The Truth will prevail, But only if we Demand it from Congress!
9-11 Inside Job and Neocons Hacked 2004
Mark Crispin Miller <mark.miller@nyu.edu>
Here (attached) are two great takes on Recount, written by unrivaled
experts on the Florida catastrophe: David W. Moore, who, as a top
executive at Gallup, was in the trenches on Election Night, and
witnessed how the race got called for Bush; and Lance DeHaven-Smith,
Professor of Public Administration at Florida Atlantic University,
and author/editor of The Battle for Florida, a seminal collection of
the major documents. (Both also have essays on Florida 2000 in Loser
Take All.)
Let me introduce their work with my own view of Recount (which just
ended its first run on HBO). It's quite a gripping movie, tightly
structured and fast-paced, and all too credible. Indeed, Recount is
so vivid that it hurts, as it returns us to that long, slow
nightfall
when we all sat watching as Bush/Cheney "won," and there was
absolutely nothing we could do about it. (By "we all," I don't mean
Democrats--as a New Yorker, I did not vote for Al Gore--but we
believers in the Constitution, fair elections, and reality.) Many
people talk about the movie by uneasily noting that it made them
feel
exactly as they felt back then: crushed, defeated, powerless--a
sense
of helplessness, I've heard some say, that darkens their
anticipation
of this next election.
Now, some might praise the movie for so strong an evocation of that
moment some eight years ago, but I would say that, by inducing that
old feeling of paralysis, Recount does more harm than good. Indeed,
I
liked it less and less the more I thought about it, realizing that
it
could have left us in a very different frame of mind. If the movie
had been braver and more honest, daring to recount the bigger and
much darker story of how Team Bush really "won," it would have had
the paradoxical effect of leaving us not whimpering in remembered
pain but standing up in righteous anger, calling for investigations,
prosecutions and-especially-reform. HBO's own Hacking Democracy had
something of that positive effect, contributing immensely to the
movement against electronic voting; and there is no good reason why
this movie too could not have moved us beyond fatalism.
But Recount stays on safer ground. Although the film is often
chilling, its conception of the struggle in the Sunshine State is
ultimately comforting, and very simple: a giant post-election brawl
between the two campaigns, one nasty and one nice as pie. The Bush
team won, according to this view, because they were far tougher and
more agile than Gore's people, improvising ruthlessly from day to
day, until they pulled it off. Thus the GOP did not engage in a
conspiracy (there is, in fact, no other word for it), but triumphed
sheerly through their fierce--but surely not illegal--tactics after
the Election.
The filmmakers derived this view from several mainstream books,
whose
authors served as paid consultants on the project: Jeffrey Toobin's
Too Close to Call, Jake Tapper's Down and Dirty, David A. Kaplan's
The Accidental President, and Deadlock by David von Drehle and Ellen
Nakashima. Written by outsiders (representing, respectively, The New
Yorker/CNN, ABC News, Newsweek and The Washington Post), these books
largely skim the surface of events, offering little background on
the
politics of Florida; and--even more important--they stick close to
the Establishment consensus that there's no election fraud in the
United States. Such, therefore, is the bias of the movie, which, as
Lance DeHaven-Smith notes here, bends over backwards (as it were)
not
to indict Team Bush for any crimes.
Hence the movie's over-focus on James Baker, the old cynic who was
called in after Election Day to manage the theatrics--a task he
carries out with cold aplomb, and a certain scary charm, thanks to
Tom Wilkinson's excellent performance. (Baker, understandably, quite
liked Recount.) Meanwhile, Jeb Bush is almost wholly absent from the
film, which represents him as a mere by-stander, even though his
office ran the massive drive to disenfranchise tens of thousands of
Floridians. On the misuse of the felons lists to sideline all those
Democratic voters, Jeb worked hand in glove with Katherine
Harris-whom the movie casts as an erratic flake, who needed firm
control by Baker's men. Although she was indeed a weirdo, Harris
also
was a dedicated supervisor of the winning effort to erase those
voters from the rolls, but you wouldn't know it from Recount, which
groundlessly depicts her as somewhat ambivalent about her mission.
(An acolyte of theocratic luminary Francis Schaeffer--she went to
Switzerland to study with him--Harris seems to have perceived her
work against the voters as her Christian duty; and yet the film
plays
her religiosity for laughs.)
From start to finish, Recount tunes out, or plays down, the
conspiratorial dimension of the story, and thereby represents as a
fiasco what was actually a coup. As David Moore notes here, the
movie
wrongly claims that ABC first called the race for Bush and Cheney on
Election Night--an honor that belongs to FOX News, where Bush's
cousin managed the decision desk, and called it for his kinsman
after
many phone calls to and from the Brothers Bush and Rupert Murdoch.
(At NBC there was a different drama, as "Neutron Jack" Welch-CEO of
GE, the network's parent company-loitered in the newsroom, pestering
the journalists to call it for Bush/Cheney.) While Recount does a
good job showing how the e-voting machinery malfunctioned throughout
Florida--getting all jammed up with chads, counting votes as
undervotes, etc.--here too the filmmakers neutralize the story; for
Recount fails to note the stunning fact that those machines screwed
up because they had been fed with the wrong kind of paper ballots.
The top men at Sequoia, the manufacturer of those machines, had been
forewarned about that problem, and its likely consequences-and they
did nothing whatsoever to correct it.
In its only reference to the pre-election plot, Recount likewise
minimizes the offense. The movie does acknowledge that a lot of
Democratic voters had been wrongly stricken from the rolls as
felons,
or ex-felons-a stroke of disenfranchisement that sidelined 20,000
citizens, according to the film. In fact, the toll was (at least)
50,000 voters; and, as DeHaven-Smith observes, such vote suppression
was no snafu but a major crime. (In 2004, the felons lists were used
again to purge more Democratic voters from the rolls in Florida.)
And, speaking of law-breaking, the movie also lands a very light
blow
on the Supreme Court, by noting only that their intervention was
improper, and their argument in Bush v. Gore unclear. Nowhere does
the film suggest that Rehnquist, Thomas, O'Connor and Scalia were
all
driven by a flagrant party bias-clear grounds for their impeachment,
as Vincent Bugliosi has so strongly argued, and yet somehow not
worth
even hinting at in Recount.
However, it is at the very end that Recount cops out most
egregiously. The last shot is a great one: a grim Kubrickian view
down a long corridor, with floor-to-ceiling shelves on either side,
all loaded up with crates of ballots--ballots that had not been
counted at the time. And yet, of course, those ballots were counted
eventually, by the National Opinion Research Center at the
University
of Chicago, with the help of all the nation's leading media outlets;
and what they ultimately found was that, by every standard, Al Gore
won. Again: If all the ballots in the state of Florida were counted,
Al Gore won--a fact that goes unmentioned at that final moment, as
that great shot fades to black without an epilogue.
That silence is especially perverse, considering the movie's heavy
moral emphasis on the importance of our knowing, to a certainty, who
won. Indeed, the movie's moral climax has Ron Klain, the story's
hero
(played beautifully by Kevin Spacey), blurt out his frustration in a
hotel bar: "I just want to know who won this election!" That the
film
itself refuses to supply that information suggests either bad faith
or crippling fear, or both.
And such refusal has made cowards of us all. If Recount had just
tried, through cinematic means, to tell the truth about that stolen
race, showing us what really happened (and what is still happening
right now), and calling it by its true name, that movie would have
done us all tremendous good, by digging up the buried horrors,
dragging them into the light of day, and reassuring us that such
enormous crimes will not be tolerated. In short, such a movie would
encourage us to stand and fight for our democracy, and not sit back
convinced that we've already lost.
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