The Real November Surprise

...Bush aides gained a fuller appreciation of what they were up against when they learned that the Gore campaign, in a conference call that day, had urged union leaders to send 40 labor lawyers to Florida to help contest the election...

...BY MATTHEW REES Austin AS FURIOUS as Republicans were last week about Al Gore's "attempted coup d'état," they also were heard grumbling about the Bush campaign's initially tepid response to the Gore offensive...

...Our democratic process calls for a vote on Election Day," he said...

...He contrasted the Bush campaign's bunker mentality with the Gore campaign's unrelenting effort to taint the legitimacy of the Florida vote...

...This left matters in the hands of Bush aides skilled at running a campaign but judged unprepared to counter the Democratic jihad...

...Friday morning came the announcement that the Florida recount showed Bush leading by more than 300 votes, and Hughes released a statement saying Bush's "victory" had been "confirmed...

...I'm afraid Bush may win the battle but lose the war," said a leading Republican operative, fearing the post-election atmosphere could be so poisoned as to make governing all but impossible...

...The earliest that's likely to happen is Friday, once the absentee ballots are counted (they were going 2-1 for Bush at the end of last week...

...As for George W. Bush, in a brief session with the press Friday afternoon, he demonstrated cool confidence, trading friendly barbs with reporters and telling them, "I'm in the process of planning, in a responsible way, a potential administration...

...Hughes's statement reflected the Bush team's strategy...

...Baker, the former secretary of state, was nominally leading this effort, but the chief tactician was Ben Ginsberg, a long-time Republican election lawyer whose experience includes overseeing a modified recount of votes in the 1988 Florida Senate race in which Connie Mack narrowly prevailed...

...Bush aides wanted to stay above the fray, saying they didn't need to answer every charge made by the Gore campaign...

...The good feeling among leading Republicans will persist as long as there are no major stumbles en route to Bush's being certified as the next president...

...Rove had been predicting a relatively comfortable victory with 320 Electoral College votes, and the campaign had stopped its daily tracking polls on the Thursday before the election...

...One reason it took the Bush campaign so long to go on the offensive was that it had never expected to be in a tight race with Gore...

...And an early favorite to chair the National Economic Council is Robert Grady, a San Francisco investment banker with the Carlyle Group who served as a senior budget official in the Bush White House (Grady could also be tapped for the top slot at the Environmental Protection Agency...

...By Thursday afternoon the campaign had abandoned its laid-back posture...

...Spence Abraham, the Michigan senator defeated in his reelection bid, is under consideration for a position in Bush's cabinet, owing in part to his popularity with Senate Democrats and his status as an Arab American...

...Among the names being talked up for attorney general are Oklahoma governor Frank Keating, Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, and former Missouri senator John Danforth...

...One of the complaints about the Bush campaign was that other than Baker, few seasoned politicos were summoned during last week's crisis...

...Republicans said it should not have taken the Bush team approximately 30 hours to respond to Democratic charges about the Palm Beach County "butterfly" ballot...

...If the will of the people is to prevail," he said, "Al Gore should be awarded a victory in Florida and be our next president...

...With respect to the transition, Bush aides moved more quietly, but there was little evidence the pace had slowed...

...The comment drew strong criticism from editorial writers at the Washington Post and New York Times...

...John Kasich, an Ohio congressman, was also seen around the Four Seasons last week, heightening speculation he's angling to become director of the Office of Management and Budget...

...It also threatened not so subtly to demand a recount in states Gore narrowly won, and quietly proceeded with its transition plans...

...That leaves the Electoral College in a 269-269 tie and makes last week's high-stakes drama look like pattycake...

...The day after the election, Dick Cheney's appointment as the transition head was announced, and national political reporters started receiving calls about who would be named to top posts in the Bush administration...

...The slow response allowed a one-sided cacophony to develop in the press and left the public thinking the Gore campaign's charges must have merit...

...That was followed by Daley's strident press conference...

...At a Tallahassee press conference on Friday, Bush emissary James Baker was judged to have struck an appropriately tough but measured tone, while Gore campaign chairman William Daley, in a subsequent appearance, was considerably more subdued than he'd been the day before (it didn't hurt that a recount had showed Bush leading in Florida by 327 votes...

...Rove reeled off voting statistics from Palm Beach County designed to counter the Democratic charges related to surprisingly high levels of support for Pat Buchanan, and Evans spelled out what he believed to be the Gore campaign's objective...

...But Bush aides recognize that before any jobs can be parceled out, Gore needs to concede he's lost Florida and thus the election...

...The campaign also assembled a network of lawyers, operating in all of Florida's 67 counties, to guarantee the integrity of the ballot counts and, more generally, to challenge every procedural move by Democratic lawyers that could impact the count...

...Bush aides also learned that Peter Knight, a long-time Gore confidant and money man, was boasting of having received $4 million in commitments to fund a recount effort in Florida...

...Given the anomalies surrounding this election, some journalists were mischievously holding out hope for the following scenario: Florida is called for Gore, while the states where the Bush campaign has suggested it might want a recount—New Mexico, Iowa, and Wisconsin—are awarded to Bush...

...On Thursday Bush met in the governor's mansion with Andrew Card and Condi Rice, who are widely expected to be named White House chief of staff and national security adviser respectively...

...At a Thursday press conference, Bush strategist Karl Rove did display a butterfly ballot used in Cook County, Illinois, home of Gore campaign chairman Daley, but there was surprise in GOP circles that it had taken so long to produce it (Rove received the ballot from a company called ESS that prints ballots...

...While the Gore campaign never switched out of campaign mode, but sprang into action challenging the vote count in Florida, the Bush campaign started planning for the transition to power...

...GOP leaders, of the risks associated with the insular nature of the Bush inner circle...

...Rove, campaign chairman Don Evans, and spokeswoman Karen Hughes signaled their shift at a press briefing of their own on Thursday afternoon...

...We hope Vice President Gore and his campaign will reconsider their threats of lawsuits or still more recounts," she added, "which could undermine the constitutional process of selecting a president and has no foreseeable end...

...But the campaign was still trying to create a sense of inevitability...

...That was a principled position, Republicans said, but naive given the stakes and the extreme tactics Gore and aides like Bob Shrum have resorted to to win elections...

...Thus, it had failed to catch the three-to-five-point erosion in Bush's numbers over the weekend (according to exit polls, 54 percent of voters who decided in the final three days of the campaign went for Gore, and just 39 percent for Bush...

...The effort is being run out of Austin, with much activity centered around the Four Seasons Hotel where Cheney has taken up residence...

...It was questioning the legitimacy of Gore's tactics in hopes of creating a groundswell of opposition to his refusal to concede...

...It does not call for us to continue voting until someone likes the outcome...

...But by the weekend, Republican grumbling had dissipated...

...But the slow reaction to the Gore offensive is a reminder, say Matthew Rees is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Thursday, chastened by criticism from the Gore campaign, the Bushies were denying responsibility for any such calls and turning down the volume on transition talk...

...Bush also met on Friday afternoon with Larry Lindsey, his chief economics adviser, who is a serious candidate for Treasury secretary (others being mentioned are Jack Hennessy, a Wall Street financier, and Bill Archer, the Texas congressman who's chaired the House tax-writing committee for the past six years...