176: Two Nations, One President

Ira Glass

So we have a new president. But after the recount mess in Florida this fall and the Supreme Court decision that ended the election, some people are having a hard time moving on. Why? Why can't they just let it go? Eric Potter drove to the inauguration to protest with his wife and kids, though he has never protested anything before.

Ira Glass

Republicans simply do not understand this. They think the Democrats were being divisive and unreasonable during the recounts and it's just galling that they won't let it go now.

Ira Glass

There have always been people at the extremes of the political parties who are really bitter, who are just furious at the other side. But as this election dragged on for weeks this fall, it seemed like more and more people got caught up in those kinds of feelings. And now where are those feelings supposed to go?

On inauguration day, 40% of Americans still thought that George Bush had not been legitimately elected as president. That's a lot of people. I think they're so divisive that even saying it's a lot of people out loud is seen as divisive. When I interviewed Democrats, the thing that most of them say is that it's not that they want to throw George Bush out of office at this point. Feelings do not run that high. It's more like they still have these moments of surprise when they happen to see him in the newspaper or on television. Like, right. He's President. It's real.

On the other side, a Republican named Chris Robling, a former election commissioner here in Chicago, says that since Florida, he feels a little chill between him and his Democrat friends. Democrats can be so arrogant when it comes to Republicans. They can look down on them, and it's only gotten worse. He took a tape recorder and talked to his friend Kathleen about it.

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our radio program, moving on after the election. Democrats trying to, Republicans urging them to. Urging them with such vehemence that you get the feeling that they're not entirely over the Florida debacle either. Our show today in five acts.

Act One, You're Not the President of Me, in which we examine the non-intersecting realities of the two sides in the political spectrum right now. Act Two, a Brief History of Republican Time. Writer David Brock gives us the inside story of how we got to this point of bitterness exactly. And it is not pretty, my friends.

Act Three, Bedroom Politics, in which a happily married couple suddenly gets politics-- different politics-- making it hard for them to move on now. Act Four, Let Us Reason Together, in which we try to get each side to understand the other in the Supreme Court Case Bush v. Gore.

Act Five, What Would You Know Who Do? A chat with an African-American minister in Florida who is trying not to be mad about the election because it is against his religion. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, You're Not the President of Me. Back when president Clinton was being impeached, at least Republicans and Democrats agreed on the basic facts-- he fooled around with an intern and he lied about it. The only dispute was over whether this was an important violation of the law. In Florida-- and who thought it would ever be possible for anyone to say this-- in Florida, things were much more bitter. Partly because the two sides did not even agree on the basic facts of what was happening. It was two entirely different pictures of the world with very little overlap.

Here is Jonathan Chait of The New Republic, a self-described liberal, telling the story of the recount with David Horowitz of Salon Magazine, a self-described conservative. Jonathan Chait starts.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: David Horowitz, his new book is called The Art of Political War, and Jonathan Chait of The New Republic.

Hearing them side by side reminds me of a conversation I had at the inauguration last week with a World War II vet, a Republican donor from Michigan named Robert Brown, who I ran into right by the reviewing stands at the White House.

Ira Glass

That's right. The one comfort in dying someday is knowing you never have to watch Crossfire again.

Ira Glass

Indeed it is, Act Two, A Brief History of Republican Time. So how did we get to this point where politics is so bitter? David Brock has a particular view of this. He used to be a right-wing journalistic hitman. First, he wrote an investigative book about Anita Hill. Then he was the very first reporter to mention Paula Jones by name in a story, which led, you could say, to her going public and suing Clinton, which led to him lying in a deposition-- lies which later became grounds for his impeachment. Brock published an apology to Clinton. He is uniquely situated to give a first-hand history of recent politics.

David Brock

The vein-popping conservative backlash Americans witnessed after the 2000 election is rooted in the war over judicial nominees that began in the late 1980s when Presidents Reagan and Bush tried to roll back decades of socially progressive court decisions by confirming conservative judges to the bench. In Republican eyes, the Robert Bork nomination was the same as the Clarence Thomas hearings. Attacks, lies and misrepresentations. They vowed revenge. Newt Gingrich was in on the tone-setting war from the start. Writing shortly after Bork's defeat, he promised to fight the Democrats quote, "with the scale and duration and savagery that is true only of civil wars."

Gingrich and the people around him were not conservatives in the original sense of the word. They were radicals who consciously adopted the street fighting political style of the '60s for their own ends. In the early '90s, Gingrich's posse hung out at the Capitol Hill row house of Grover Norquist, an anti-tax lobbyist whom The New Republic once called the Che Guevara of the Republican revolution.

At Norquist parties, where conservatives convene to drink kegs and grouse about the latest liberal outrages, I ran into former Reagan and Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, Wall Street Journal editorial writer John Fund, and many of the figures you saw kicking and screaming on TV about the stolen election.

