Sure, They Stole It, But Did They Steal It Fair and Square?
Small wonder Al Gore is set to fight on until he's dragged off by a posse of enforcers from the Democratic National Committee. In terms of support he has nowhere to go but down from the votes he won on Election Day, Nov. 7, with recession not yet upon us and public satisfaction with a Democratic administration still high. The theory that a magnanimous concession now will reap Gore huge dividends four years hence is foolish. The minute the Vice President quits the field of battle in Florida his day is done and his future dark. Big-money Democrats openly griped last week in the Los Angeles Times about the incompetence of his campaign. Even Salon seems to be turning against him.
So of course Gore is clinging to the assets at hand: a win in the national popular vote and a probable win in Florida, though definitive judgment about ballot totals in the Sunshine State is clearly out of the question. There's scarcely a day that does not bring some fresh disclosure of ballot tampering, intimidation or arbitrary disqualification. Here's a story that appeared in the Palm Beach Post on Nov. 27:
"A challenge to throw out all absentee ballots in Seminole County took a back seat for weeks as the forces of Al Gore and George W. Bush fought it out over recounts and revotes in more populous South Florida.
"Yet, the lawsuit filed in the Republican suburban enclave north of Orlando ticks like a time bomb in the unprecedented post-election-day scramble for Florida's 25 electoral votes and, ultimately, the presidency. On Wednesday a circuit judge in Sanford will hear arguments on whether to throw out 17,000 absentee ballots, putting thousands of Bush votes in jeopardy.
"'The hand-counting could pale compared to this,' said Nat Stern, a professor of law at Florida State University."
Sinkhole? Judge for yourself. Here's the start of an AP dispatch from Seminole County: "The Seminole County judge [originally appointed by Jeb Bush] presiding over a Democratic activist's lawsuit to dismiss 4,700 presidential absentee ballots had absentee ballot problems of her own in her campaign this summer. A campaign worker says he filled in voter-identification numbers on about 3,000 absentee ballot requests that originated with the campaign of Circuit Judge Debra Nelson. That is similar to what allegedly happened in the absentee ballot dispute that is the subject of the lawsuit before her." These tamperings constitute a third-degree felony.
Unlike the Republican rabble-rousers who dispatched their bullyboys to demonstrate at the recount house in Miami-Dade (where two of the relevant officials were apparently under the sway of the local Cuban machine), the Democrats have been timid in mobilizing street heat. Jesse Jackson was hardly hitting his rhetorical stride before they told him to cool it and go home. The party is obviously prepared to countenance high-price lawyers like the very competent David Boies or the decrepit Warren Christopher, but not vulgar agitators.
Whereas James Baker was clearly ready to issue an order that the members of the Florida Supreme Court be shot on sight, the Democrats have been desperately eager to avoid such inflammatory topics as the clear pattern of racial intimidation in black and Haitian precincts disclosed by the NAACP hearings broadcast on C-SPAN, and now the subject of a request to Attorney General Janet Reno by the Congressional Black Caucus that the U.S. Dept. of Justice investigate "substantial evidence" of discrimination. The testimonies to the NAACP by black Floridians denied the chance to vote were shocking. One woman, a black attorney, described how conditions were so ill-organized at the polling place (a fire station) that it took her a good hour to get to the head of the line, only to be told she couldn't vote because of a misprint of her middle initial on the voters' list, even though she was able to produce full ID. Hundreds of would-be voters arrived at a designated polling site to find it had been torn down, with no replacement advertised. At some precincts cops conducted methodical intimidation of blacks on their way to vote, accusing them of being felons and therefore disqualified. Haitian Creole speakers couldn't get help, even though Florida law allows translators in the booth.
Such fears that even casual investigation of Florida's ballot procedures might delegitimize the state have afflicted such normally robust folk as Camille Paglia, who quavered in her Salon column that the "excruciating protraction" of this presidential election "is certainly one of the most discouraging political events of my lifetime" and has "dragged on far too long and at terrible financial and psychological cost." Is the notion here that we are to stop counting votes as soon as the NASDAQ dips? That the American psyche is too frail to entertain the possibility of a stolen presidency? LBJ had much more faith in the political and moral resilience of his fellow citizens when he used to boast triumphantly of his first Senate race in 1948 that he "stole it fair and square."
