Despite the best efforts of judges, lawyers, political parties and even the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Election That Wouldn’t Die stubbornly staggered on for weeks after it was supposed to be over, relentlessly rising from the near-dead and dragging all of us limply along behind it.
We’re amazed. We’re appalled. But mostly, we’re tired.
Even before the nation’s highest court weighed in Tuesday night and appeared to drive a stake through its heart, the election elicited widespread weariness, with many Americans having long since given up trying to keep track of the status of absentee ballots, lawsuits or upper- and lower-court rulings in Florida’s electoral farrago. But their election fatigue is, in most part, figurative.
For certain others, the exhaustion is all too literal and, where television cameras are involved, all too visible. Red-rimmed, baggy eyes, stress-creased brows and unfortunate slips of the tongue: Classic emblems of exhaustion worn by more than a few of the lawyers, judges, campaign aides and members of the media involved in an imbroglio stretching between Tallahassee, Fla.; Austin, Texas, and Washington.
These people–many of whom haven’t had a day off in more than a month–are plumb tuckered out, burnt out and, yes, bushed, in the purely non-partisan sense of word.
The high price to be paid for too much work and too little sleep was vividly illustrated Tuesday, when many high-priced television reporters tried to make sense of the Supreme Court’s complicated, late-night ruling.
On Monday, attorney Joseph Klock became a footnote to history, perpetrating perhaps the most spectacular string of faux pas anyone can remember a lawyercommitting before the U.S. Supreme Court.
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During arguments regarding the Florida vote count, Klock, who represents Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, continually flubbed the names of the justices. He called Justice John Paul Stevens “Justice Brennan,” a reference to a jurist who died in 1997. Then he called Justice David Souter “Justice Breyer,” referring to Justice Stephen Breyer, who was sitting nearby on the nation’s highest bench.
“I’m Justice Souter. You’ve got to cut that out,” Souter gently chided Klock.
“I will now give up,” said the chagrined Klock, who still later took a good-natured jab from Justice Antonin Scalia. As a pre-emptive strike, when his turn came to address Klock, Scalia said, “Mr. Klock, I’m Scalia.”
Chagrined but good humored, Klock later tried to shrug off his mistake. “I was so tired that I was happy I didn’t call one of them `Justice Gore,'” he said.
Meanwhile, after presiding over televised court hearings involving the presidential contest that stretched from dawn until well into the night, Judge Terry Lewis of Leon County Circuit Court in Tallahassee was so tired that he blurted out the courthouse fax number live on CNN. Less than an hour later, the court’s fax machine struggled with the deluge of crude political sketches and sharply worded memos dispatched from disgruntled Americans.
“You poor son-of-a-gun,” wrote James S. Scott Jr., who sent the judge a note from an undisclosed location. “You’ve been put in a terrible position by an insane group of brazen judicial activists. Good luck making up rules on the fly.
“P.S.–Don’t give out your fax number!” Scott added.
Indeed, fatigue has become the fashion all over Tallahassee. What once was a small, sleepy capital city with the polite and neighborly manner of the South, a place closer in style to Georgia than Miami, has been left disheveled, disrupted and often disgusted by the fallout from Election 2000.
Reporters and lawyers and political workers have swamped the place. Restaurant owners and parking lots and hotels have been thrilled with the business, but its sheer size and velocity are overwhelming their ability to cope.
The dry cleaners in town are so busy they cannot handle the bulk of laundry from the local hotels; guests often are told that laundry due at 6 p.m. may not arrive until 10 p.m., sometimes midnight, and finally, daybreak. The local bagel shop constantly battles shortages caused by huge orders for television crews camped outside the Florida Supreme Court and other venues.
For some residents, the sheer increase in traffic and human bodies in motion has become a major irritation.
Cora McMullian, 24, of Tallahassee said: “I’m ready for this to be over. I’m sick of seeing people everywhere. I’m sick of fighting traffic. I’m ready for us to be able to drive down the road again. … No offense, but I’m ready for all of you to leave.”
McMullian is hardly the only one wilting from the ordeal. An ordinary citizen who came to Tallahassee to testify before a legislative subcommittee on choosing the electoral slate fell asleep during the hearing last week. She snored.
Increasingly, people are obsessed with sleep. Conversations between lawyers, partisans and reporters inevitably come around to sleep, as in: Did you get any? How many hours?
Steve Tankel, a Democratic Party spokesman, recently has gotten almost none. He also is running short of laundry. Tankel was wearing a medium blue dress shirt (with an orange ribbon in honor of the “disenfranchised” voters of Florida) for the third day in a row. Defeated by the choices at the local Wal-Mart, he has washed his shirt in his hotel sink each night.
Meanwhile, members of his staff are having trouble keeping their eyes open. Tankel tried to contact a press aide before dawn one morning to send her to the Leon County Courthouse, but she apparently couldn’t wake up. No amount of phoning would help. Someone finally had to be sent to pound on her door.
Among the most tired people involved in the Endless Election are those in the media, many of whom have camped outside the Texas governor’s mansion in Austin, Vice President Al Gore’s residence in Washington and outside courthouses for what may now seem like several lifetimes.
One of the most visible, and apparently indefatigable, is Candy Crowley, CNN’s senior political correspondent, who hasn’t been back to her suburban Washington home since the first week of October.
“I think the problem is that you know how you set your mind that there’s a marker someplace” for the campaign to end, she said from her post in Austin. Noting that she has been covering George W. Bush for a year and a half, she added that the Friday after the election, Nov. 10, was supposed to be the closure point.
“Not only did that mile-marker just get blown away, but I got stuck not ending my political story. It doesn’t matter anymore how he won it or he lost it, what are we going to write? `How did he tie it?’ So, that story has gone away.
“Then you take a political reporter and cast them in the middle not just of the legal system but of the Florida legal system. I’m sitting in Austin, Texas, watching my political story unfold in a courtroom in Florida and it’s so frustrating,” she said.
“It has that feeling of, `Somebody, please step up and end this thing.’ It’s like we’re in Dante’s 9th Circle” of hell.