Recount

There are some things that just get your blood pressure up when you remember them. An event a lifetime ago can make one feel like it just happened when it is remembered. Humans I think are programmed to remember loss and feelings of being treated unjustly much more than feelings of happiness and contentment. It stands to reason, for most of us days that we experience loss and what we perceive as unfair behavior are not everyday occurences. I guess we should consider that a person who remembers vividly a very happy experience might not have had as many of those to paint his memory banks with.

My point is that the election of the year 2000 is on of those events for me. I have a friend who to this day remembers a high school basketball game in which the timekeeper messed up preventing an important win against an arch rival. We all have these events.

I believe that in their heart of hearts most people who favored Bush know that were all the votes counted in Florida in 2000 that Bush would have lost. Now their are many arguments to mitigate this fact. They range from Gore probably stole other states, that's why we put the Justices in, to, after Gore became a caricature of himself, did you really want that guy to be President during 9/11.

I will not visit that history and ask pertinent questions like if Gore had been in office would there have even been a 9/11? They are inflammatory, cannot be argued with any certainty, and most positions are set in stone.


Still for me reading Jeffrey Toobin's excellent book on the 2000 Florida election and watching a movie like this HBO production are exercises in masochism. In short they drive me nuts and literally make me sick to my stomach.

In this wonderfully acted movie Kevin Spacey, a very underrated actor, plays Ron Klam a Democratic strategist who spearheads the Gore forces in Florida. Equally strong is Tom Wilkinson who plays James Baker. Playing Katherine Harris is Laura Dern in a performance that is honestly a bit over the top. I suppose it is possible that Harris was that ill prepared for the national spotlight and was likely led like a puppy dog by the Bush forces but her performance to me is a little unsettling, if this is an approximation of the truth it makes me feel worse to know it.


The movie moves crisply offering excellent dialogue and a full representation of the event a month after the election. In the end Rom Klam feels like he let the Vice President down by not winning but he was handicapped from the beginning. As the movie shows and Toobin's book cites the Democrats in choosing Warren Christopher as their original team leader in Florida brought in a man who was more in love with the process than the result. The Republicans led by Baker knew right away that this was a street fight and that people would only remember who won, not how they won. With this advantage the Republicans had all the advantages. With the state wired with Republicans it is amazing that the recount process got off the ground.


Many questions will never be answered. Who won? Both sides are confident they did, it does not really matter now. More important today is why did this happen. The purging of 20,000 people mostly black, fron the voter rolls, the foolish Butterfly ballot that had Pat Buchanan winning the Jewish vote in Palm Beach. The questions go on and on.


We will never know the whole truth but what we do know is history is written by the winners. Bush wrote the history. If it could or should have been a parallel history is something historians will be fighting about for the next hundred years.

This movie is an excellent telling of the events. If you will excuse me my blood is boiling, I need to go meditate.