The only thing wrong with The Recount, HBO's powerful docu-drama about the Florida election fiasco of 2000, is that it is premiering to ballyhoo six months too early. The story of the ugly fight over Palm Beach County's disastrous "butterfly ballot" and the Sunshine State's "hanging chads" ought to be required viewing for every American citizen in the days leading up to this November's general election; a reminder to one and all about how fragile our democracy truly is and how far from ideal it has become.
I am a veteran of the Florida Recount and I have the emotional scars to prove it. In November and December 2000, I spend five weeks in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C. covering every single legal twist and turn to the story. I was on the air live that chilly night when the Florida Supreme Court issued its first ruling. I was across the street from the Florida Supreme Court on that Friday afternoon when the Justices gave new life to Al Gore's chances. And I was on the radio minutes after the Supreme Court of the United States stopped the recounting--stopped the recounting of legally-cast votes!-- for good in early December that year.
I saw firsthand the posturing, the lies, the filthy deceits, and the threats of violence portrayed, accurately if a little melodramatically in my view, by the HBO film. I saw with my own eyes the use of raw political power used to immoral and illegal ends. I saw hammered to bits the great, national myth that every vote counts and that every legal vote should be and is counted. That canard, which generations grew up believing, and which has since been blown apart by a Pew Foundation study and other means, today has as much basis in reality as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. Save for a few cynical politicians talking to our village idiots, no one even tries to sell it anymore to the American public.
In my mind, however, the more grievous sin we are yet to be fully invoiced for is that, nearly eight years later, our election laws continue to be a fiasco, a national disgrace. In the wake of the Supreme Court's once-in-a-lifetime equal protection doctrine to once-and-for-all dispatch Al Gore's recount challenge, we were assured by leaders of both parties that things would be much more fair and organized the next time around. There was a bit of a push but it wasn't nearly enough. And then came 2004 and voting problems in Ohio, among other places. And there is
absolutely no reason to believe, with ballot machine science still underdeveloped, and with cynical political operatives still as zealous as ever, that the 2008 election will be the freest and fairest yet.
Instead of ensuring that more votes were counted in the wake of Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, legislators in states all over the country have instead cried "fraud" (even where little or no voting fraud exists) and done what they can to ensure that fewer votes are cast and counted; an ass-backwards paradigm the Supreme Court endorsed earlier this year with another dubious ruling. Sure, the likelihood of "another Florida" is low-- the same or similar confluence of events isn't likely to happen. But that doesn't hide the fact that the grand post-Florida promises that "every vote would count" were glossed over and now nearly forgotten.
At the time I was covering events from Florida, I thought the story was a great one, full of fun and inside baseball jokes and Last Hurrah-like political shenanigans. After all, there were no "victims" of the sort I usually encountered in high-profile case; no grieving families and forensic pathologists. But I now know that I was very wrong about that carefree attitude. The chain of events--both foreseen and unforeseeable-- that swirled during those five weeks was a sign of a darker reality about politics in America in the 21st Century. Ask Roger Stone, the uber-creepy subject of Jeff Toobin's latest New Yorker article.
There is a disconnect in this country, a divide, that even the tragic events of September 11, 2001, were able to bridge for only a few short months before we all tumbled back into our "recount mode" of politics as usual. This divide has given us both Barack Obama's unlikely ascension to leadership of the Democratic Party and the concomitant (and not wholly irrational) fear that his life is in danger. It has given us nasty protestors at the funerals of soldiers and the ugly, rancorous circus over immigration that has as its symbol, Lou Dobbs of all people.
Eight years on from Florida 2000, and nearly seven years after the Twin Towers fell, the country is still struggling politically and ideologically between hope and hate, between a yearning to track what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" and the visceral pull toward suspicion and blame and anger. At one point in Recount, Kevin Spacey as the lead Gore attorney asks: "Who won this thing? Who won it??" The answer, we now know, is "no one." We all lost in Florida in 2000 and so we continue to lose today.
Andrew Cohen is a legal analyst and commentator.