After George W. Bush won Florida in 2000--O.K., I apologize to my Democrat readers for legitimizing Bush by using the word won. Also, I apologize to the Republicans for delegitimizing Bush by apologizing to the Democrats ...
This is what Florida has done to us. Nearly eight years after Bush--um, "became President"? Can we agree on that?--the Florida recount still grips our politics, down to its semantics. To choose a verb is to take sides. Florida is not just a state but a state of mind: the widely held attitude that the game is rigged (by the courts, the media, the voting machines ...) and that any close election is suspect. Florida looms over politics like the Alamo, the Maine and the grassy knoll all rolled into one.
On May 25, an HBO docudrama about the legal-political battle between Bush and Al Gore will remind us of all that again. You might think that HBO would have timed Recount to air around Election Day. As it turns out, the network could not have scheduled the movie better. The Democratic primary, like the Florida election, has turned out close enough that it must be decided by people whom nobody voted for--this time superdelegates, not Supreme Court Justices. With the old electoral wounds being ripped open, here comes Recount like a brimming shaker of salt.
Even if the primary is settled by the time Recount airs (or by the time you read this), some Democrats will feel bitter and cheated and will invoke the powerful language of 2000 all over again. If Barack Obama gets the nomination, the anger will center on the primaries in Michigan and you-know-where. (Democrats! Disenfranchised! In Florida! The blog posts write themselves.) Hillary Clinton's camp has already stepped up the "count every vote" talk. If it's Clinton, the protests will be that, as in 2000--when thousands of black Floridians were struck from voter rolls--African Americans were overruled and the popular-vote leader denied. That there are several competing gauges of legitimacy only makes recriminations more likely.
Recount is told largely from the Gore camp's perspective; the Dems even get the marginally bigger stars--Kevin Spacey, Denis Leary and Ed Begley Jr. to the Republicans' Laura Dern, Tom Wilkinson and Bob Balaban. When a Florida court decision holds out hope for Gore, stirring music swells. When Bush recount honcho James Baker III (Wilkinson) walks onscreen, the sound track all but plays Darth Vader's theme.
But it makes sense for Recount to be Dem-centric. True, Florida was bipartisan in feeding cynicism about institutions--politics, the courts, the media. (There's a montage of the networks calling the state for Gore, then Bush, then no one.) But it had the greatest effect on the Democratic psyche, as will happen after you lose an election. (My apologies for writing "lose." And "election.")
Still, Recount portrays Republicans as not so much stealing the election as getting lucky (with the Palm Beach "butterfly" ballot that led seniors to accidentally pick Pat Buchanan over Gore), then aggressively going after the jump ball in the media, the courts and the streets. In Recount, the enemy is often Democrats. Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher (John Hurt), elder statesman of Gore's recount effort, is portrayed as a wet noodle, fretting about honorable compromise while Baker goes to the mattresses. Gore's running mate, Joe Lieberman, hands the Bush team a gift by declaring that challenged military ballots should be counted. With friends like these, who needs Karl Rove?
Seen this way, Recount is more important for what it says about intra-Democratic politics than about the interparty battle. (Bush and Gore appear only in clips, in shots from behind or as off-camera voices.) As Gore's brass-knuckled campaign staff (Spacey as recount captain Ron Klain and Leary as field director Michael Whouley) urge the likes of Christopher to fight GOP fire with fire, you can see the seeds of the schism between netroots activists and Establishment Dems. The activists regard their colleagues as sellouts or wusses, too refined to throw a punch and too concerned about the mainstream media's approbation.
Through Gore's defeat, Recount hints at the emergence of the Democrats of 2008. Clinton and Obama have each argued that they know the post-Florida way to win: Obama by embracing the grass roots, Clinton by promising to whale on the Republicans. But with those lessons came a zeitgeist that views elections as dirty unless proved otherwise. How to marshal the spirit of '00 rather than be destroyed by it will be the challenge for whichever candidate wins. And I apologize in advance for using that verb.
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1 comment:
The film is fantasy wrapped in documentary SaranWrap. Truthiness ambodied.
The script is the first effort of one Danny Strong, heretofore best known for appearances in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Gilmore Girls. Needless to say, Danny was looking to carve a new career path. He obviously decided that sexing up the facts of the 2000 recount was the way to draw some attention. And HBO bit. The result? A melange of fact and fiction that does injustice to both. His storyline has Bush winning the recount because a bunch of Dems on the ground in Tallahassee (save and except for one brave warrior) wimped out. Never mind that all of the key decisions were made by one guy and one guy only--Al Gore. Never mind that every Democratic operative in Florida worked his or her heart out to keep the GOP from stealing the election. No. For Mr. Strong needed wimps--and he selected Warren Christopher and Bill Daley for the roles.
It took some genuine chutzpah to bring it off.In the NYT story published yesterday, Strong admits to waiting to contact Christopher until the the day the scenes involving his character were shot. He also admits not giving Christopher a copy of the script, even though he did so for Jim Baker and Ron Klain,who were also allowed to give notes and to veto lines and scenes. Danny wants us to believe he had the time to find and commission Christopher’s tailor to make a suit for Christopher’s character, but was too busy to talk to the guy whose measurements he was using. Strong would have been better advised to make his first screenwriting foray a docudrama about what “really” happened on the Buffy set.
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