In fact the ballot scandals in Florida come as a satisfactorily appropriate climax to an election campaign whose legitimacy was quite rightly questioned at every turn. Is it right that the two major candidates can evade the intent of campaign spending laws with the infamous "soft money" escape window? Is it right that corporate money should dominate the process? Is it right that the Democrat and Republican candidates can exclude their rivals from the major debates? Is it right that voting machines can have a built-in error rate of anywhere from 2 to 5 percent?
Watergate famously began as a "third-rate burglary." It mushroomed into what Paglia's predecessors in alarmism called a long national nightmare, but which was in fact an exciting interrogation of the legitimacy of executive power that did America no end of good. It's never untimely, or ill-mannered, or inappropriate to question democratic legitimacy, and this is what is happening in Florida. It would be no harm if it happened in other states too, if only to leaven apparent public agreement that Florida's institutions are now more heroically corrupt than those of Illinois or New York or Pennsylvania.
If Gore loses, he could always insist he is the true president and go into exile like some Stuart or Bourbon in the fallow years, surrounded by loyal courtiers calling him Mr. President, signing papers with a grandiose seal, issuing important statements to the press. Probably the best site would be the UN, where he could have observer status and a nice suite of offices.
For his part, Bush has diminished steadily from a stature that was scarcely majestic when the networks celebrated his supposed triumph shortly after 2 a.m. in the dawn hours of Nov. 8. He reminds me of those medieval kinglets thrust reluctantly to the throne by some powerful faction, then strangled after scant months in office. Clearly Bush drove Cheney to heart failure by his incessant requests for advice: what should he have for breakfast; to jog or not to jog; a smile for the press corps or just an impassive stare. It's not the last we've seen of that boil, I'm sure. It could be the start of a promising science-fiction movie, in which the "boil" is in fact the preliminary growth of a second head, whose unimpeded development is finally recognized by the nation's top biologists as the only way the President's life can be saved. As the heads begin to quarrel, Bush himself becomes an emblem of gridlock.
A century later this somewhat dingy afternoon paper became a beneficiary of one of the most colossal bribes in America's rich political history. In 1970, as Nixon made ready for reelection, he received a letter from Hearst company president, Richard Berlin, imploring him to sign a scandalous piece of legislation put up by some of the nation's newspaper publishers, entitled the Newspaper Preservation Act. Under its terms, publications such as San Francisco's Examiner and Chronicle, or Detroit's Free Press and News, or Seattle's Post-Intelligencer and Times, would be given permission by the Justice Dept. to flout the antitrust laws and establish monopolies in their respective cities. Not only would these papers be able to set advertising rates, confident that they could jointly conspire to evade all price competition, they could also fend off all would-be competitors. The price tag on this "preservation" act was of course newspaper endorsement of Richard Nixon in the 1972 election. Nixon duly saw reason, and all the publishers likely to benefit by the Joint Operating Agreements endorsed him over George McGovern.
Certainly they would have backed Nixon anyway, but his support of their cause lent an extra zest to their editorial statements that Nixon was their man. Unburdened of the rigors of the "free market" to which their editorial writers and columnists continued to pay fervent tribute, the newspapers began to coin money.
The years rolled by. Then, in the late 1990s, the Hearst corporation, which by now had made something like half a billion out of the JOA-protected vein known as the Examiner, planned to acquire the San Francisco Chronicle, a morning paper. The Hearst plan was clear enough. After a not particularly decent interval the scrawny Examiner would be closed down and the Hearsts would carve their pounds of flesh off the plump survivor.
There was a certain majestic chutzpah to the Hearst design. The rhetorical accouterments of the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 consisted of much verbiage about the vital necessity of sustaining a vigorous Fourth Estate, vigilant guardian of our democratic way of life. But here, quarter of a century later, were the Hearsts, fatter by hundreds of millions off the oligopoly they and their fellows had extorted in return for political services rendered, saying that no longer was liberty imperiled by the possibility of San Francisco becoming a one-newspaper town, or that any possible peril would be more than outweighed by the sense of well-being enjoyed by the Hearst corporation if it was allowed to have its way.
