A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (164 page)

Handshake agreements with photo opportunities, such as the Wye Plantation “nonagreement” between the Israelis and the Palestinians, played perfectly to Clinton’s own inclinations for quick fixes abroad. Two interrelated challenges revealed the deadly weakness of this view of international affairs. The first was the revival of Saddam Hussein. During the Gulf War, George Bush and his advisers had chosen not to overthrow Hussein because it would, in all likelihood, have resulted in a bloody civil war among Sunni and Shiite Muslims, as well as the minority Kurds, and it risked escalation to a broader war involving Iran or Turkey. An inevitable American/NATO/allied occupation of Baghdad would have placed U.S. peacekeepers in constant danger from all parties. Thus, allied war aims in 1991 did not include removing Hussein; he was only to be rendered incapable of offensive military action. Many analysts in Europe and the Middle East thought internal opposition would force Hussein out anyway without additional pressure. That did not happen, and Hussein carried a grudge from his battlefield humiliation.

Where Clinton underestimated Hussein was in the Iraqi’s ability and willingness to use terrorist weapons against western powers. In 1981 the Israeli Air Force had bombed the Iraqi Osirak nuclear power facility, claiming that Hussein intended it for the production of nuclear weapons. Iraq then took its nuclear program underground, employing as many as seven thousand in an attempt to manufacture a nuclear bomb or missile.
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Hussein cleverly hid his main biological and chemical weapons facilities in defiance of United Nations resolutions. Throughout the Clinton administration, in speech after speech by Clinton, Al Gore, and other top Democrats, the point was reaffirmed that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons, and was likely getting nukes.

Another figure, whom the Clinton administration totally ignored, actually posed a more immediate threat. Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi-born fundamentalist Muslim who had been exiled from his homeland and taken up residence in Afghanistan, directly attacked United States soil. On February 26, 1993, bin Laden’s agents (using Iraqi passports) had set off a massive car bomb under the structure of the World Trade Center (WTC), killing seven people and wounding some seven hundred. They had intended to bring the WTC down but failed. Four Muslims were captured and tried, including Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. In 1994 a New York City jury found all four guilty of murder. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the plan, was captured two years later and also convicted.

From the safety of Sudan, then Afghanistan, bin Laden planned his next strike against the United States. A plan to hijack several airliners over the Pacific was foiled. Then, in August 1998, powerful bombs ripped apart the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Tanzania, leaving 184 dead (including 12 Americans) and thousands wounded.
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Clinton ordered retaliatory strikes, including the bombing of alleged terrorist camps in Sudan and bin Laden’s headquarters in Afghanistan, but only an aspirin factory was hit. Clinton succeeded in proving to bin Laden that he wanted a bloodless victory from afar.

The entire Clinton approach to bin Laden (and all terrorists) was to treat terrorism as a law enforcement problem and not a national security/military issue. This policy had far-reaching (and negative) effects because when a terrorist like Ramzi Yousef is indicted, all evidence is sealed and cannot be used by the FBI or CIA to thwart other attacks. It was not a program designed to deal with the evil bin Laden. Bin Laden’s forces staged other attacks: on the Khobar Towers in Dharan, Saudi Arabia; on the USS
Cole
; and a foiled assault on the USS
The Sullivans
—all without any serious retaliation by the United States under Clinton.

Only after 9/11 did evidence surface that Clinton had turned down not one but three offers from foreign governments to seize bin Laden, one by Sudan in 1996 and one by a Pakistani official working with an “unnamed Gulf State” in July 2000, and a third undated offer from the Saudi secret police, who had traced the luggage of bin Laden’s mother when she visited him.
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Having hurled expensive Tomahawks at unoccupied tents in a public show of force, Clinton thereafter, according to his advisers, demonstrated a consistent lack of interest in, or commitment to, the fight against terrorism. He consistently downgraded funding requests for the Central Intelligence Agency’s human intelligence capabilities and rejected any attempts to watch terror suspects within U.S. borders, unless they were somehow tied to white militia groups.
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Yet as Clinton escaped conviction and coasted to the end of his second term, the threat of Osama bin Laden seemed remote, if not insignificant. Saddam Hussein posed what was thought to be a regional threat, but lacked (it was thought) the ability to launch direct attacks on the United States. Damaged but still determined, Clinton continued to rely on the economy to advance his proposals, though they became increasingly smaller in focus. Evidence had already begun to surface, however, that the economy was not in the great shape Clinton—and the country—thought. Worse, the terrorist threat he had all but ignored resurfaced in a tragic and horrific way.

