POLITEX...Yes, we do, and some of it will eventually be in the novel that, little by little, we've been posting...

Let's be deductive rather than inductive with respect to this presidential campaign. Rather than watching events that appear to be moving toward a Bush presidency, lets assume a Bush presidency and work back to the events that needed to happen in the last week or so in order for that circumstance to come about.

First, Bush needed to run out the clock. It should be clear by now that if all of the contested votes were counted Gore might very well have won, so the legal system had to be employed to prevent that from happening. While it appeared that the Florida Supreme Court gave Gore the legal basis for having the votes counted, that same court didn't give him enough time to do so, particularly since it made no provisions to protect the counting process from the anticipated intimidating mob tactics of the Bush forces. The next step was for the Scalia-led U.S. Supreme Court to somehow invalidate the decision of the Florida Supreme Court and be unanimous in doing so. Parallel to this, Gore's contest of the election results in Judge Sauls' Florida court had to fail and be appealed to the Florida Supreme Court.

Today, the Florida Supreme Court will find in Bush's favor. The court has indicated that it now feels intimidated by the U.S. Supreme Court and has said that now there is not enough time to count the votes. While two years ago it publicly humiliated Judge Sauls, noting "the continuing disruption in the administration of justice" in his court, don't look for the court to overturn his pro-Bush decision that flies in the face of Florida law. (Keep in mind that every third case decided by Judge Sauls, a Scalia constructionist, has been overturned on appeal.) Further, don't expect Gore to be helped by any findings by the courts hearing the Seminole and Martin absentee voting fraud cases. In both cases, the Bush lawyers have admitted that the Florida voting ballot laws have been broken, but no matter. You see, the judges will decide that the will of the voters is more important than any laws broken with respect to the manner in which those votes were obtained by the county voting boards. Of course, this is exactly what the Florida Supreme Court contended when it gave Gore the right, but not the time, to have the votes counted. At the Florida Supreme Court, the Bush lawyers argued in favor of the rule of law at the expense of the will of the voters. In the Seminole and Martin cases the Bush lawyers argued in favor of the will of the voters at the expense of the rule of law.

Is there any wonder George W. Bush is arrogant? At every turn, his long-held assumptions about the way the world works are being reinforced. He knows that he and his backers will do whatever it takes and say whatever is needed to win. He knows that his backers are in key positions on every level and throughout every branch of government and the media, and they will do what is needed to have him win. After all, it's in their best interests to do so. It's just business as usual. One hand washing the other. After today, Bush's next step will be to convince the majority of the American people that he is justified in making decisions in their name. Although fewer Americans voted for him than for Gore, although, when the votes are actually counted and the charges of voter discrimination are found to be true and it will be discovered that Gore won in Florida as well, thereby winning the majority of electoral college votes, Bush will not only have declared himself the victor, he will have declared himself "legitimate" on the basis of the above politicized court opinions. Then the media will begin to beat the drum about the Bush "mandate," which will allow him to begin to carry out his ill-informed economic policies, creating the recession that he and acting-President Cheney have already blamed on the Democrats.

Relax this weekend. The Bush campaign for his second presidential term will probably begin on Monday. --Politex, 12/8/00

"ChoicePoint, an Atlanta-area company, has conservative Bernard Marcus, chairman of Home Depot and a major Republican contributor, on its board of directors. Since 1995, Marcus has given more than $200,000 to Republican causes, including a $100,000 check in September 1998.... ChoicePoint bought Database Technologies in a merger earlier this year...By then, the Boca Raton Database Technologies had agreed to join a nationwide "voter scrub" project with the Voting Integrity Project, a Virginia group founded by conservative activists that calls itself a nonpartisan watchdog group. Much like Database Technologies' $4 million job for the state of Florida, the "voter scrub" project was meant to help communities scour their election rolls for ineligible voters. VIP's founder is Helen R. Blackwell of Arlington, Va. Her husband is former Reagan assistant Morton Blackwell, the executive director of the arch-conservative Council for National Policy, which features Oliver North and Ralph Reed as members, said Joel Kaplan, a Syracuse University journalism professor investigating the group.

