Word: bracingly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Kimball Brace, the founder and president of tiny Election Data Services, shambled up to the witness stand of Judge Sanders Sauls' Leon County omnibus hearing-for-the-presidency, bespectacled and bookish, grayed and shaggy - like Pat Caddell's older and even geekier brother. A political scientist by education and a demographer (sort of) by trade, he's also been looking in on the election offices and voting booths of this great nation for 25 years. He'd even brought his own Votomatic, just like they use in Palm Beach, which he'd owned since the '70s. And after a meticulous...
...Bush team pounced. They relentlessly questioned the expertise of the expert witness, in which Brace wound up looking like a sort of hobbyist, able to voice his opinions only as "personal observations" based on his long experience in the field. (Or, as Bush lawyer Phil Beck put it disdainfully, "his years of travels.") And then they let him talk...
...stiff over age, he told Gore questioner Stephen Zack. Some styluses were particularly apt to leave chad behind. Some people voted with the card on top of the machine, and only left dimples. Sometimes the chad basin filled up so high that punching through was futile. And Brace never missed an opportunity to tack a Gore talking point at the end of observations. The scanner misses votes, so all the votes in Maimi-Dade must be counted by hand, "the only way of absolutely knowing for sure" who won. Thank you, Kimball...
...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...
...rest of America has been entertained from a safe distance by Florida's headlines, but our endemic weirdness can no longer be regarded as amusing local color. The very fate of the American presidency now rests in its slimy, surreal grip. As a native Floridian, I advise you to brace yourselves. Given our recent history, more bizarre twists are to be expected...