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insurance execs, though her own campaign manager was later named as an unindicted co-conspirator by federal prosecutors in the same scam. The man most responsible fox’ the successful Bush strategy of preparing to go to the Supreme Court all along, was D.C. super-conservative lawyer Ted Olson, recently rewarded with the job of Solicitor General. What I didn’t know was that Olson is the same great guy who successfully represented the four students who sued the University of Texas Law School in the Hopwood case, overturning UT’s affirmative-action policy. This was when he wasn’t helping to ‘run’ the Arkansas Project, the multimillion-dollar investigation into President Clinton’s life funded by a right-wing billionaire. And then there was the press “coverage.” Throughout ‘the after-campaign, press and pundits alike repeatedly cited the gracious, noble example of Richard Nixon in 1960, who refused to contest possible voting irregularities in Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago and LBJ’s Texas, and let his razorthin loss to John F. Kennedy stand for the good of the country. The implication was “Why wasn’t Al Gore as classy?” Turns out, Nixon wasn’t so classy either. The Nixon campaign sent lawyers to all of the disputed places \(including one lawyer, Fred Barlit, who would be instrumental in W’s successful defense in laying the groundwork for challenges and lawsuits. They only pulled back in December of 1960 when they figured out that their efforts were not likely to succeed. All of this history could easily have been accessed by reading newspaper articles from back then on microfilm in any library. Press coverage of the “spontaneous” demonstrations in Florida was, likewise, less than rigorous. As Tapper points out again and again, almost every voter “protest” against the Democratic attempts to “steal” the election \(and most of the people holding Sore/Loserman signs in seemingly every Bush campaign staffers or “volunteers” whose day jobs involved working for various Republican officials around the country. I suppose this ranked with the “coverage” of those constant Republican charges that there Were numerous cases of tampering with ballots in the hand recounts that did take place. Tapper found that there were actually no substantiated cases of tampering, not a single oneand many examples of local Republicans who took part in the recount process being pissed off by the charges by Bush surrogates. Beyond that, Tapper reminds us, over and over, that the Bush spin team con tinually spit out statements about voting behavior that most first-year political science grad students would know were ludicrous. For the record, it would be . very unusual if more people choose not to vote for president, the choice at the top of the ballot, than to not vote for down-ballot, lesser offices. And as for the argument that counting votes by hand is inherently more biased and less accurate than counting by any manner of automation, the Republican-dominated Florida Legislature recently voted to ban punch card ballot machines \(goodbye recounts of any election where the margin of victory was less than a quarter of one percent. And finally, let’s go back to that dispute on military absentee ballots. Remember how the Bush campaign marched out Bob Dole and Norman Schwarzkopf, accusing the Gore campaign of attempting to throw out the ballots of our loyal men and women serving their country overseas? Their accusations stemmed from an internal Gore team memo detailing a strategy for challenging overseas ballots without the necessary postmarks. Turns out, though, that well before the Dems started worrying about military ballots for Bush, the Republicans actually feared that the bulk of Florida’s overseas absentee ballots would be coming from American Jews living in Israel, all gaga over Joe Lieberman and voting for Gore. In a preemptive strike, Tapper recounts that former Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith \(a Republican predecessor of ference and demanded that Florida law be followed, with all ballots without proper postmarks \(on or before Election thrown out. Exactly what the Democratic memo \(“leaked” by the I suppose one might ask why no one in the press mentioned the fact that the Busbies has actually taken the same positionand in a public press conference. This, of course, is water under the press bridge. It was clear that the politi 24 TIE TEXAS OBSERVER 6/22/01