"After felons, out-of-towners and dead people helped elect Miami's mayor three years ago, [Republican controlled] state lawmakers vowed to purge Florida's voter rolls of anyone not legally allowed to cast a ballot. But now the Boca Raton company hired to do the job is under fire because of its recent ties to the conservative VIP Virginia group that has aided Republican causes in previous election disputes. The ruckus is adding yet another racial tinge to the already multi-hued tumult over Florida's botched presidential election. The reason: Blacks make up a disproportionate number of Floridians who are barred from voting because they hold felony convictions. Recent studies say nearly one-quarter to 31 percent of black men in Florida cannot vote. Now, the state's voter-purge project has critics doubting both the accuracy and the motives of the state's contractor, Database Technologies....Even before the partisan ties became an issue, election supervisors in some counties -- including Palm Beach County -- declared the company's information too dubious to use. In one glitch, the company mistakenly listed 7,972 people as possible felons, only to acknowledge later that [,like George W. Bush and his DWI,] they had been convicted only of misdemeanors. Even after that error was cleared up, some black activists and lawmakers have charged, legitimate voters were blocked from casting ballots on Election Day because they were erroneously listed as felons." --King and Englehardt, 12/6/00

BUSH WATCHER...Like Bush and his spinners, it appears that Leach will say anything to win. Here's how he ends that essay..."Will we ever see leaders with the common sense to think on their own, or take responsibility for their actions, instead of passing the buck...?" The hypocrisy of Bush and his minions is stunning.--Politex

"Florida Senate leader John McKay has taken a more cautious approach than the zealous [Florida House Speaker] Mr. Feeney, but together they represent the kind of politics that will probably characterize a Bush family restoration. Like their Congressional counterparts, Mr. McKay is a dutiful lackey of business and agricultural interests, while Mr. Feeney promotes the agenda of the religious right. A few years ago, the author and Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen called Mr. Feeney "a right-wing flake with a dubious track record." To take just one example from many, Mr. Feeney once tried to require the state to issue a special license plate adorned with the slogan "Choose Life." On another occasion, he tried to suppress the dangerous practice of yoga among Florida high-school students. Both Florida legislative bosses are creatures of Jeb Bush, the governor who has affected to "recuse" himself from the struggle over his state's electoral votes, at least until his signature is needed on a bill that will ensure his older brother's victory.

"One measure of Mr. Feeney's extremism was Jeb Bush's decision to dump him from the Republican ticket in 1998, after their unsuccessful experience running together four years earlier. Ridiculed by then-Governor Lawton Chiles as "the David Duke of Florida politics," Mr. Feeney's candidacy for lieutenant governor proved to be the excess baggage that sank the younger Bush's challenge to Chiles in 1994. That campaign was a fervent crusade of ideas-mostly very bad ideas. For someone who grew up under pretty soft conditions, Jeb Bush took a hard view of those less fortunate than himself. Flanked by Mr. Feeney, he promised to be tough on juvenile offenders and welfare mothers. "We should have punishment being the overriding philosophy in how we deal with children," he said. And according to reporters who followed his campaign, he would shock Florida's country-club Republicans by revealing how welfare mothers could cadge as much as $18,000 a year to feed their families by illicitly working for cash while they received food stamps and Medicaid.

"That ugly approach led to a narrow but well-deserved defeat for the Bush-Feeney ticket. When Jeb ran again on a platform of what Dubya later described as "compassionate conservatism," he carefully selected a pro-choice woman as his running mate. It was an opportunistic decision whose necessity even Mr. Feeney seems to have understood. As Mr. Feeney told a reporter for Miami New Times near the end of that campaign, Jeb had wisely modeled his new image on that of his successful Texas sibling. That shift didn't trouble the ultraconservative Mr. Feeney at all. "I don't think Jeb Bush's belief system has changed fundamentally," he explained. The same might accurately be said of Jeb's brother, the man who would (and at this point, probably will) be President. The Bush style in recent years has been to sugarcoat hard-right policy with a thin layer of bipartisan rhetoric and happy talk. What lies beneath that sweet veneer is what inspires the likes of Tom Feeney." --Joe Conason, 12/6/00

