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He has made his reputation not by showboating on Geraldo but by reducing complex litigation to understandable stories, which he tells in his flat Midwestern tone. Boies likes the concrete. On Friday he introduced a developer of the Votamatic machine, William Rouverol, 83, to explain how his imperfect machine is more likely to produce dimpled chads in the vote for President than for other offices, because that column gets clogged by getting the most use and therefore harder to punch out cleanly as the day goes on. Boies took special delight in his statistician, a Yale professor resembling Professor Irwin Corey, who pointed out that the undervote in counties that used punch cards was five times as high as that in counties that used other methods. But Boies has also shown uncharacteristic passion in the election battle. Alarmed that "a mob stormed the canvassing board" in Miami to stop the count, he and Gore decided, in an 11 a.m. phone call on Friday, to file a challenge to the vote results after they are certified Sunday.
Though he's a guy who so hates getting up in the morning that his wife has to phone to make sure he hasn't slept through his wake-up call, Boies bounds through a day that begins at 5:30 with the three morning news shows, continues through legal and political strategy meetings and ends with an appearance on Nightline. At a dinner squeezed in after The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and before Larry King, he orders a hamburger with absolutely nothing on it, a fetish of the unapologetic red-meat eater who doesn't want so much as a sprig of parsley between the bun and the burger. While he likes chilled Mumm champagne and gourmet cuisine on bike trips in Provence with his family, he can live for days on pretzels and Diet Coke. When he finds out the restaurant has his favorite dessert, chocolate ice cream, he digs into it with as much relish as if Miami-Dade had just started counting again.