Florida Recount Underway

NASHVILLE —  From the very beginning, going all the way back to last winter when he’d almost come a cropper in Iowa and New Hampshire, Al Gore has counted on a tough 42-year-old ex-ward boss from Massachusetts named Michael Whouley. He could pull the fat out of the fire.

Late, almost too late on election night, Whouley did it again--one last time.

With a little help from the Internet, a cell phone and some weary aides working the boiler room at Gore headquarters in Nashville, he pulled the vice president back from the brink of publicly declaring he had lost the 2000 presidential election and, instead, breathed new life into an apparently doomed Democratic ticket.

By doing so, Whouley joined Gore, George W. Bush, their senior aides, television network anchors and their private pollsters, and more than 100 million of the nation’s voters in producing one of the most extraordinary nights in the history of American politics--a chain of premature judgments, awkward recantations and hairpin turns that left both camps walking on eggshells and the American people unsure who would be their next president.

It was an election night people would tell their grandchildren about, a night out of the past--the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race that hinged on a handful of votes in Chicago, or 1948, when Harry S. Truman upset Tom Dewey. A night of evaporating certainties the likes of which had supposedly vanished--become impossible, really--in the Information Age.

It was shortly after 2 a.m. CST Wednesday in Nashville when Whouley stepped up.

By then, television anchors had put both candidates and country through the wringer four times: First, they had declared Gore victorious in Florida. Then, they retracted that, paused a few hours, and awarded the state and the presidency to Bush. Finally, they admitted they could not tell who had won.

Half an hour before, Gore had accepted as fact news reports that he was trailing by 50,000 votes in Florida and would inevitably lose the last undecided state with enough electoral college votes to give him victory. He retired with his family to their 10th-floor hotel suite and called Bush at the Governor’s Mansion in Austin, Texas, to concede defeat.

Jubilant Bush aides began preparing the governor to go before the cameras to accept victory and give sleepy citizens their first glimpse of the president-elect, while across the country, in cold, rain-swept Nashville, Secret Service agents were forming up a motorcade in the underground garage of Gore’s hotel to carry him to the War Memorial Plaza. There, he would break the sad news to several thousand supporters who had stood all night at the foot of giant television screens watching the news and waiting for him in the drizzle.

As he had done hundreds of times before, slender, curly-haired Michael Feldman, the 32-year-old chief of the campaign’s traveling staff, squeezed into a van several cars back from Gore’s armor-plated limousine. This time, instead of excited local campaign workers lining the sidewalk, a handful of red-eyed Gore aides watched in dejected silence.

The procession swung out into the wet, empty streets and gathered speed. It was only two blocks from the memorial when Feldman’s Skypager went off. The message on the tiny screen was cryptic and hard to read in the bad light: “Call Switchbd” it said. “Call holding with Mike Whuley. ASAP.”

Without hesitation, Feldman used his cell phone to call campaign chairman Bill Daley, who was riding in another car in the motorcade, then patched both of them through to Whouley.

What Whouley wanted to report was that, back in the boiler room, his minions had made a startling discovery: Driven as much by habit as hope, they had logged on to the Web site of the Florida secretary of state and found that, while the networks reported Gore a hopeless 50,000 votes behind, the actual count showed Bush ahead by a mere 6,000 votes--with thousands still untallied.

By the time the procession pulled up to the memorial, Feldman remembered later, Whouley reported that Bush’s lead had shrunk to 900 votes, then 500, then 200.

Gore was out of his car and striding toward the speaker’s platform when Daley reached his elbow. He steered the vice president into the suite of “holding rooms” the Secret Service has ready for every candidate at every stop on a daily schedule. Family and senior aides crowded in after them.

There was no television set. Cell phones popped out. Almost everyone was calling someone for information and advice. The vice president listened, leaning back in a chair with his cowboy boots up on a table.

“It became very clear to him that the world had changed,” an aide remembered.

About 2:15 a.m., Daley called Don Evans, his counterpart in the Bush hierarchy, and told him that, in light of the changing situation in Florida, Gore’s telephoned concession was off.

How was Gore feeling now, someone asked a little later. “A lot better than I did an hour and a half ago,” Gore replied.

Of course, everyone had known it would be a long night. Early in the evening, Bush had decided to set a tone of quiet confidence by taking his family to dinner. It was 6:10 p.m. when his motorcade pulled up to the Shoreline Grill, which nestles on the high bank of Town Lake.

The chef had risen to the occasion: On the menu were mixed field greens with caramelized pecans and feta cheese; parmesan-crusted chicken with grilled shrimp, preserved lemon and sun-dried tomatoes; onion potatoes; baby vegetables; vanilla and brownie mousse ice cream.

