Down & Dirty by Jake Tapper Read Free Book Online Page A

the county, as far west as you can get without standing in the Everglades. It’s a place
     of wealth and power, where several members of the Miami Dolphins live. Interstate 595 was built for Weston.
    McCartney and Pozzuoli think something’s amiss. Where are the Weston ballots?! Have they been stolen? Are they going to be
     counted?!Have they even arrived yet?! Carroll explains that it’s no big mystery, Weston is forty-five to sixty minutes away, and it’s
     not as if there are two deputies assigned for each of the county’s 609 precincts. Each team is assigned several precincts
     where they’re to pick up and escort the ballots back to the warehouse. The ballots will get there.

    At a party in Washington, D.C., Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor watches Dan Rather give Gore Florida.
    “This is terrible,” she says.
    She rises to get a plate of food. Her husband explains that his wife, a Reagan appointee and former Republican leader of the
     Arizona state senate, wants to retire, but feels that she can do so only if a Republican is in the White House to name her
     successor. 3 But what can she do? She’s had her one vote.

    The press “pool”—the dozen or so members of the press whose turn it is to experience smaller events firsthand, after which
     we have to report back to the larger, more unwieldy, press corps—is bused to the governor’s mansion.
    “He preferred to be at home,” says an aide, Gordon Johndroe, to the pool. “He found his house was more relaxing than the hotel,
     where there was a lot of activity.”
    As the pool waits for the call from Bush to allow us to walk in to see him, big news comes in via cell phone. One of the networks
     is about to call Pennsylvania for Gore, filling the last third of the Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania trifecta that is
     essential to a Gore victory.
    Minutes later, as I walk into the upstairs living room of the governor’s mansion, Bush doesn’t look so panicky. He’s sitting
     with his wife and parents, and though a handful of reporters swarms in—and a cameraman knocks over a vase, spilling water
     and flowers all over the place—Bush stays cool.
    Appearances mean so much in the Bush campaign plan. His easygoing demeanor, as with his campaign’s bold victory predictions,
     is all about conveying an air of inevitability. And that’s kind of the story of W. Grandson of one senator, son of a president,
     W. has had a life that’s been largely about coasting, failing upward, from Andover to Yale to Harvard Business School. His
     daddy’s connections got him a cushy spot in the Texas Air National Guard during Vietnam; he started an oil business and ran
     it into the ground, but no matter, because one of his daddy’s friends bailed him out ofthat, too. His daddy’s rich friends helped him raise the dough to be the public face of the partners that bought and ran the
     Texas Rangers. And suddenly he was governor, and then he was the ordained candidate for president, and then he was here, in
     this room.
    “We’re not conceding anything until we see the actual vote,” Bush says on the phone to Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge. “Tom,
     I appreciate your calling.”
    He hangs up.
    “I think Americans oughta wait until all the votes are counted,” Bush says to us. “I don’t believe the projections,” he says,
     about both the Keystone State and Florida. “In states like Florida, I’m gonna wait for them to call all the votes,” he says.
    Jeb, who earlier in the night was saddened and apologetic when the networks handed his state to his brother’s nemesis, has
     had a shift in mood. His political people back home have the race too close to call—at the very worst.
    Jeb shares the news with his brother’s chief strategist, Karl Rove, who is pleased to hear it. He directs his staffers to
     call up the networks and yell at them for their premature projections. Rove thinks that the nets have a double standard—other
     states that Bush