"The Republicans, and the Bush team...really need to look in the mirror. What they will see is not pretty. Their most senior leaders trashed and smeared the very courts that are now close to delivering a legitimate victory for Mr. Bush. Mr. Bush's spokeswoman accused Mr. Gore of going to war against American troops abroad because of a dispute over absentee ballots. And George W. Bush and his brother Jeb were preparing to have the Republican-dominated Florida Legislature convene a special session to simply elect their own pro-Bush slate of presidential electors that would overrule any court-mandated vote recount. Excuse me, but we don't do that in this country. Even if it is technically legal, it violates the whole spirit of democracy. Ramming through an election victory no matter what the vote count is what Raúl Castro does for his brother Fidel in Cuba. Not here. Shame on the Bush brothers for even contemplating this.

"While they are looking in the mirror, Republicans also need to ask themselves what face of America they see. Is it the multi-ethnic, multiracial face of their Philadelphia convention? Or is it the Bush old-boy network and corporate boardroom that was utterly indifferent to the fact that too many African-Americans, who wanted to be part of this election, never got to vote in Florida — either because of obstacles put in their way or because their voting equipment, like their schools, was dilapidated? Which brings us back to Mr. Bush. If he is elected, we don't need him to be the "education president." We need him to be the "democracy president."...We really need to take a comprehensive look at how we cast our ballots, count our votes, resolve our electoral disputes and finance and run all our campaigns. The country may have dodged a bullet in this election, but we don't want to go down this road again.

"We can't afford a president with tarnished legitimacy, and neither can the world. Throughout the campaign Mr. Bush kept saying that he would restore American "leadership" abroad, without ever explaining: leadership for what?... What most threatens world stability now is bad governing, corruption and the erosion of the rule of law....Therefore, one of the biggest challenges for a Bush team will be to develop the strategies, and credibility, to help stem a wave of democratic breakdown. Mr. Bush could actually use such a noble goal. It would give some meaning to his presidency, especially since the vapid foreign policy he articulated during the campaign evinced no vision, or moral energy, no "lift of a driving dream" that one of his G.O.P. predecessors once spoke about. Reviving democracy at home...is a worthy driving dream." --Thomas Friedman, 12/5/00

"Bush's minions have engaged in incendiary rhetoric, accusing the Gore camp of trying to "steal" the election and calling election officials "thugs." They have denounced and tried to discredit the courts when they didn't rule the GOP's way. And in one astonishing episode, a Republican mob verbally attacked and intimated a group of low-level functionaries trying to hand recount ballots in Miami-Dade. By the way, that scene of well-heeled young conservatives engaged in a near-riot bore the imprimatur of House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, among the scary GOP contingent that Bush tried to keep hidden during the campaign. DeLay and other Republican congressional leaders -- realizing that they couldn't expect many legitimate voters in heavily Democratic Miami-Dade to rally to their cause -- offered their aides airfare, hotels and meals if they would fly down to Florida to cause trouble. Indeed, they were thrilled for the opportunity to use their peculiar talents. One GOP operative told The Wall Street Journal: "Once word leaked out, everybody wanted in." Perhaps Bush's resort to such tactics shouldn't come as a surprise -- his mantra about being a "uniter, not a divider" notwithstanding. When he was under pressure from U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona during the Republican primaries, Bush allowed his minions to resort to the worst kinds of dirty tricks. Bush surrogates went so far as to suggest McCain sold out to the Communists in Vietnam and to smear his 9-year-old adopted Bangladeshi daughter.

"Bush ought to know better. He should have learned from the late Lee Atwater, a South Carolina native who used scorched-earth tactics to win the presidency for the governor's father, George H.W. Bush. In a death-bed confessional written for Life magazine, Atwater, who died of cancer in 1991, spoke with deep regret of the bitter war he waged against Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee. "In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I 'would strip the bark off the little bastard' and 'make Willie Horton his running mate.' I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not. "Mostly I am sorry for the way I thought of other people. Like a good general, I had treated everyone who wasn't with me as against me." That's the least of it. The Bush camp is treating the opposition as illegitimate, un-American, thieves. And, if Bush assumes the White House, Gore's supporters -- about half of America -- won't easily forget it. If he wins (and the clock seems to favor Bush at the moment), he's in for a rocky road. They say the governor doesn't read much, but he ought to go back and take a look at Atwater's dying words. It is too late for Bush to reclaim the mantle of "uniter, not a divider;" he has long since given the lie to that. But it may not be too late for him to reclaim his soul." --Cynthia Tucker, 12/4/00

