Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
As Palm Beach County prepares to hand count its ballots, the Bush faithful take to the streets.
Nov 12, 2000 | "THEY!HAVE!NOCLASS!" cheers a Floridian woman with a face like Karl Malden whose rather generous dimensions have been impressively wedged into a tight floral pantsuit.
She's offended by a backer of Vice President Al Gore who's carrying around an effigy of "King George II." It consists of a George W. Bush Halloween mask covered in Band-Aids wrapped around the head of an inflatable doll and dressed in an ensemble of K-Mart's finest polyester. The whole rig hangs from a 6-foot-long two-by-four.
"THEY! HAVE! NOCLASS!" the woman continues.
It's one of the few chants that doesn't catch on here, on the corner of North Olive and Fourth streets, right outside the Palm Beach County courthouse on a lovely Sunday afternoon. In the morning's wee hours, county election commissioners had voted 2-1 to proceed with the countywide manual recount hoped for by the Gore campaign.
The crowd that's gathered isn't one whose members, Bush backers or Gore backers, care much about class. This is a good guys/bad guys deal. There aren't many thoughtful debates about the nature of democracy, or the hair-trigger media projections that called the state first for Gore, then for no one, then for Bush, then for no one. No one's discussing why Bush signed a 1997 law allowing hand recounts in Texas but filed for a federal injunction the day before to stop the same from happening here. No one's quoting historian David McCullough.
"No hand jobs," says one Bush backer's T-shirt, hastily scrawled in pen on a Fruit of the Loom undershirt.
"No More Lynching in America!" reads the sign of Jennifer Lowery-Bell, 53, who drove down from Washington to join the call for a revote. She's drawn an African-American hanging from a noose.
How is this lynching? I ask.
"Anytime you have a violation and the people cannot do anything to help themselves, they go to extremes," she says.
She cites the Palm Beachers who were confused about the now-infamous "butterfly ballots," about the African-American voters who were supposedly intimidated from voting in Broward County.
"What is that except lynching? It's just a different phrase for doing it," she says.
But Lowery-Bell is in the distinct minority today; the Bush forces are out and energetic. When they cheer "Bush won twice!" -- as they do, quite often -- she is relegated to standing on the curb and yelling "No!" after each line. She soon changes this to a long "Oooohhhh nooooo!" during the Bushies' cheer, which is at least competitive in its annoyance factor.
Clearly there were more from the other side here earlier. A local merchant hawking "Re-Vote" T-shirts says he's sold 400 since Friday, at $10 a pop.
Between the Bush backers and bashers, cops, journalists and bystanders, there are only 200 or so of us here today. But on TV it must look like many more, since anytime MSNBC's Suzanne Malveaux goes live she immediately becomes the most popular kid in the playground. The crowd mobs her. As soon as the camera light goes off, the protesters quickly dissipate.
Otherwise, they don't seem to know what to do. A few times, the Bush crowd marches halfway up the one block of Fourth Street that has been cordoned off. Then they march back.
You get the feeling that they're all kind of new at this. One guy is so eager to join the fun that he marches while still in the midst of making his sign. He holds his posterboard awkwardly in front of him while he colors the block letters in the words "NO CONTROLLING LEGAL AUTHORITY/BUSH WINS" with a thick green magic marker.
"GORE=MILOSEVIC" reads a completed sign by Wade Whitaker, 22, of Las Vegas.
"It's the same parallels," Whitaker says when I ask him about his sign. "When Milosevic was voted out of power, he wouldn't leave, either." Whitaker was so hepped up about the presidential controversy, he hopped on a red-eye that arrived in Orlando at 5:00 Saturday morning. He doesn't know anyone in town, and isn't even sure where he's staying tonight.
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