Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (89 page)

The flip side of that irony lies in the other key to Greenspan’s success—his alliance with President Bill Clinton in engineering what many economists believe was the underpinning of the financial boom of the 1990s. The two struck a bargain to keep interest rates low if the president would work with Congress to reduce the federal deficit. Greenspan’s deal with Democrat Clinton, and Clinton’s ability to broker that balanced budget plan with Congress to deliver on deficit reduction, may ultimately be considered Clinton’s single most important accomplishment as president—perhaps removing some of the sting of being only the second president to be impeached in American history.

The other question economists and others argue about was whether Greenspan was right back in 1996. Was there “irrational exuberance”? And was that the cause of the massive meltdown that crippled Wall Street from 2000 forward? In a short space of time, the NASDAQ stock average, which had rocketed to 5,000 on the strength of a flood of money being invested in new technology companies, the Internet, and “dot.com” startups, fell back below 2,000. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which topped out at more than 11,000 points in 2000, tumbled back below the 9,500 range—later moving down to 7,500—as America entered its first recession in a decade and people learned for the first time in a decade that stocks can move up and down. Technology hysteria, “bubble” mentality, crowd psychology, stock analysts and brokers who touted everything as a “buy,” thereby inflating stock prices, as well as revelations of an increasing number of possible frauds committed against shareholders by corporations and accountants who were disguising their profits by “cooking the books” all served to overheat the financial markets.

In many ways, the 2000 stock market meltdown was comparable to the great losses of 1929, except this crash affected selected industries and did not take the entire banking community down with it as thoroughly. Decades of federal regulation governing stock markets and banking, and a more diverse economy that was in far better fundamental shape than the 1929 economy had been, served to prevent a global financial catastrophe on the order of the Great Crash of 1929.

Must read:
Maestro: Greenspan’s Fed and the American Boom
by Bob Woodward.

Is that chad dimpled, pregnant, or hanging?

“Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.”

Joseph Stalin, to whom that quote is attributed, may well be smiling in the Socialist Paradise, if there is one. The Soviet dictator would have certainly appreciated the American presidential race of 2000 and the strange goings-on in the state of Florida. A smile might also cross the face of William “Boss” Tweed, the notorious nineteenth-century “fixer” of all things political in New York City. On Election Day in 1871, Tweed said, “As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?”

If it hadn’t been so important, it would have been completely comical. Citizens of the richest, most powerful, most technologically advanced country in the world—on the verge of launching the International Space Station into orbit 300 miles above Earth—were reduced to holding paper ballot cards up to the light to see if a hole had been punched through the paper or not. As the world watched the state of Florida in electoral disarray, America was learning a whole new vocabulary of “chads”—the small bits of paper produced when a hole is poked through a punch card. For all of America’s fears of going into the year 2000 with the much-dreaded possibility of a Y2K computer bug that would crash the world’s entire information and technology apparatus, it was the simple act of pushing a sharp stick through a piece of paper that actually wreaked the most havoc.

It had been a very long time since America had seen a presidential election so close: the Nixon-Kennedy race of 1960, to be exact. It had been even longer since Americans had seen an election in which the candidate with the most popular votes lost. That dates back to the controversial race of 1888, when Grover Cleveland won the popular vote and Benjamin Harrison won the Electoral College vote and became president. But these are the strange but true vagaries of American presidential politics.

Election Day 2000 pitted the sitting vice president against the son of the man who had been defeated eight years earlier in the election of 1992. On the face of it, the incumbent vice president, enjoying the fruits of the longest and most successful era in American economic history, had the cards in his favor. The economy, though flagging, was still strong, with employment high and inflation low. Prosperity is usually good for an incumbent. There was relative peace in the world. The American effort in Bosnia had been a success, with little cost in American lives. To be sure, there were problems, but Al Gore thought that his biggest problem was embracing everything good about the Clinton years while distancing himself from the scandals that had nearly destroyed Bill Clinton’s presidency.

On the other side was the two-term governor of Texas, George W. Bush. Dismissed as an intellectual lightweight, he campaigned as a “compassionate conservative” who would restore honor and dignity to a White House besmirched by Clinton’s reprehensible behavior. Both men had survived bruising primary battles. Gore had fought off an insurgency from former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, a Rhodes scholar and former professional basketball player for the New York Knicks who appealed to the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Bush had confronted a strong popular campaign waged by Arizona senator John McCain, a conservative Republican who was a much admired war hero, survivor of years of captivity in a North Vietnamese prison in Hanoi. The primary campaigns had left both candidates battered, and in a fairly unmemorable campaign, neither distinguished himself. Interestingly, one of the most historic aspects of the campaign—the first Jewish nominee for vice president in the person of Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman—barely made a ripple.

There were also two significant independent candidates adding intrigue to the race. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader represented the liberal environmentalist Green Party. Patrick Buchanan, the fiery archconservative former Republican candidate, had wrested control of Ross Perot’s once crucial Reform Party. But neither of these two men was included in any of the debates between the two main party candidates, and it seemed that they would have little impact on the national vote. But as Tip O’Neill, the famed Massachusetts congressman and speaker of the house, once said, “All politics is local.” And Nader and Buchanan would prove to have an impact on a few important local races.

On the eve of the election, surveys had the race too close to call. America seemed to be split in two. And for once the polls were right. As the voting booths closed across the country on election night, the closeness of the election was apparent, but Gore seemed to have a slim edge. Late on election night, network television projections declared Al Gore the victor in the state of Florida, giving him the electoral votes needed to win the presidency. The balloons of victory were soon floating in the air. But they were about to burst. In a stunning turnaround, the network projections were retracted. Florida was proving too close to call.