FLORIDA ELECTION UPDATE...Everything you want to know is here

"When outraged Republicans raised a ruckus outside the Miami-Dade County elections office last week, some protesters at the door weren't local citizens. They were Capitol Hill aides on all-expenses paid trips, courtesy of the Bush campaign. Right up front on television images of the event last Wednesday were Thomas Pyle, an aide to GOP Rep. Tom DeLay, and Michael Murphy, who works for a DeLay fund-raising committee. Doug Heye from California Rep. Richard Pombo's office also was in the fray....Behind the rowdy rallies in South Florida this past weekend was a well-organized effort by Republican operatives to entice supporters to South Florida....The biggest contingent appears to have hailed from within the marbled walls of the Capitol complex in Washington....

"In Washington, several GOP aides say the office of Mr. DeLay, the House Republican whip, took charge of the effort on Capitol Hill, passing on an offer many staffers couldn't refuse: free air fare, accommodations and food in the Sunshine State -- all paid for by the Bush campaign. Aides who accepted took advantage of liberal congressional workplace rules that allow them to jump from government jobs to political tasks at a moment's notice by declaring themselves on vacation or temporary leave. "Once word leaked out, everybody wanted in," says one GOP operative involved in the effort. Participants estimate that more than 200 staffers signed on, some spending more than a week in South Florida. Many stayed in Hiltons by the beach and received $30 a day for food, as well as an invitation to an exclusive Thanksgiving Day party in Fort Lauderdale....

"Staffers who joined the effort say there has been an air of mystery to the operation. "To tell you the truth, nobody knows who is calling the shots," says one aide. Many nights, often very late, a memo is slipped underneath the hotel-room doors outlining coming events. On Friday night, one aide received notice that he and his colleagues were welcome to stay in South Florida until "further notice." Bush supporters sometimes outnumbered Gore backers by 10 to one outside the Broward County Courthouse in the Democrat-leaning community. A block to the north, a recreational vehicle festooned with Bush-Cheney signs served as operation central, having recently been transferred from similar duty in Miami....[GOP] camaraderie was on full display at the glitzy Thanksgiving night party featuring free food and libations at the Hyatt on Pier 66 in Fort Lauderdale -- "a festive family mood," says one protester. Entertainer Wayne Newton crooned the song "Danke Schoen," until a group of frenzied female fans rushed the stage. The night's highlight was a conference call from Mr. Bush and running mate Dick Cheney, which included joking references by both running mates to the incident in Miami." --WSJ, 11/27/00

by Jerry Politex

I drove my silver Audi down Mesa Drive, the spine of Cat Mountain, hung a left at the cat's tail, drove quickly up the hilly, winding 2222 in low gear, took a right onto Balcones Drive, and came to a stop in the rear parking lot of Che Zee.

Another sunny, warm early spring day in Northwest Austin, Texas. The lunch crowd was pretty much thinned out by now, so I had choices of parking spaces. I got out of the car, the turbines winding down, and stood by the rear entrance to the restaurant, a pretty-good place for not very expensive Southwestern food. I didn't have long to wait.

He came into the parking lot in an old, rattletrap Nissan pickup. Paint worn off in places, rusty, dusty, squeaky. I recognized him from the description the moment he got out. Looked to be in his fifties. Grizzled. Kind of rusty, dusty, and squeaky. A stringbean of a guy with pale white skin, reddish hair, which was short but unkempt. He was wearing a black polo shirt with the tail out. Denim shorts that had shrunk to a tight fit over his bony hips, short enough for the front pockets to stick out of the frayed cuffs. A pair of old, once-white but now gray, paint-spattered tennis sneakers. Austin casual for a yuppie restaurant, ten minutes from the glass buildings of the city's burgeoning silicon gulch , a world of high tech hopes in buildings springing up like overnight mushrooms.

"Name's Wayne," he said with a crooked, good-natured smile, coming across the parking lot with his arm outstreatched like a spear, eager to shake my hand. "Recognized you right away, Politex. Good description."

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