Like all such sagas in San Francisco, this particular tale weaves its way through political underbrush of interest only to locals and that is barely comprehensible to outsiders. Suffice it to say that court proceedings attendant on a challenge to the Hearsts' plan disclosed that former San Francisco Examiner publisher Tim White believed that he had offered Mayor Willie Brown the Examiner's staunch editorial backing in return for Brown's backing of the Hearsts' takeover of the Chronicle.
For some bizarre reason, this disclosure embarrassed the Hearsts and the local owners of the Chronicle, who were eagerly awaiting their cash-out. I say "bizarre" because surely any lingering, childish expectations of the "integrity" of the Fourth Estate had been settled years earlier by the publishers' deal with Nixon. Maybe the Hearsts figured that the circumstances of the JOA had become obscure in the public memory and that it was impolitic to rekindle suspicion.
At any rate, the publishers made a huge and comical effort to persuade the world that White had misspoken himself, had somehow got everything wrong when he let the cat out of the bag about offering to trade favors with Mayor Brown. Retired Judge Charles Renfrew was hired to run an investigative commission that took testimony for half a year at prodigious expense, brooded mightily and finally delivered itself of the somewhat qualified judgment (reported extensively by the Chronicle and the Examiner) that somehow things were not as they seemed and the horse-trading had not taken place.
All the same, Renfrew did say his panel was "not persuaded" that the reasons White gave for his original damning court testimony "provide a complete or even partial explanation." In fact one panel member, Bill Kovach, editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said that "greater deference should be given to White's sworn testimony." White himself, after 16 months in the publisher's chair at the Examiner, was shuttled off into retirement in a gold-plated litter worth almost $10 million.
And what, you ask, actually happened to the proposed trade disclosed by White? Well, one thing you can safely say about Willie Brown is that he's one of the smartest operators in American political history. Many and varied are the prosecutors who have yearned to have put him behind bars. And across more than 30 years no one has ever caught Brown. What the Hearsts hoped to have gotten, and what they actually got, were two very different things.
We now come to one of our story's greater surprises: the U.S. Justice Dept.'s relatively decent comportment during this affair. The DOJ took the view, similar to its posture over a JOA in Honolulu, that the Hearsts would not be allowed so summarily to abandon the JOA when it had ceased to serve its purpose. They could take over the Chronicle, but would have to surrender the Examiner to an appropriate purchaser, and furthermore give that purchaser a three-year slice of the money Hearst had been making out of the JOA over the past generation, said sum coming to about $66 million.
Enter Hinckle, a journalistic adventurer whose rich career includes sessions at Ramparts in its great early days, Scanlan's, City magazine, the Argonaut and The Independent. This last is a free San Francisco paper appearing three times a week and owned by a local Chinese family, the Fangs, who originally enlisted Hinckle to do a hit-job on a former San Francisco mayor called Art Agnos. Hinckle came through with a robust polemic hand-delivered to the voters in booklet form days before the election, and that was the end of Agnos. In fact The Independent is a good community paper.
So the Fangs got the Examiner, beating off some bottom-feeders from New York, and Clint Reilly, that same political operator whose court case against the Hearsts had elicited the damning testimony from White. And now the Fangs have got not very long to establish the Examiner as a morning paper rival to the Chronicle.
Last Wednesday the first Fang-owned Examiner hit the stands. Actually, it hit very few stands, owing to incompetence and misapplied planning. The news section was almost entirely a grab bag from AP and news stories from the Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post. The feature sections were uninspired. With the supposed "professionals" imported to launch the new Examiner now discredited by the screwups of the first few days, the way would appear to be open for Hinckle (on the masthead as associate editor, with Ted Fang as editor and publisher) to do things his way?namely, to make the Examiner a bundle of unexpected journalistic combinations and political positions, getting its joie de vivre from the great examples of the Anderson Valley Advertiser (world's greatest newspaper) and, yes, New York Press.
He hasn't got long. The Fangs have a lot at stake, but their fortune is not vast nor their endurance limitless. On the other hand, the Bay Area has huge, fractious constituencies of readers tempting to advertisers and eager for interesting journalism. It would be great if the more interesting experiments in weekly journalism over the past few years could inspire a city daily with a circulation of about 100,000. That's Hinckle's mission.