been really great," he sounds almost surprised.
The Democratic legal team spent most of the week in what one lawyer calls "triage," as Harris issued new opinions and set new deadlines almost daily, and sometimes hourly, most of them designed to delay the hand recounts until they became moot. At first, the Gore lawyers were primed for battle, but by Tuesday night the mood turned somber. Daley was so tired that he began to resemble Bert the Muppet. Christopher at times looked absolutely ancient. As their anger and frustration rose, Harris became the woman they loved to hate, just as she did for Democrats around the country. If she wasn't taking her orders from Austin - and she swears she was not - she might as well have been, since her every decision furthered Bush's goal. Members of Gore's legal team pushed all week to go after her in the courts, if not for possible election-law violations, then for breaking the Sunshine law, because her Elections Canvassing Commission met in secret. But Christopher vetoed the idea - until Saturday, when Gore's supreme-court brief called her decisions "Kafkaesque."
The Gore camp claims to have been stunned by Harris' rashness in refusing all recounts and not maintaining a pose of impartiality. Instead, she banked the fires in all three counties - and Gore's folks can't believe Bush let her do it. "They just totally blew her credibility," says a Gore adviser. "If they had been 10% less brazen, they'd be 50% better off."