Word: austine
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...Bush came out for reporters in Austin at noon Wednesday to give Dick Cheney a medical thumbs-up and deliver a folksy version of James Baker's speech from the night before. "Make no mistake, the court rewrote the laws," Bush said. "It changed the rules and it did so after the election was over." He hinted at the constitutional challenge - and the legislative one. He called on Al Gore to help him urge that military overseas ballots be generously counted. He even braved a few questions afterward, deferring all matters legal to Baker down in Tallahassee...
...could still save the day. There was also the outside chance that the overseas ballots would include enough from Israel to tip the balance to Gore. The second was the public relations war: stoke the anger of African Americans and Jews--for whom disfranchisement strikes a deep chord--throw Austin off balance, keep that transition from getting organized. All this would have useful downstream benefits for the Democrats even if they don't ultimately prevail. The third track was to figure out the legal strategy while the first two tracks bought them time to mull it over...
...Down in Austin, Rove and polling analyst Matthew Dowd were in their adjacent offices, glued to their computers and telephones. "They were like mad scientists with those calculators," says media strategist Mark McKinnon. "They were punching them so hard and so fast, it sounded like a machine gun." At various points one of them would shout that they were a thousand votes down or a thousand votes up. "We lived and died a thousand times tonight," said McKinnon. Spectators hovered outside Rove's office, looking in through a glass window. "We were all standing around like expectant fathers," says...
...lead that, given the apparently small number of votes left and the voting history of the districts left to report, seemed increasingly insurmountable. At 2:16 a.m., Fox News called Florida, and thus the presidency, for Bush. Soon every network rolled the President Bush graphics; the crowd whooped in Austin; and Gore called Bush to concede. Newspapers prepared BUSH WINS! front pages that would leave them black, white and red-faced all over. And the error traveled across news websites like a virus (including, for a while, TIME's). "Unless there is a terrible calamity," ABC's Peter Jennings called...
...meantime, the relaxed Bush, who might well be on vacation if he thought he'd actually won, worked like a dog putting on a tableau of transition. He may not be President, but he played one on TV, using the Governor's mansion in Austin like the set of The West Wing, ushering his make-believe Cabinet through iron gates into meetings. He gave up his usual afternoon video games and naps for lunches with his maybe Vice President on a table set with linens and silver, evoking those famous weekly Clinton-Gore meals adjacent to the Oval Office...