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Title: Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election by Jeffrey Toobin ISBN: 0375507086 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 02 October, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.37
Rating: 4
Summary: luck, dubya and democracy
Comment: Molly Ivens once wrote GW Bush is so lucky "if they hung him the rope would break." Nothing comes closer to fulfilling that claim than the 2000 Florida presidential election. No one who has seriously considered the butterfly ballots, questionable absentee ballots, failure of state officials to follow their own laws and rules, and mechanical problems with that election would conclude a majority of Florida's voters intended to vote for Bush. Jeffrey Toobin succintly summarizes the good, the bad and the ugly of the events that led democracy away from the will of the people to the will of five Supreme Court justices.
Unlike (perhaps) the other reviewers of this book, I have hands-on experience with punch-card ballot counting machines, software and procedures. I can say without qualification if you want to be absolutely sure, you have to look at the ballots themselves. The voting machines mis-calibrate, voters and others mishandle the cards, the counting machines jam possibly losing or double-counting a ballot. Anyone who has used a copier has a sense of how much trust we should place in these devices.
Toobin briefly describes the events, legal issues, political maneuvering and, in particular, the failure of Florida's elected officials to do the jobs the citizens entrusted to them. He has criticism for many of the participants and particularly Katherine Harris, Joe Lieberman, Theresa Lapore and Sanders Sauls. If you admire any of those people, you won't like this book.
Several reviewers have given "Too Close To Call" one-star for Toobin's presumed liberal bias. He clearly argues that Floridian's INTENDED choice for President did not win. Those who already disagree with that conclusion will find no comfort here.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Must Read Book if you believe in Democracy
Comment: This is an excellent objective recount of all that happened between election day, Nov. 7, 2000, and the final resolution of that election by the Supreme Court on Dec. 12, 2000, when by a 5-4 vote the Court ruled to stop the vote recount in Florida. It gives both an outside (what we all saw), and a behind-the-scenes (what the public couldn't see) view of the chaos, dirty tricks, legal maneuvering that went on in Florida in the days after the presidential election that put the loser of the popular vote in the White House.
This is not a partisan book. It discusses the moves, good or bad, that each side made, and it puts on the record events that should never be forgotten in this Democracy.
It details how some of those involved in this election decision allowed their partisan beliefs to taint their decisions. For instance on the Supreme Court side, a quote from the book:
"As it turned out, in the tight whirl of the Republican social establishment in Washington, O'Connor's views on the election were already well known. On the previous Monday, December 4, the day of the Supreme Court's first opinion on the election, O'Connor and her husband had attended a party for about thirty people at the home of a wealthy couple named Lee and Julie Folger. When the subject of the election controversy came up, Justice O'Conner was livid. 'You just don't know what those Gore people have been doing,' she said. 'They went into a nursing home and registered people that they shouldn't have. It was outrageous.' It was unclear where the justice had picked up this unproved accusation, which had circulated only in the more eccentric right-wing outlets, but O'Connor accounted the story with fervor."
I read the book yesterday, skipping over parts that are still fresh in my memory and too painful to read about even now. I'll eventually go back and read through them. Toobin offers a lot of details of what went on behind the scenes. He appears sympathetic to the Gore team, but not entirely uncritical of Gore. What he does clearly show, however, is the absolute ruthlessness of the Bush team: their Machevellian approach to making sure their man got into the White House. Another theme that comes through clearly is that the Democrats tried to take the high road, to their disadvantage; while the Republicans had only one goal--winning, by any means necessary. Gore was too instinctively decent to stoop to similar tactics, and his reluctance to do so caused some divisivness in his team. My one compaint is that Toobin too easily seems to dismiss the ramifications of this past election, eluding to the feeling that Bush is now our President and we should all move on. We should forget that the past election was manipulated and that our Supreme Court stepped into very shaky legal territory by ruling as they did in favor of Bush.
However, near the close of the book, Toobin makes this statement:
"But still, the election of 2000 will not go away, because in any real, moral, and democratic sense, Al Gore should have been declared the victor over George W. Bush--in the popular vote, in Florida, and in the Electoral College. No one seriously suggests that 3,407 people intended to vote for Patrick Buchanan in Palm Beach County; no one believes that thousands of black voters in Duval County had no preference in the race for President. The 680 questionable overseas absentee ballots identified in July 2001 by the New York Times assuredly, and improperly, went to Bush by a wide margin. If the simple preference of the voters behind their curtains was the rule--and it IS supposed to be the rule in a democracy--then Gore probably won the state by several thousand votes, approximately the margin of the original exit polls."
A MUST READ book for all of us, but be forewarned, it may stir up emotions and anger that you thought you'd started to put behind you. When I finished the book, I wanted to cry.
Rating: 5
Summary: A liberal author rips into Al Gore
Comment: Toobin is famous for his pro-Democratic sympathies, but what makes this book tolerable to conservatives (like me) is his unrelenting loathing of Gore as spineless and milquetoast, and his grudging admiration for the GOP's no-holds-barred tactics. Toobin covers the events from election night to the unofficial non-partisan tabulation released in November 2001. Although he does an excellent job of explaining the incredibly complicated series of events, Toobin makes no effort to be neutral and doesn't hold back from labeling people as spineless, incompetent, or ruthless. He explains how some judges in the lower-level Florida judiciary were in over their heads, and although Democrats, did Gore great harm, while other minor judges rose to the occasion and demonstrated impressive leadership. According to Toobin, the Palm Beach "butterfly ballot" fiasco was not nearly important as the Democrats' decision not to challenge the massive numbers of improper absentee ballots.
Toobin's theme is that while Gore focused on managing the process in a statesmanlike way, the GOP concentrated on winning at any cost. According to this author, Clinton said he would have declared victory, played the race card, fought the inclusion of the controversial military ballots, and encouraged mass protests in the streets. One wonders where such an approach would have led.
The author's harshest criticism is reserved for the US Supreme Court, where Rehnquist and his allies abused their power and behaved as unscrupulous political hacks. Even conservatives find it difficult to defend Rehnquist's action that stopped the statewide recount. Ironically, later examination of the ballots showed that the statewide recount would have ended in Bush's favor anyway, and all Rehnquist's intervention accomplished was to taint the (already dubious) legitimacy of Bush's victory.
Toobin reminds us that a non-partisan consortium that examined every ballot discovered that under any criterion of defining what constituted a valid vote, Gore would have won the election (although not under the rules imposed by the Florida Supreme Court for the statewide recount, which limited the recount to ballots already deemed questionable). In an ideal world, Gore deserved to win the Florida vote count and hence the presidency, but no voting system can hold up when an election comes down to roughly a hundred votes in a nation of a quarter-billion people. Toobin blames the ruthlessness of the Republicans and the spinelessness of Al Gore for what happened.
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Title: A Vast Conspiracy : The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President by Jeffrey Toobin ISBN: 0743204131 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Accidental President: How 413 Lawyers, 9 Supreme Court Justices, and 5,963,110 Floridians (Give or Take a Few) Landed George W. Bush in the White House by David A. Kaplan ISBN: 0066212839 Publisher: William Morrow Pub. Date: 1901 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: The Miami Herald Report: Democracy Held Hostage by Martin Merzer, Miami Herald, the Staff of The Miami Herald ISBN: 0312284527 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 2001 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton by Joe Klein ISBN: 0385506198 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 05 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Down and Dirty : The Plot to Steal the Presidency by Jake Tapper ISBN: 0316832642 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: 2001 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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