After the feast, the family was to gather in a suite at the nearby Four Seasons to watch the returns. Their plans were dashed by the first of the night’s television thunderclaps:

Beginning at 6:49 p.m., NBC, CNN, Fox, ABC and Associated Press reported that Gore would carry Florida, based on their projections.

Florida had been hotly contested, but the Bush camp had counted on winning it. Adding Florida to Gore’s impending victories in New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan and California would make it difficult for Bush to win the election, even though he was sweeping the rest of the South, the border states and the Rockies.

Abruptly, the governor, his wife and his parents decamped for the mansion.

In the governor’s private quarters, the GOP candidate paced up and down as senior aides plumbed the seeming new reality. The former president oscillated between the television set and the telephone. Laura Bush, the candidate’s wife, kicked off her shoes and talked quietly to her mother-in-law, the former first lady.

At 8:30 p.m., with the polls still open in many states, Bush moved to administer a dose of calming syrup to the broadcast media. He called in the waiting pool of reporters and photographers. What they saw was the family serenely seated around a fireplace, while Bush--in shirt sleeves and a red tie--talked on the telephone.

“Call me when you hear something,” Bush said and hung up.

“That was the governor of Pennsylvania,” Bush told reporters.

“He’s not conceding anything, and I’m not either in the state of Pennsylvania. Nor are we in Florida.” The projections could be wrong in those states, he said, and the networks had called the races too early. Bush insisted he was not concerned or nervous. “Actually, my whole future isn’t on the line,” he said. “I’m not worried about getting through it.”

Then the reporters and cameras withdrew and it was back to the telephones.

At 8:55 p.m., virtual reality shifted again. The networks began withdrawing Florida from the Gore column. Said Bush media advisor Mark McKinnon on CNN: “It was like five life and death experiences . . . It was really devastating when Florida went south. The whole campaign went dark.”

For the rest of Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, the race remained too close to call, television analysts said. Now it was the Gore camp’s turn to twist in the wind.

But at 1:16 a.m. Wednesday, the networks decided to change their minds again. First MSNBC and then the others declared Bush had carried Florida, and with it the White House. Even California’s huge bundle of votes could not save Gore.

Many Bush staffers had spent election night at a party in a hotel a few blocks away from the Capitol. “We were all ecstatic,” when the news changed, one said. “But at the same time, they’d been wrong all night, and there was a sense in the back of our minds that this, too, might be wrong.”

Back in Nashville, Gore aides had been watching television too. Gore had given Florida his all. Though most analysts had considered it beyond his reach, he had concluded his primary campaign there and his general election campaign as well.

When the networks reported the cause was lost, the staff seemed to deflate. Some approached the vice president and said, “I’m sorry.”

“As he had been all night,” said Carter Eskew, a senior campaign consultant, Gore, wearing jeans and a knit pullover shirt, “was very calm.” He reported the turn of events to his wife, Tipper, who had gone to bed.

“The victory speech was all done. He’d worked on it all day,” said a senior staff member. Now, the aide said, “He was ready to work on an alternative--a short, simple, moving speech” conceding the election.

With that speech in hand and his family reassembled, Gore had set out for the War Memorial--only to experience yet another sea change.

At the memorial, after the frantic news from Whouley that Florida was still in play, Gore sent Daley out to talk to the crowd--to say the campaign would go on--while he made his second call of the night to Bush. On the line, Gore said he needed to withdraw his concession. There was a pause. “Circumstances have changed,” he said.

As Bush communications director Karen Hughes described Bush’s reaction, the governor was startled.

“I heard the conversation,” she said. “He [Bush] said, ‘Let me make sure I understand. You are calling back to retract your concession?’ or something to that effect.”

Somewhere in the ensuing exchange, Gore was heard to say, “Well, you don’t have to be snippy about it.” And, after another pause, referring to Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, Gore said, “Well, I don’t think your little brother is going to be the final arbiter of this.”

“We don’t know who’s won Florida,” the vice president continued, adding that he would be happy to “graciously” concede if Bush proved to be the winner.

“Well, Mr. Vice President,” Hughes reported Bush saying at last, “you need to do what you have to do.”

*

Times staff writers Edwin Chen, Michael Finnegan, Megan Garvey, Matea Gold, Maria L. La Ganga, Melissa Lambert and Jack Nelson contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Scorecard

Winner of Florida’s 25 electoral votes wins the presidency.

POPULAR VOTE

BUSH: 48,609,640

GORE: 48,707,413

ELECTORAL VOTE

BUSH: 246

GORE: 255

ELECTORAL VOTES NEEDED TO WIN: 270

NEXT STEPS

1. Florida recount: Could be completed today.

2. Still uncounted: An undetermined number of absentee ballots.

3. Final Florida results: May take days to tabulate.

4. Electoral college: Electors meet Dec.18 to cast their ballots for president.

Source: Associated Press