12/19/00 1:55 p.m.
It’s Still Not Over
A legitimate presidency, if you can keep it.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

t would be a mistake for Republicans to breathe a sigh of relief now that the electors have voted in George W. Bush as president and to forget all about the recent unpleasantness in Florida. The GOP has a habit of letting the Democrats spin away their victories after the fact. In 1991, for example, most Americans were convinced that Clarence Thomas was telling the truth and Anita Hill was lying. But after a year of propaganda unchallenged by Republicans, the polls had flipped by 1992. (Never mind that the only evidence to surface in the interim tended to weaken Hill's case.) Anger over Hill's treatment helped the Democrats to mobilize their feminist base in 1992.

The Republican convention that year in Houston followed the same pattern. Republicans got a decent bounce out of the convention, but did nothing to counter a vicious Democratic/media offensive about the intolerance and extremism allegedly on display there. (They were, indeed, defensive about the charge.)

The Democrats, or at least their affiliated interest groups, are going to continue their campaign to show that Bush wasn't "really" elected president. They will say that a "full" recount — one that counts dimpled chads as votes — will show that Al Gore won. (The New Republic takes this line in a hysterical editorial this week.) And the U.S. Civil Rights Commission will go to Florida next month for a hearing on voting-rights violations. The commission, controlled by liberals, does not have enforcement powers, but it may subpoena witnesses.

The battle isn't over. Is it ever?

Sandra, Oh!
It's apparently not enough to question the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore last week. Now the press is taking aim at the Justices themselves.

First came the charge — made by a Tennessee judge (who happens to be a Gore family friend) and trumpeted in the New York Times — that Justice Clarence Thomas should have recused himself from the case because his wife, a Heritage Foundation employee, has a very loose tie to the Bush campaign. Now Newsweek has set its sights on Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who, it says, became visibly upset on election night when Dan Rather said Florida had gone for Gore. "This is terrible," she "exclaimed."

How do reporters Evan Thomas and Michael Isikoff know this? "Two witnesses described this extraordinary scene to Newsweek."

They add: "With an air of obvious disgust, she rose to get a plate of food, leaving her husband to explain her somewhat characteristic outburst. John O'Connor said his wife was upset because they wanted to retire to Arizona, and a Gore win meant they'd have to wait another four years. O'Connor, the former Republican majority leader of the Arizona State Senate and a 1981 Ronald Reagan appointee, did not want a Democrat to name her successor."

All of this may very well be true. But we can't know for sure, because the identity of the "two witnesses" is hidden from us. Follow-up work by other journalists is practically impossible, especially because O'Connor, like every other Supreme Court Justice, won't talk to the press. ("Responding through a spokesman at the High Court, O'Connor had no comment," they write.) We're left with a creepy feeling that O'Connor ruled for Bush because a Gore administration would have wrecked her retirement plans.

This isn't the first time Evans and Isikoff have used anonymous sources in an anti-Republican hit-and-run since the election. They came awfully close to a smear in the November 20 issue: "When the time came for [Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris] to ponder whether to allow the manual recount to go forward or exercise her 'discretion' under the law to certify the final vote, she cleared her office &#!51; overflowing with flowers and bouquets from admirers and supporters — of all aides and hangers-on. She needed to be alone, she said. When her advisers returned, however, they included a powerful local lawyer-lobbyist with unusually close ties to Jeb Bush: J.M. (Mac) Stipanovich, also known as Mac the Knife. After last year's session of the state legislature, Stipanovich, who represents Big Sugar, among other interests, was overheard telling Jeb Bush, 'I got everything. I don't know what the poor people got. But the rich people are happy, and I'm ready to go home.'"

It's hard to know where to start with that one: the sneer quotes around "discretion"; Harris's advisors returning "however" — as if there's something not quite square about her saying she wants to be alone, something that requires contradicting; the "unusually" close ties to the governor. But worst of all is the portrayal of Stipanovich. He doesn't even appear again in the story. He is an ornament here, not a character. The sole purpose of including him is to inform readers that Republicans prefer rich people to poor ones. And we know this because Stipanovich "was overheard" saying something. We don't know if he really said it, because Evans and Isikoff won't tell us who did the eavesdropping. (Stipanovich refused to talk to them, and they apparently didn't ask Jeb Bush about it.)

Evan Thomas is normally a fine writer, and Michael Isikoff has broken important stories. But they do themselves, Newsweek, and journalism itself a disservice when they play games like this with anonymous sources.