The integrity of ballots was the last thing I ever thought this crowd would get worked up over. Norquist kept a pet boa constrictor named Lysander Spooner, after a turn-of-the-century anarchist. A majestic portrait of Lenin graced Norquist's living room wall. Incongruously for such a right wing crowd, Peter Paul and Mary tunes played on the stereo. I asked Norquist about this once and he told me it was OK, since the '60s left wing was being destroyed.

After the Cold War, Gingrich and company candidly recognized that the Cold War's demonizing, us-versus-them worldview could still be useful. They just turned it against their domestic enemy. Now it was the Democrats they called unprincipled, immoral, and un-American. The shift from one enemy to another culminated at the Republican National Convention in 1992 in Houston, where RNC Chairman Rich Bond stood on the convention floor and said, of the Clintons and their supporters, we are America. Those other people are not.

Republicans have never forgotten that in 1992, the ballots cast for Ross Perot combined with those cast for George Bush constituted a majority of the electorate. In their minds, the will of the people clearly favored conservative leadership. On election night in 1992, then-Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole went on national television and denounced the Clinton-Gore ticket, which had won with 43% of the vote, as illegitimate.

That made it possible to say and do anything to stop them. And boy, did we try. The American Spectator, for example, spent $2.4 million looking for dirt on the Clintons, including sending me to Arkansas to chase down outlandish stories linking Clinton to drug running and murder. I'd come back telling them the stories weren't true. They'd figure out a way to publish them anyway.

Riding a wave of anti-Clinton sentiment, the Gingrich revolution swept into power in 1994. In came a generation of right-wing rabble-rousers whose politics seemed based as much on raw emotion and invective as conservative ideals. The radical right wasn't pretending to be outraged at Clinton for dramatic effect; the rage was real, even when they knew they were stretching the facts to make their case. Beginning with the famous election night party that Laura Ingraham and I threw to celebrate the 1994 election, my house in Georgetown became the center of social life for the revolution.

The highlight of my dinner parties was always a dramatic reading from Gennifer Flowers's steamy book, Passion and Betrayal. Here's a typical passage.

"Yes, I found Bill Clinton incredibly sexy. I can still remember the way he had of staring at me. He did more than just mentally undress me. He was visually seducing me, and he made sure I knew it."

When Gingrich's extreme anti-government agenda fell flat, furious Republicans fought back. GOP congressional investigation staffers, together with friends of mine who worked for Kenneth Starr, quickly generated charges, counter-charges, conspiracy theories, and rumors designed to depict the Clintons as criminals. After I introduced Paula Jones to the world in the pages of the American Spectator, I was one of the right wing's golden boys and I was in the thick of it all. We were on a mission.

Among Clinton's foes, tempers boiled over as the promised indictments failed to materialize and Clinton won reelection handily. Tired of running down dead ends, I bailed out soon afterward. But the right never stopped believing that the Clinton-Gore administration was a depraved, criminal syndicate.

In the fall of 1997, months before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, I attended a dinner given by the American Spectator. The subject of discussion that evening was how to build support for an impeachment resolution, introduced by representative Bob Barr of Georgia. John Fund from the Wall Street Journal said it was quote, "not a matter of law but of political will."

The Republicans saw their subsequent failure to remove Clinton from office as a historic defeat, but they didn't blame themselves. In their minds, they had simply been outmaneuvered by the oily Clinton-Gore spin machine, tricky lawyers, and the liberal-leaning media. And they would do everything they could to ensure that nothing like this ever happened again.

This is the political backdrop for Florida's recent drama. And it explains why Republicans so quickly concluded that Florida Democrats were colluding with Gore to steal the election, and why they were so adamant about drawing their line in the sand. It also explains why, during the recount, polls showed that 75% of Democrats would have accepted Bush as president, but barely 60% of Republicans would accept Gore.

During the disputed recount and in the months since, when the mainstream press talks about what happened in Florida, the story it tells, the story that's become the accepted version of events, is that the Democrats and Republicans behave the same as each other. That their actions were morally equivalent. I don't think that's true. Inside the courts, they might have fought with equal fierceness and self-interest, but outside the courtroom Bush and his allies showed a willingness to rely on rhetoric and tactics that the Democrats didn't.

Bush's top strategist, former Secretary of State James Baker, portrayed court decisions that went against Bush as partisan and illegitimate. Republicans charged that Gore could not pull ahead without cheating and stealing. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay decried a theft in process and George Will referred to slow motion larceny. Republican morality czar William Bennett said a Gore victory in Florida would be illegitimate. Former Senator Bob Dole suggested that Republicans might boycott a Gore inaugural.