In Florida, earlier on Election Day, state Democratic officials had already begun to receive reports of confused voters in several election districts who believed that they may have miscast their votes. Many of them were Jewish senior citizens, traditionally Democratic Party loyalists, who feared that they might have cast votes for Reform Party candidate Patrick Buchanan, considered by many Jews to be an anti-Semite, largely because of remarks he had once made about Hitler. Others thought that they had pushed out two holes in the paper punch cards. Would their votes still count? At the same time, Ralph Nader, on the Green Party ticket, was drawing about 100,000 votes in Florida. It was not a huge number, but his votes were presumably drawn from more liberal and reformist independent voters who might have been more likely to choose Gore if Nader had not been in the race.

In the early hours of the morning, television networks completed the turnabout and projected George Bush the winner of Florida’s electoral votes, giving him the presidency. Gore telephoned Bush to concede. Told that the race in Florida was too close to call, Gore then retracted his concession and the projection of Bush as the winner was also retracted. Governed by Jeb Bush, the Republican candidate’s brother, Florida had been considered a key state in the election. Nobody could have imagined just how key—and chaotic—it was going to be.

On the day after Election Day, Gore had a lead in the national popular vote and was ahead in electoral votes, with 255 to 246 for Bush; 270 electoral votes are needed to win the presidency. While two other states were also still undecided, the balance of the election hung on the outcome in Florida, with its 25 electoral votes.

Before the day was out, the first suits contesting ballots in some Florida counties, like the first scattered gunshots in a battle, were filed by both sides. While an incomplete count of Florida’s votes gave Bush a statewide lead of 1,784 votes, prompting a mandatory statewide mechanical recount, voters in heavily Democratic Palm Beach County filed a suit challenging the results there. They were specifically challenging the “butterfly ballot,” a paper ballot with candidates’ names shown in two facing columns. Voters were expected to punch out a hole that corresponded to their candidate. But the ballot had confused many voters, especially the “early bird special” vote, Florida’s large, politically active retiree community. Many voters worried that they had mistakenly voted for Buchanan; some, realizing they had made a mistake, punched a second hole instead of requesting a new ballot. Ballots with two votes cast would be invalidated as “overvotes.”

Over the course of the next month, Florida became an armed camp of dueling lawyers and “spin doctors” all trying to sway the courts and public opinion. Battling through local, county, state, and federal courts, the two sides fought over which votes should be counted, who should count them, and whether it was too late to count them under Florida law. Finally, on December 1, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on an appeal by the Republican candidate George Bush. On December 4, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated a Florida Supreme Court decision extending the deadline for certification of votes, and returned the case to the state court for clarification. When the Florida Supreme Court ordered a manual recount of all ballots in which a vote for president was not recorded by a machine and restored 383 votes from partial recounts in two Florida counties, the Bush legal team again appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On December 9, in a five-to-four decision, the Supreme Court halted the manual recounts pending a hearing of Bush’s appeal, and on December 11, the Court heard oral arguments from the two sides. Finally, in high drama at 10
P.M.
, on December 12, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two unsigned rulings that reversed the Florida Supreme Court’s order to proceed with the recount. Technically speaking, the Court had sent the decision back to the Florida Supreme Court for review, while noting at the same time that there was no time for a recount because of constitutional deadlines.

On December 13, in a televised address, Al Gore again conceded to Bush. George W. Bush addressed the nation as president-elect. For the first time since John Quincy Adams was elected, America had another set of father-son presidents. More significantly, for the first time in American history, the Supreme Court had played a decisive role in the outcome of a presidential election.

The final official results showed that Gore had won the national popular vote 51,003,894 (48.41 percent of the popular vote) against Bush’s 50,495,211 (47.89 percent of the popular vote), a difference of 508,683 votes, or approximately one half of one percent of the popular vote. Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, took 2,834,410 votes, less than 3 percent of the national vote. However, in Florida Nader garnered 97,488 votes. Many political analysts agreed that Nader had played the spoiler’s role, drawing support from Gore in Florida, as well as a few other close states.

Patrick Buchanan, the archconservative Republican who turned controversial Reform Party candidate, polled only 446,743 votes, a mere 0.42 of the national presidential vote. In 1992, Ross Perot had won 19 percent of the popular vote under the Reform Party banner. Four years later, the Reform movement still managed to deliver Perot more than 8 million votes. But the controversial Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, had splintered the Reform Party, rendering it insignificant. It was clear, however, that Buchanan’s candidacy had hurt Al Gore because of the confusion over the ballot in Florida, where Buchanan tallied 17,484 votes.

While the debacle in Florida captured the world spotlight for thirty-six days, the election was not only about the Sunshine State. The spotlight of the post-election drama was deservedly on Florida and the dueling lawyers and press conferences. And much of the post-election analysis focused on how likely it was that Gore would have won the state without the Nader-Buchanan factor and the large number of disqualified ballots. But the official electoral tally showed Bush winning the electoral vote with 271 votes to Gore’s 266. (Gore should have had 267, but one elector from Washington, D.C., abstained.)

Mostly overlooked was the fact that the sitting vice president, beneficiary of the greatest economic boom in modern times and with the country enjoying relative peace and prosperity, could have won the Oval Office simply by carrying one of a handful of other states that had voted for Clinton-Gore four years earlier:

Tennessee
Gore’s home state, where he and his father had both been elected U.S. Senator, with its eleven electoral votes, a state carried by Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996.

Arkansas
With six electoral votes, the home state of President Bill Clinton had also voted Democratic in 1992 and 1996. But it went to George Bush in 2000 by 50,000 votes.