Spinning Out of Control

by David Corn

No surprise there; the electoral system is managed by Democrats and Republicans. With the grandest political prize at stake, every utterance from the bipolar political class was suspect. Is there any doubt that had the circumstances been reversed the Democrats would have been arguing the case for finality and Republicans would have been praising the noble, age-old tradition of hand-counting ballots? If hand-counts were ordered only in Republican-leaning counties, wouldnât the Gore-ites have gone crazy? If Gore had squeaked past Bush with 300 votes, wouldn't the Bushies have petitioned for one moâ count?

A decision of a Democratic secretary of state would not have appeared more independent than that of Katherine Harris, the Bush campaign state co-chair, who ruled there was no reason for several Florida counties to conduct a manual recount of their ballots. (So much for the Republican notion of trusting people, not government bureaucrats. By the way, during the 1998 campaign, Harris, who had been ensnared in a serious money-and-politics scandal, vowed to "depoliticize" Florida'sÊ Department of State.)

There was no escaping politics; there were few, if any, independent voices to provide relief. The election provoked a mean-spirited catfight between Ds and Rs, but both parties have happily colluded over the years to freeze out other parties, working together to enact legislation that creates high hurdles for third-party ballot access. Think ofÊ the post-election conflict as two mob families battling for dominance in the territory they jointly control.

Never has the spin been so fast and furious. One night, as I sat in a dark television studio, waiting my turn to pontificate, I watched Senator Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, on theÊ monitor. He was going on about how people were "scared" and the "process" had to be concluded.

Scared? Republicans feared Gore in the White House and Democrats were horrified by a Bush win, but what average citizen was actually scared by a delay in pronouncing a winner?

And Benjamin Ginsberg, the Bush campaign's lead attorney, was quite busy arguing against a manual recount, as if such a practice was akin to tarot-card reading and would doom the nation. But six years ago, Ginsberg defended a Republican congressional candidate who had lost by four votes and demanded a hand count and a new election. Ginsberg won him a recount but no new election, and the fellow ended up losing by 21 votes.

Do-anything-to-win Democrats bitched about the actions of a Republican secretary of state; do-anything-to-win Republicans groused about the actions of Democratic elections officials. Both sides were right.

One of the more amusing elements of the spin-off was that each campaign trotted out lawyers they presented as trustworthy graybeards -- former Secretary of State James Baker for the Republicans, and former Secretary of State Warren Christopher for the Democrats. But why should the public heed the assertions of either of these supposed men of honor? Itâs not only that each one is a party loyalist. Both are corporate lawyers who have done well as hired-guns.

In April of 1993, merely five months after President Bush was dis-elected, Baker and Neil and Marvin Bush -- brothers of George W. -- accompanied the former president to Kuwait, where they all tried to cash in. Baker attempted to exploit his tenure as Bush's Secretary of State -- during which he crafted the coalition that pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait -- by winning Kuwait government contracts worth billions of dollars for the Enron Corporation, the largest natural-gas-pipeline company in the United States. Kuwait was then looking to rebuild power plants destroyed during the Gulf War, and Baker had signed up as a consultant to Enron. As Seymour Hersh wrote in _The New Yorker_, "It has long been a commonplace of American life that private gains follow from connections made during years of public service; however, there is a sense, too, that certain things -- certain types of schemes and deals -- are simply beyond the bounds of decency. In seeking contracts to rebuild Kuwait so soon after American men and women risked their lives there -- in using their sacrifice as a kind of calling card -- haven't Baker, the two Bush sons, and the rest transgressed those bounds?"

Gore's main suit, Warren Christopher, is a familiar Washington animal. He smoothly moves back and forth between high-profile government posts and a top-level perch at O'Melveny & Myers, a corporate law firm that, among other activities, lobbies for the Civil Justice Reform Group (an association of 60 large corporations angling for tort reform), the Coalition for Asbestos Resolution (a pro-industry front group), the Coalition for Truth in Environmental Marketing (a collection of large multinational firms opposed to labeling products with eco-seals), the Free Trade Lumber Council (a Canadian group looking to overturn US restrictions on imported timber), MacMillan Bloedel (a lumber company cited for numerous environmental law violations), Samsung, the Federal National Mortgage Association, Advanced Micro Devices, Lockheed Martin, GTE, and Cigna. Christopher isn't listed as a lobbyist for any of these outfits -- most of which would probably relish a George W. Bush Administration -- but he is quite comfortable swimming (and earning much money) among the sharks of O'Melveny & Myers.