A Generation Challenged

D
uring the 1990s, Americans were repeatedly reminded of “the greatest generation”—those who had come out of the Great Depression and swept away the Axis powers in World War II.
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Implied in the term was the assumption that the United States had reached its apex of honor, courage, and determination in 1945, and had been on a downward slope ever since. The Clinton presidency seemed to underscore this assumption. The first boomer president, Clinton seemed to personify everything the GIs had not: a self-absorbed man who had avoided national military service and never delayed gratification.

Many Americans were beginning to doubt their own purpose, and America’s position, in the world. Yet just when some thought that the horrors endured by the GIs could not be topped, nor their courage matched, and just as the nation’s moral compass fluttered wildly, everything changed in a nanosecond. A bitterly contested election put an unlikely figure in the White House, but a bloodthirsty attack drew Americans together, at least temporarily, with direction and patriotism. An old enemy surfaced to remind the United States of its primacy in the world and of the relative irrelevance of international action.

Clintonism Collapses

After the 1996 election—and before the impeachment process had gained momentum—Bill Clinton stood atop the political world. His approval ratings held in the low 60 percent range; he successfully claimed credit for reforming welfare and for getting the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passed; and he had mastered the new political art of triangulation. Pockets of hard-core liberalism remained—on the West Coast and in New England especially—but Clinton thrived largely by taking credit for conservative legislation, such as welfare reform, passed by the Republicans. Most of all, he pointed to the apparently healthy economy.

All of these benefits fell on the obvious Democratic nominee, incumbent Vice President Albert Gore Jr., who had easily won the Democratic nomination in Los Angeles.

Seldom in American history had sitting vice presidents lost during times of peace and prosperity (Richard Nixon, in 1960, is one of the few who did). The advantages of incumbency, combined with unease about changing horses, creates a powerful disadvantage for the challenger. Al Gore, however, could not boast too much about the economy without associating himself with his boss. Consequently, during his acceptance speech (where he introduced his mantra “I am my own man”) and throughout his campaign, he shied away from the Clinton record, even to the extent that he did not tout the booming economy. A darker fact may also have influenced Gore’s unwillingness to run on prosperity: storm warnings were appearing on the horizon by mid-2000, but subsequent review of Commerce Department statistics suggests the government had put the best possible spin on the nation’s economic health, possibly even misstating the actual growth numbers.
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Either way, Gore could see that he had no choice but to distance himself from the president.

As for Republicans, the race for the White House actually started with Bob Dole’s defeat in November 1996. Many GOP analysts concluded that the party needed a “charisma injection,” and that it could not afford to run any more “tired old men” merely out of obligation. Some Republicans yearned for a “GOP Clinton”—someone who could soften the ideological edges to appeal to the soccer moms and the independents who had deserted Dole in 1996.
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However, any candidate had to represent strong conservative positions against gun control, abortion, and taxes.

In late 1999, just such a new star appeared on the GOP horizon when popular Texas Governor George W. Bush, the son of the former president, threw his hat in the ring. Bush, or Dubya, as he was called to differentiate him from his father, had gone from Midland, Texas, to Andover and Yale, where he admittedly achieved mediocrity. A typical frat boy, Bush graduated and served as a lieutenant in the air national guard, where he flew F-104 fighter planes. He received an MBA from Harvard (the first president ever to do so), where he began to take his education more seriously.
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Returning to Midland, he attempted to make a career in the oil business, but it went badly. Bush and other investors had started a small company just as oil prices plunged worldwide. When his father ran for president in 1988, Dubya worked on his campaign as a speechwriter and made enough contacts to put together a partnership to purchase the Texas Rangers professional baseball team in 1989. Running the team as managing general partner, Bush later joked that his only noteworthy accomplishment had been trading home run star Sammy Sosa to the Chicago Cubs. In fact, he did an excellent job restoring the team to competitiveness on the field and solvency on the books.

