Vote of no confidence

A self-described "election junkie" surveys dozens of books about the 2000 presidential contest and arrives at some troubling conclusions.

By John W. Dean

Jan 30, 2002 | By my count, the 36 days following the Nov. 7, 2000, presidential election generated not less than 36 books and one Ph.D. dissertation, plus countless articles and essays. To examine and understand the historic Florida vote count, however, no reasonable person is going to read all this material, excepting perhaps another Ph.D. dissertator. Nonetheless, being an election junkie, I was sufficiently interested to read almost half of them.

Many observers believe that the 2000 presidential election story is over and dead. I don't. Rather, I think these events are going to return to haunt future elections, not to mention the Senate confirmation hearing of the next nominee to fill any vacancy on the United States Supreme Court. For example, after reading these books, I would not be surprised to discover that Enron's political largess was somehow involved in the Florida vote-counting debacle.

Most of the book-length efforts at recounting, explaining, criticizing and justifying the 36-day imbroglio have been ignored. Clearly, some books have been victims of the tragedy of Sept. 11, which rendered Election 2000 irrelevant, passi.

Yet even before that, only two Election 2000 books had attracted any real attention; former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's "The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President" spent six weeks on the New York Times paperback bestseller list, and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz's "Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000" enjoyed seven weeks of New York Times bestsellerdom.

Both books (which were reviewed by Salon), however, had fallen off the New York Times list a month before the terrorist attacks. I read Dershowitz's broadside on the Supreme Court's majority ruling in Bush vs. Gore for the same reason that people stop to watch a wrecking ball knock down a building. The professor does not disappoint. He does a smashing job ... so to speak.

Similarly, I couldn't resist mince-no-words Vincent Bugliosi, who makes Dershowitz appear shy as he asserts that the five justices who "literally stole a presidential election" did so because "they had, incubating inside them, the most squalid of characters, a lowness that may never have manifested itself if they had never been presented with this situation."

More specifically, "these five justices are criminals in every true sense of the word, and in a fair and just world belong behind prison bars as much as any American white-collar criminal who ever lived."

A seasoned senior editor at a New York publishing house told me shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack that all the Election 2000 books still in the publishing pipeline -- and there were many -- would be DOA; even those by previously bestselling authors like Jeffrey Toobin would tank. He was correct. No other Election 2000 book would become a bestseller.

Certainly, after Sept. 11, my own thoughts and reading turned from the election debacle to understanding terrorism. But as that clear and present danger has seemingly diminished, my interest in all those Election 2000 books was revived.

I decided to take a serious look. Leaving aside institutional books (those prepared by Lexis-Nexis, Congressional Quarterly, the New York Times, the National Commission on Election Standards and Reform, and the like), as well as those I had already read (Dershowitz, Bugliosi, Jake Tapper and Bruce Ackerman, to name a few), I selected nine more authors I thought might be worth adding to my library. There were a few surprises, both good and bad.

Because most of these books are highly critical of the Supreme Court's ruling in Bush vs. Gore, I was particularly interested in any that defended the high court's action. They are few, with the most prominent being "Breaking the Deadlock: The 2000 Election, the Constitution, and the Courts" by Federal Court of Appeals Judge Richard A. Posner. While a partisan, Judge Posner is always judicious.

Having read many of the prolific judge's writings -- indeed I'm reading his latest on "Public Intellectuals" as I write this -- I found that his Election 2000 apologia may be the worst book he has ever written. It is poorly organized and so thinly argued that it is difficult to find justification for his conclusion "that the Florida Supreme Court acted unreasonably and that the U.S. Supreme Court did not -- which is not the same thing as saying that the Court's decision was correct. That is a close question, perhaps unanswerable."

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