At around 4:15 in the morning of November 8, 2000, Ben Ginsberg, general counsel of the George W. Bush presidential campaign, met with Dan Evans, Bush's campaign manager. With a slim Bush lead in Florida being declared "too close to call" by the national media and Al Gore having rescinded a concession call made only a short time earlier, Evans said to Ginsberg, "I suppose there will be a recount now."
Thus began the postelection campaign of the most bitterly contested presidential election in U.S. history.
Award-winning journalist Robert Zelnick gives us an insider's look at this controversial election in Winning Florida: How the Bush Team Fought the Battle (Hoover Press, 2001). Detailing both the hard facts and the roller coaster of human emotions experienced on both sides, Zelnick carefully reconstructs the political chess match that ensued in Florida in the days following the 2000 election. He paints a vivid picture of the strategies employed by both sides in their contentious fight for the presidency, from the early efforts of the Gore campaign "to delegitimize the narrow Bush victory in Florida and overturn the results of the contest" to the scrappy defensive measures of the Bush team that eventually won the day.
From election night through the U.S. Supreme Court's historic decision, he reveals the facts behind every key event leading to the Bush victory, including
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How the battle lines were drawn: the demands by the Gore campaign for a recount in four key counties in Florida that initially resulted in startling gains for Gore
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The legal wrangling over Florida election law and the role of Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris in the contest
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The Florida Supreme Court's decision to allow hand recounts to continue and the Bush's campaign decision to take its case to the U.S. Supreme Court
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The battle over absentee ballots that eventually secured a substantial lead for Bush
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The U.S. Supreme Court decision—viewed as partisan by Gore supporters—which sealed a victory for Bush
Winning Florida also offers a number of previously unreported surprises. It shows, for example, that, rather than working in tandem, the Bush team and the Republican legislature were sometimes at odds on the steps to take and that many in the Bush camp feared the legislative card would be useless if Gore ever pulled ahead. In addition, Zelnick looks into perhaps the biggest legal blunder of the case—the failure of Gore superstar lawyer David Boies to begin counting the Dade County ballots himself once they were admitted into evidence, something the Bush lawyers fully expected him to do.
The book highlights the sparring among Bush strategists as to whether to withdraw their first appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court after winning certification, an argument that was resolved by a decision memo signed by the candidate himself. And Zelnick answers the intriguing question as to why the Bush team declined to seek recounts in GOP counties to offset Gore's selective recount strategy.
Robert Zelnick is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of journalism and acting director of the Department of Journalism at Boston University. During his twenty-one years with ABC News, he covered political and congressional affairs primarily for ABC Morning News, World news Tonight/Saturday/Sunday, and This Week. He has won two Gavel Awards for his work.
The Hoover Institution, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the 31st president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic and international affairs.