After a wild youth in which he gained a reputation as a regular partygoer, Bush experienced a religious conversion in 1988, later becoming the first modern presidential candidate to specifically name Jesus Christ as the chief influence on his life. During the debates with Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, Bush handled the pressure by fingering a tiny cross in his pocket. Time and again, whether in the postelection recount turmoil, or the horrific days following 9/11, Bush’s religious faith was front and center. He had become, easily, the most publicly religious president since Lincoln.

In 1994, Bush ran for governor of Texas against a popular Democratic incumbent, Ann Richards, a silver-haired flamethrower who had lambasted the elder Bush at the 1992 Democratic campaign with the line, “Poor George! He was born with a silver foot in his mouth!” But two years later, “poor George’s” son exacted political revenge. Richards badly underestimated Bush, mocking him as an intellectual lightweight, but he won with 53 percent of the vote. Clinging to the Right on matters of economics and taxes, Bush gained a reputation for working with political opponents to advance important legislation. Equally surprising, he made sharp inroads into the traditionally Democratic Hispanic vote. In 1998, he ran for reelection, winning in a landslide.

Bush had learned one lesson quite well from Clinton: money overcomes myriad political sins. He committed himself to raising more money, from more small donors, than any other candidate in history. This allowed him to turn down federal campaign funds, thereby freeing him from federal election spending limits. Breaking new ground by soliciting funds through the Internet, Bush hauled in thousands in $50 increments, and within three months of his announcement, had raised an astonishing $36 million. He would later prove to be the greatest political fund-raiser in American history, dwarfing the-then record levels of cash pulled in by Bill Clinton.

Understanding the reality that defeating an incumbent party during a peacetime good economy was a Herculean task, Bush quietly worked to gain the support of the more than thirty Republican governors, including his brother, Jeb Bush of Florida, whose state support he would need in November 2000 if he got that far. Bush’s team also controlled the convention in Philadelphia, where the party was determined to shatter the image that it was for rich white men once and for all, with dozens of black, Hispanic, Asian, disabled, and women speakers. The only surprise was the selection of former Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney as the vice presidential nominee.

Gore looked forward to the televised debates, where his advisers were convinced their man’s experience would easily carry the day. To their horror, Bush not only held his own, but he won all three. Worse for Gore, the Green Party fielded a candidate in the election, Ralph Nader, who was certainly guaranteed to take votes from the Democrat. Unable to run far enough to the left to capture Nader’s supporters, Gore’s chances slipped away. With Bush clinging to a narrow lead in the polls, on the last weekend of the election, a Democratic operative in New Hampshire discovered an old arrest record of Bush from his college days for driving under the influence. Pollsters found the race tightening up rapidly in the forty-eight hours before the election, and what had appeared at one point to be a Bush electoral landslide became the tightest race in American history.

The night began poorly for Bush when Gore “won” a shocker in Florida. The networks called that key state before the polls had closed in its western part, by all accounts causing numerous Bush supporters en route to abandon their intention to vote. After all, Gore had won the state. Or had he? After a few hours, the networks backtracked, saying Florida was too close to call.
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In fact, Bush led in every tallied count in the state at the time, although he watched a large lead of more than 10,000 votes shrink to 537 in the final minutes of counting. By that time, every other state had been called (except Alaska and Hawaii, each of whose three electoral votes canceled the other out). With Florida’s 25 electoral votes, Bush had 271, or one more electoral vote than necessary to win the election. Without them, Gore, who had narrowly won the popular vote (50.15 million to Bush’s 49.82 million), would also take the electoral college.