Christopher delivered one of the early classic lines of the Clinton era. During the 1992 campaign, Candidate Bill vehemently attacked the Bush Administration for barring Haitians, who were fleeing poverty and a military dictatorship, from obtaining political asylum in the United States. Yet within two months of taking office, Clinton flip-flopped and supported the Bush policy he had assailed as cruel and inhuman. This is how wise-man Christopher explained the switch: "I don't suppose you'd want anybody to keep a campaign promise if it was a very unsound policy."

Also in Gore's legal posse is Lloyd Cutler, who is often identified in the media as a "longtime presidential counsel." But he has spent more time as a lobbyist. His lobbying firm -- one of the most influential in Washington -- represents Amgen, Boeing, the Business Roundtable, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Citibank, the Florida Sugar Cane League, Genzyme, the Health Industry Manufacturers Association, McDonalds, Merrill Lynch, Time Warner, and many other corporations. As a lobbyist, naturally, Cutler strives hard to serve the private interest, not the public interest. And there's Kendall Coffey, who was a lead attorney for Elian Gonzalez's Miami relatives during _that_ circus. He resigned as US attorney in South Florida after it was reported he had bitten a nude dancer on the arm at a Miami strip club.

Why should the public be impressed by any of these guys when they stride before the television cameras and claim the high ground? And where's Johnny Cochran? ("If the chad doesn't fit, you must acquit.") This is tussle between two camps with no credibility.

Bush summed up this crucial argument when, during a robotic mini-address to the nation, he claimed a manual recount "introduces human error" and is "arbitrary and chaotic." He maintained "additional counting will make the process less accurate." The Gore people, of course, asserted the opposite.

And the breathless media did a lousy job of mediating this portion of the dispute. (An aside about the media: when a booker from CNBC asked me to appear on the network, she noted that her producer had said, "We want people who will be yelling at each other.") Many pundits adopted the Republicans' language on the subject of manual recounts. Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly declared, "The point everyone should understand is this -- a hand count of votes anywhere in the United States runs a huge risk of being dishonest. Machines are not dishonest....This country is being torn apart now by ideological zealots."

Let's turn to the experts. Two officials of the Association for Computer Machinery -- Lauren Weinstein and Peter Neumann -- issued a statement regarding hand-counts. (Neumann is one of the top computer scientists in the country.) The two wrote, "As is well known to election officials and voting system vendors, but historically not advertised to the public at large, all voting systems are subject to some degree of error -- electronic and mechanical systems alike. Punchcard-based systems are no exception....In general, so long as the interested parties both have observers participating in manual recounts to assure a consensus on the interpretation and tabulation of the cards, manual recounts provide the MOST reliable mechanism for counting these cards accurately, particularly due to the common hanging chad problem....Indeed, manual counting is still prevalent today in England and Germany."

(Hand-counts, as the Democrats were fast to point out, are used in Texas. After the recent election, a Republican who lost a state representative race by 2000 votes asked for a hand count of the punchcard ballots, and the Texas secretary of state approved the request.)

Weinstein and Neumann recommended that all votes in Florida be counted manually, a position the Gore gang adopted late in the game. "If the will of the voters is not to be subjugated to technical flaws over which they have no control," the two said, "this would be the only fair course." So whose word should one accept, that of Bush spinner Karen Hughes -- who repeatedly attacked the hand-count -- or that of prominent computer and systems experts?

The email observed, "Remember, the goal of the New World Order shadow government and its Big TV Networks is NOT speed, NOT thoroughness, NOT logic, NOT the interest of the citizen -- it is simply the criminal goal of making sure they can rig the election."

This, I promise you, is not a joke. But the conspiracy crowd is right to believe that fairness is tough to find in a system run -- if not rigged -- exclusively by Democrats and Republicans. Who watches the vote-counters, if not the Democrats and the Republicans? And which sides is to be trusted -- particularly when each adopt situational principles and engage in relentless spinning? Well, neither -- and the two parties have no one to complain to about that but themselves.