During the controversy over military ballots, Bush spokesman Marc Racicot, the governor of Montana, all but called the Gore forces unpatriotic, saying that they had gone to war against the men and women who serve in our armed forces. There's no equivalent on the Democratic side to all this. The Gore team was under orders not to attack the Republicans or impugn the integrity of the judicial process. When Gore spokesman Chris LeHane did otherwise and called Katherine Harris commissar, the Gore staff was ordered not to let it happen again.

Perhaps most disturbing were reports of Republican violence. Democratic officials in Florida said they were kicked, chased, and shouted down by Republican protesters. In Miami Dade county, an angry mob of Republican operatives, organized through Congressman Tom DeLay's office in Washington, stormed the recount center at a critical juncture.

New York Republican Congressman John Sweeney commanded the troops to shut it down, according to the Wall Street Journal. When the demonstrators later held a Thanksgiving Day party, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney called in and joked about the disruption. Again, there was no equivalent to this on the Democratic side.

Now that the dust has settled, everyone seems to be proceeding as if none of this nastiness ever happened. I can't forget, even if I want to. Watching Bush take the oath of office as James Baker and the Supreme Court looked on, it was hard not to think of the ugliness that had got him to this point, and it's hard to believe that we've seen the last of it. George Bush ran as a different kind of Republican-- a uniter, not a divider, and certainly not a hater. Then came Florida.

Last week I couldn't help notice a photograph in the New York Times of conservative strategists planning to support the nomination of John Ashcroft for Attorney General. And Ashcroft doesn't exactly fit anyone's notion of unity or inclusiveness. The meeting was being run by Grover Norquist, the Gingrich protege with a pet boa constrictor. I wondered if everything I had seen on the right in the '90s was just a prelude to what's about to happen.

Ira Glass

David Brock. A version of this story appears in the issue of Talk Magazine, which is now on newsstands. Brock is writing a memoir of his years in the conservative movement and his break from it. It'll be out in the fall.

Ira Glass

Act Three, Bedroom Politics. When it comes to political fighting, there is no more intimate a space than a marriage, where you have to get along, where you have to figure out how to move on and get over disagreements. Scott Rayson is a corporate lawyer and his wife Carrie is a social worker which, you might think already is a recipe for political fighting right there. But in fact, they have always voted together in 10 years of marriage. They both supported Bill Clinton. And then something changed.

Ira Glass

Scott and Carrie Rayson, in Nashville, Tennessee. Coming up, a love supreme, a hate supreme, we go back once more, slowly, to a certain five-to-four court decision. And this time, we really, really, really use our brains. In a minute, for Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today, one week into the Bush presidency, we bring you stories of people trying to move on after our bitter national election recount imbroglio. I don't even know what that word means, but I feel like this is my one chance to say it.

We've arrived Act Four of our program. Act Four, Let's Reason Together. When the Supreme Court handed down the decision that ended the election, it came and went in a day. There was a flurry of commentary, some of it from people who are usually very evenhanded and calm about the court, like Jeffrey Rosen, who appears on ABC News and on NPR sometimes, who teaches law at George Washington University Law School. He was saying things like--

Ira Glass

Was it really this bad? If so, there was a feeling among those of us who put this radio show together, that we wanted to understand exactly what was wrong with this decision. And more than that, we wanted to believe that there is a reasonable case to be made for the decision. Thinking anything else is just too harsh.

So with some distance on the decision and some time, we assembled four constitutional experts-- two for and two against the decision-- to explain it. We figured if we had these lingering questions about the whole thing, a lot of people probably did. Here's what we learned. There are really just two parts to the decision. The majority first says that the recount in Florida was violating principles of basic fairness under the equal protection clause of the constitution. Then it sets out a remedy to fix that. We'll take these one at a time. First, the equal protection Argument Here's Mike McConnell, one of the leading conservative Constitutional experts in the country.

Ira Glass

The Supreme Court goes into great detail about all the unfairness in the way that the Florida Supreme Court was allowing the recount to happen. The unfairnesses include which votes got recounted and which didn't, whether the people doing the recounting were properly trained and fair, whether there was a fair way to challenge a result. Some counties counted dimpled chads one way, some counted them another way. Palm Beach County switched standards. There were reports that different teams within a county sometimes used different standards.

Ira Glass

In fact, even people who have big problems with the Supreme Court decision agree that there are all sorts of unfairnesses built into what the Florida court did. The question is whether these unfairnesses are so bad that one could conclude that the Florida court had actually left the realm of normal judicial interpretation, leaving aside Florida law entirely, leaving aside impartiality, and committing what the Supreme Court calls, scarily, a non-judicial act. Only then can the US Supreme Court intervene.

Ira Glass

Again, Jeffrey Rosen.