At three o’clock in the morning, after the final votes in Florida had certified Bush the winner by 950 votes, Gore telephoned Bush with his concession. Under Florida’s laws, however, the closeness of the vote triggered an automatic recount, so Gore, sensing he still had a chance, called Bush back an hour later to retract the concession. The recount cost Bush a few votes, but he still emerged with a 327-vote lead. Meanwhile, in Palm Beach County some residents claimed that they had been confused by the county’s ballots.
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Gore’s advisers saw an opportunity to selectively use a hand recount in only Democratic strongholds where they could “find” the necessary votes to overcome Bush’s slim lead.
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Like their Reconstruction Republican counterparts, the modern Democrats thought they had an edge because they controlled the voting machines in the local districts that would ultimately be involved in any recount, so naturally Bush petitioned a federal court to block
selected
hand recounts. By then, Bush had assembled a top-flight legal team, directed on the ground by former secretary of state and Reagan adviser James Baker. Bush, meanwhile, stayed behind the scenes at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Gore assembled his own “dream team” of liberal lawyers, including Laurence Tribe and the protagonist in the Microsoft lawsuit, David Boies. Their strategy was simple: “Do everything you can to put numbers on the board. Whether they’re erased or chiseled in granite, get them on the board.”
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To counter that, the Bush team emphasized the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Counting (or recounting) some votes and not others violated the principle of one man, one vote.

For days, panels of election officials stared blankly at ballots, trying to determine if a ballot had been punched or not. Determining intent in such circumstances was impossible. This painstaking process took time, but Florida law required that the secretary of state, Katherine Harris, certify the final results from all counties on the seventh day following the general election. Although the Florida Supreme Court prohibited Harris from certifying the results, giving the recount process still more time, overseas ballots had pushed Bush’s lead to 930. Secretary of State Harris followed the Florida constitution and certified the election on November twenty-sixth, whereupon she declared Bush the winner. With the ballots counted three times, and the result each time in his favor, Bush made a national television appearance to claim victory.

Gore realized that he had seriously miscalculated the public relations fallout caused by calling for only a partial recount, and that the Constitution had put in place a ticking electoral college clock.
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He then shifted gears, calling for a statewide recount. A key ruling by Florida Circuit Judge N. Sander Sauls rejected the request for a hand recount of selected (disputed) counties, and at the same time, the Republican-controlled Florida legislature prepared to appoint its own slate of federal electors if the dispute was not settled by the December twelfth constitutional deadline. By then, Gore realized he had shot himself in the foot by demanding selected initial recounts from three precincts in the state of Florida, which chewed a valuable amount of time off the clock, which might have permitted a statewide recount later. He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to extend Florida deadlines and to allow hand recounts. That same day, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated (set aside) the November twenty-first Florida Supreme Court ruling; in essence, ruling that the Florida Supreme Court had delivered a purely partisan decision. Yet the state justices responded by ordering a statewide recount of
all ballots
where no vote was detectable—some 43,000 ballots—essentially claiming that no choice was not an acceptable choice, and that all ballots, in essence, must have chosen a presidential candidate. When Leon County Judge Terry Lewis ordered the local boards to determine what constituted a vote, the Bush team told Gore lead attorney David Boies, “We just won this case.”
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Any variance by any local board in accepting votes after the fact constituted a violation of due process for all those who had already voted in all the other counties and whose votes were not going to be reinterpreted. Bush’s victory may have been apparent to the Bush lawyers, though not to Gore’s team, when on Tuesday, December twelfth—the federal deadline for the submission of all presidential electors’ names—the United States Supreme Court reversed the Florida Supreme Court decision by a 5–4 vote. But the actual decision on key points was not that close. The key Supreme Court ruling was 7–2 that the hand-counting process violated federal equal protection clauses because of the absence of objective standards on the dimpled chads and other ballots. Five justices also stated that there was not enough time to count the votes (with the results due that day according to the Constituton). Gore conceded. Polls showed that people thought the Supreme Court had reached its decision on the merits of the case, not out of partisan leanings toward Bush.
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Numerous media-sponsored recounts occurred in the wake of the election, well into May 2001. Most concluded that Bush would have won under almost any standard. A
USA Today/Miami Herald
survey of 61,000 ballots, followed by a broader review of 111,000 overvotes (where voters marked more than one candidate’s name, and thus were disallowed), found that if Gore had received the manual recounts he had requested in four counties, Bush would have gained yet another 152 votes; and if the Supreme Court had not stopped the hand counting of the undervotes (ballots where a hole had not been punched cleanly through), Bush would have won under three of four standards for determining voter intent.
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