Word: becking
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...testimony of the vice president's first witness, political scientist Kimball Brace, was breathtakingly inept: The bedraggled wonk spent most of his time on the stand fumbling with 40-year-old voting machines and inadvertently shaking handfuls of chads onto Judge Sauls' desk. By the time Bush attorney Phil Beck had finished his cross examination, Brace had failed to support his theory that there might be structural problems or inconsistencies with the left-hand side of the Votomatic voting machine. He'd also all but admitted there was no reason to doubt the canvassing boards' ability to count their...
...Cross-examination is a savage business, and Beck came out with teeth bared. Sneering, sardonic, and sometimes downright vicious, Bush's new star went after Brace on the rubber blends used in South Florida ("I don't know"), the name of the machine that tests rubber softness ("I don't know") how many chads make a pile ("I don't know"), and every other technical fine point with which he could stump Brace for Sauls' amusement. "Your opinion as a political science major is that rubber gets harder?" Beck scoffed, the scarcasm dripping. Brace had come in looking like...
...while he cut away at the technical truth of Brace's claims, Beck did something else - he goosed the passionate and pontification-prone witness into helping the Bush team with its backup plan. As Brace defended the integrity of some dimples, he got Brace to valiantly defend the abilities of canvassing boards to discern dimpled intent. Whoops. Boies, looking for another 600 votes, is also suing for a recount of the hand count in Palm Beach. If Gore's witness for his case in Miami-Dade turns out to be credible, he'll have done some work for Bush...
...impression on Sauls. The idea that hanging chad happens - and can fool a machine scanner - is still a valid and sensible argument for a Miami-Dade manual recount, whatever the legal questions involved (that'll come later), and there was no evidence Sauls didn't see it. And when Beck had finished, and wiped the blood off his lips, Gore lawyer Zack made up some lost ground, bringing in a genuine Votomatic whose basin that was "filled to the brim with chad." The intuitive virtues of Brace's testimony were badly wounded, but they survived...
...During his cross-examination, Bush lawyer Beck peppered Hengartner with hypothetical questions relating to the left-hand side of the voting machine, apparently hoping to discredit Brace's testimony but serving primarily to underscore a serious miscalculation on the part of Gore's legal team - which would probably have been wise to have stuck with the Miami-Dade recount as the basis for their contest. Then, instead of wasting two witnesses trying to prove esoteric mechanical flaws of machines in Palm Beach, the Democrats might have scored a few points by insisting they were only trying to procure a first...