Katherine Harris Says She Upheld The Rule of Law in 2000 -- NOT!

April 17, 2002

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

BuzzFlash.com has obtained a fundraising letter Katherine Harris sent to assist in her bid for the Sarasota, Florida, Congressional seat.

Ms. Harris claims, in the letter (which is available for viewing at the bottom of this page), that she upheld the rule of law when she declared George W. Bush the winner of the Florida 2000 vote:

"I want to work for you in Congress because I believe we face a historic opportunity in this new year.

As Florida's Secretary of State, I honored the rule of law during the 2000 Presidential election. I know I did what was right and I have no regrets.

But, because I followed the law, I am the target of unrelenting partisan attacks. That is why I need your help today.

Please join our team, Katherine Harris for Congress, and help me run a winning campaign."

Of course, Ms. Harris didn't uphold the rule of law in a democracy. She upheld the Bush rule of law, which means a Bush always wins, even if he's lost.

To prove BuzzFlash's point, we are excerpting just one piece of corroborating evidence from Jeffrey Toobin's "Too Close to Call":

"As James Baker said any number of times during the post-election battle, "The vote in Florida was counted…the vote in Florida has been recounted…" No one from the Gore campaign ever challenged this view. There was only one problem. It simply wasn't true….

In fact, many counties - a total of eighteen - did not recount their votes on the day after the election. Those counties accounted for 1.58 million votes, more than a quarter of all the votes cast in the election. The significance of this omission can scarcely be overstated. First, as recount expert Jack Young never tired of pointing out, increasing the size of the pool of votes in a recount invariable increases the chances for the lead to change. In other words, if Roberts had insisted that the counties follow the procedures that Harris's own office had established, Al Gore may have been leading in the vote totals by Thursday afternoon. Moreover, the process may have prompted some counties to reexamine their ballots more closely. In Lake County, which did not run its ballots through the machines, the Orlando Sentinel found 376 uncounted ballots clearly intended as votes for Al Gore - and 246 uncounted ballots showing clear votes for George W. Bush. The swing in just this one county - where Gore would have netted 130 votes - illustrates how important a true recount might have been.

Baker, and Bush himself, invariably cited the automatic recount as proof that the votes had been "counted and recounted." But, of course, those votes had not been recounted, and to this day, the votes in the eighteen counties still have not been officially recounted. A central theme of the Republican public-relations effort was that Gore was demanding third and fourth examinations of ballots that had already been rigorously scrutinized. And it was false.

This subterranean story of the automatic recount marked just the first time that Harris's office performed heroic, if necessarily unsung, service to the Bush campaign. In the days that followed, Clay Roberts and Debbie Kearney, Harris's general counsel, would exchange nervous glances whenever the subject of the automatic recount came up. They knew that it had not been a full recount. But neither they nor their superior, Katherine Harris, ever corrected the public record."

There's much more evidence in "Too Close to Call" to debunk Harris's pious and ridiculous assertion that she "upheld the law."

But, before you peruse her fundraising letter, you might also want to read a passage from "Too Close to Call" that describes how Harris is more than an accomplice in the theft of election 2000; she's also a dingbat. This section describes an otherworldly chance encounter that former Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Gore Campaign Manager Bill Daley had with Harris in a Tallahassee restaurant, in the midst of the recount brawl:

"In a fifteen-minute monologue, Harris explained how she had been all over the world and how she was going to make Miami the headquarters of the Western Hemisphere, the Brussels of the Americas. She went on and on in such a breathless way that Christopher [Warren Christopher] could only study her in wonderment. She was completely unselfconscious in rattling on about these matters, and reached the climax of her oration when she said that the Congress of the United States had passed a resolution supporting her effort to make Miami the headquarters of a free-trade region. It didn't take an extreme cynic to note that congressional resolutions were usually devoted to such urgent matters as designating National Bird-Watching Week. Daley [William M. Daley], who was sitting across from Christopher, was rolling his eyes at Harris's performance, but she wasn't finished.

'Isn't it funny,' she mused, turning to Daley, 'that here I do all this foreign trade and you were secretary of commerce.' And then, shifting back to Christopher, Harris added, 'And I'm a secretary of state, and you were a secretary of state!'"

Now, are you ready to contribute your hard-earned money to the Congressional campaign of Ms. Harris? Not!

(Note: You can obtain Toobin's incisive and revealing "Too Close to Call" on BuzzFlash.com at http://www.buzzflash.com/premiums/TooCloseTooCall.html)

The fundraising letter from Katherine Harris can be seen here:

http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/2002/04/Harris/Harris01.html