DOWN & DIRTY: The Plot to Steal the Presidency.

DOWN & DIRTY: The Plot to Steal the Presidency

by Jake Tapper 

Little, Brown & Co. $24.95

MAYBE IT'S TOO SOON. I LOVED covering the Florida recount mess, but I don't love reading about it now. The insanity of the whole thing just needs to settle a bit more. Then, after all the news organizations have finished their own counts and we see more clearly from President Bush's presidency how high the stakes were, a real historian will come along and tell us what it all meant.

In the meantime, we have Jake Tapper, who covers politics for Salon, emptying his notebook in book form, so anxious to be the first out of the gate that he harms his otherwise good reputation in the process. It's not just that my name is misspelled in the index and my comments taken out of context in a footnote; there's a slapdash and padded quality to this book that detracts from some of the good Florida reporting within it. Books are not supposed to be rough draft Internet dispatches thrown between hard covers.

The impressionistic present tense sounds cyberhip and immediate, but it's sometimes bogus. And Bush honcho Ed Gillespie is seen on the ground Monday and Tuesday, steering the orchestrated ugliness. One of Bush's media advisers, swingin' Smart Stevens, is buzzing around somewhere, as well," Tapper writes on page 259. Gillespie has been "seen" by whom? Where? Doing what exactly? Tapper never shys. As for Stevens, he told me recently he did his swingin' up in Vermont and never set foot in Florida during the entire post-election period.

Tapper's only scoop--and only support for his charge of the illegal "plot" mentioned in the title--is that an unnamed Republican operative told him that, on November 10th or 11th, a conference call was held in which word was passed to get GOP operatives to encourage overseas military personnel to send in their absentee ballots--in other words, to vote after the election.

The circumstantial evidence that something sleazy happened here is convincing. More than 14,000 overseas military ballots arrived legitimately by Election Day. Because of the ferocious and highly successful GOP efforts to label the Gore campaign as anti-military for even thinking of a challenge to military absentee ballots, the postmarks on those dribbling in afterwards were not considered. But despite huge publicity about the disputed outcome, only 446 additional such military ballots arrived in the first six days after the election. Then suddenly more than 6,000 flowed in, most of them for Bush.

Hmmm. Very suspicious. But instead of taking this tip and reporting the hell out of it--calling everyone who might have been in on the conference call and tracking as many GOP operatives on or near military bases as he could find--Tapper just drops it in for a half page at the end of a chapter and writes that the lack of subpoena power prevents him from tracking it any further. He's right that it's tough to prove something like this, but he doesn't even appear to try.

The same thing applies to lots of other tantalizing information in this book. In a footnote, for instance, we learn that Florida Assistant Attorney General Paul Hancock says a Florida Highway Patrol checkpoint in Tallahassee that prevented some African-American motorists from getting to the polls "was not done in accordance with normal procedure." Why not? Maybe another reporter will come along and dig deeper on this and the other suspicious Election Day activities to which Tapper devotes only a chapter.

Tapper does, however, offer some new details, especially from inside the God-forsaken Gore camp. Many pundit types (myself included) were screaming as loudly as we could in the 48 hours after the election that Gore should seek a recount in all 67 counties. Gore himself took a crucial week to make the same proposal, and then only as part of a deal where Bush would be allowed to request it. As Tapper recognizes, this was the central tactical error that may well have cost Gore the presidency. The insistence on only requesting recounts in heavily Democratic counties made Gore's "count every vote" mantra sound hollow. It also turns out that the margin Gore needed was not in "undervotes" in Miami-Dade, Broward, and. Palm Beach but in "overvotes" in mostly GOP counties spread across the state. Tiny Lake County, for instance, gave Gore more than 130 overvotes. If Gore had done the right and fair thing from the beginning, he might have won.

I learned in Tapper's book that, in fact, Gore wanted to do just that four days after the election, but was talked out of it by Joe Lieberman and Ron Klain. Warren Christopher and Bill Daley were among the others urging Gore to focus on the Democratic counties where they thought the extra votes were. Democratic operatives Charlie Baker and Jill Alper were also wrong. Interestingly, the ones pushing for statewide recounts--Chris Sautter and Jack Young--were the operatives with the most recount experience from other campaigns, but they didn't have the status to push their case.

In defending themselves now, Gore aides say that state law required them to request recounts within 72 hours in 67 different counties with different rules--logistically impossible. But if a statewide handcount had been their consistent message before the Florida Supreme Court (the court early on asked David Boies if he wanted one, and Boies said it was up to Bush), the court would likely have ordered it. That is only one of the scattershot what-ifs that will resonate for years from this excruciating period of history.

JONATHAN ALTER is a Newsweek columnist, NBC News analyst, and contributing editor of the Washington Monthly.