Ira Glass

In contrast, says Rosen, the Supreme Court's decision cites a few precedents. But they either do not support the case or, sometimes, precedents seem to go against the decision in Bush versus Gore. For instance, in the past conservatives on the court have said that you have to prove that discrimination is intentional before it is a real violation of the equal protection clause.

Ira Glass

Even legal experts who support this Supreme Court decision agree that the precedents cited by the majority don't really say much that backs up the decision. Again, here's Mike McConnell.

Ira Glass

In the end, there is simply a great divide between the people who support this decision and those who impose it. And at one level, the divide is not over the reasoning in the decision. The divide is over whether or not they see the Florida court's recount as being profoundly flawed and deeply unfair. If they do, then they conclude that there was enough of a problem to justify the very unusual step of the Supreme Court jumping in.

If they don't, then the logic of the decision dissolves. This comes up over and over when you talk to the two sides. Take two of the arguments against the decision that you've probably heard on the news at some point.

Critics said that it was grotesque for the Supreme Court to stop the Florida recount on equal protection grounds when the point of the recount was to give equal protection to the unfortunate voters who lived in districts with inferior, less-reliable voting equipment-- the punch card ballots.

Critics also said that the US Supreme Court put the Florida court into a kind of Catch-22 situation. Here's how this works. The Supreme Court first told Florida to be careful, not to change the rules of the election after election day. Don't go in, don't muck around with the law, that would be unconstitutional. So the Florida court refused to set a statewide standard for counting ballots because that might be seen as altering the law. Then the Supreme Court spun around and overturned them, saying no, you should have imposed a statewide standard in the interest of fairness.

Faced with both of these criticisms, supporters of the equal protection argument are unmoved. Because, again, in their view the bottom line is that there were just grave problems with the Florida recount that the Florida court needed to fix.

If, on election day, some voters faced worse voting equipment than others, well this recount scheme-- in their view, impossibly biased towards the Democrats in a few select areas that had been hand-picked by Gore, this scheme would not make things any fairer. And if the Florida election law was so vague that it was impossible to invent a fair, statewide standard for a recount without changing the law, then it's better to just shut down the recount. And what's the loss? After all, recounting in a biased way is no better than not recounting at all. Again, Mike McConnell.

Ira Glass

Let's move on to the second part of the Supreme Court decision. Once the Supreme Court decided that the Florida recount violated the equal protection amendment of the Constitution, what should they do about it? Conservative legal scholar Mike McConnell says that he agrees with the court when it comes to the equal protection part of their decision. But that's it.

Ira Glass

Liberal legal expert, Pam Karlan of Stanford Law School.

Ira Glass

The Supreme Court, of course, stopped the Florida recount on December 9 and then handed down its opinion on the 12. The opinion said that because there wasn't enough time at that point to do a fair recount, they would call it a day. The state would go to George Bush. In his dissent, Justice Breyer points out that the majority decided that there was no time for a recount without any evidence on the court record that the recount could not have been completed on time, by December 18, which is when the electoral college would meet. Breyer writes, quote, "the majority finds facts outside of the record on matters that state courts are in a far better position to address," end quote.

So what was the majority's argument for declaring it over on December 12? Well the majority doesn't say much about it at all. Except that December 12 was the date that the Florida court was shooting for as the deadline for finishing the vote. Greg Sisk thinks that this was not only reasonable, he says it was the most sensible way to do it.

Ira Glass

Dissenters point out that the December 12 date is an arbitrary one, and not part of Florida state law. If states miss the safe harbor deadline, they can still get their votes in. Pam Karlan.

Do these discussions convince anybody of anything? Speaking completely honestly, I came to this as a Gore-leaning voter, wanting to be persuaded by the majority on the Supreme Court. And in all honesty, I have to say, I did not find their arguments convincing. But I can say now that I see why they think they're convincing. Maybe that's something.

Ira Glass

Act Five, What Would You Know Who Do? Richard Harris, a Reverend from Belgrade, Florida says he doesn't even know how many days and weeks he spent registering voters for this fall's election.

Ira Glass

Come election day, the number of African Americans who voted in Florida broke all records. It rose 50% over the last presidential race. But over the course of the day, Reverend Harris witnessed some of the problems at the polls, which have led to civil rights hearings. He saw police at a polling place asking voters for ID. He saw polling officials from poorer districts unable to get through to state officials to confirm voter IDs. There were people who were thrown off the voter roles because of a faulty list that the state of Florida bought, which incorrectly identified over 8,000 people as felons, who aren't allowed to cast ballots, according to Florida law.

Ira Glass

Reverend Richard Harris.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Starlee Kine and myself, with Blue Chevigny, Jonathan Goldstein, Julie Snyder and Alex Blumberg. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Erin Yanke, our production trainee. This is her last show with us. Erin, we are sorry to see you go. Musical help from John Connors and Chris Lygan.

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This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

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Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

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