Words, UnLtd. December 2002

                                Unprecedented,
                                      A new film documenting the rape of democracy …
                                                       Lest we “get over it….”

Shown Tuesday, October 22, 2002, in midtown Manhattan
Sponsored by People for the American Way Foundation (PAWF), The Nation Institute, the NAACP, and Greg Palast 

       I have had a rotten feeling in my bones since I first saw a press photo of George W. Bush in July 1999.  That feeling has expanded to encompass the worlds this miscreant has polluted since he illegally took over the White House in December 2000.  Two years later, mainland civilian America has been attacked for the first time since 1812 – if civilians were wounded even then. The ethics of the corporate world are in worse condition than the World Trade Center, as is the domestic economy and, by contagion, the global economy.  Democracy is being drained out of this country like blood by a vampire.  So I have to laugh when George W. Bush speaks of spreading democracy to the Middle East when he is draining it here.  What he plans there is not regime change nor even war, but its ancient corollary, plunder and pillage.

      The timing is good: two weeks before the election.  But the film must proselytize rather than preach to the convinced.  Nonetheless, the review of events was compelling, and new perspectives were offered.  There was criticism of Gore, for example, for demanding recounts in only four counties (the most heavily Democratic ones) instead of all of them, which would have handed him victory, had a comprehensive recount been permitted.  And there was in-depth documentation and analysis of the devious forms racial injustice took two years ago, and the numbers cry out, approaching 200,000 or more uncounted votes, that the wrong candidate moved into the White House.  Intimidation, bullying, deferral and cover-up tactics were also detailed. News clips were integrated with interviews of scholars, government and party officials, and voters to review many of the most strident violations of democracy.  Many, but not all, because there were so many.  There are still unanswered questions.  Why did Gore’s attorney argue so  ineffectively when there was so much evidence to support his suit?  The country was behind him: that was the best argument of all.  The people wanted him to be president.  The radical right machinery is so highly skilled at bullying its way everywhere it wants to go.  It simply has no place in a democracy.  Why is it winning?  I had to disagree when one reviewer opined that Bush simply “played a better game than Gore.”  Presidential elections are no game.  Life may also be a game for the one percent, but as Aristotle wrote in his Politics so long ago, in real democracies rich and poor rule equally.  Majorities can tyrannize, he warned, but so can minorities.  Where the law has no authority, the best and brightest cannot rule and there is no constitution.

      My anger, that rotten feeling, was re-ignited, if it needed to be.  But the problem is one that also occurred to Aristotle back in fourth-century Athens.  Most of us have to work most of the time. We do not have the leisure to participate as we need to now. The exigency upon us certainly justifies full-time activism, but our finances are so depleted there is hardly any time.   I wonder how often in history such a complete reversal has been accomplished in such a short amount of time: from peace to war, prosperity to hardship.

      The producers of Unprecedented have been filming since January 2001. Indeed, the film begins with clips of the Bush inauguration, the mainstream media on election night, the nightmare experienced by countless voters, many of them black: intimidated by police, arrested for loitering when they were waiting in line to vote, finding polls closed earlier than scheduled, or, worst of all, being turned away.  Then, a quick shift to Jeb Bush promising to deliver Florida to his brother no matter what.  There is another shot of Jeb Bush uneasily mingling with admiring young black students in a classroom and then the reminder that he outlawed affirmative action soon after that. Only 10 percent of the Florida black population, after all, had voted for him.

      The history of the black response follows; mobilization succeeded in bringing out 65% more blacks to the polls.  Of no avail.  The felon purge list, which decisively robbed Gore of victory, was prioritized as the most serious violation of all.  However, the film later notes, the immediate deliverer of the Republican “majority,”  was the illegal absentee ballots from overseas, most of them received after the deadline date.  680 late ballots were certified by Katherine Harris, and Bush “won” Florida by only 537 votes. There is even a brief clip of a U.S. soldier in Kosovo expressing pleasure that his vote was having such an impact.

      Scenes from the Florida elections that we never saw were aired in England, where Greg Palast was watching in horror.  His response, the in-depth investigation of the felon purge list that he discovered with BBC and Guardian/Observer cooperation, was made possible through funding supplied by The Nation.  However, it was first publicized in this country by salon.com in early December 2000.  Unprecedented traces the history of the law banning felons from voter privileges.  It originated after the Civil War, in 1868, to keep blacks from voting.  Enforced haphazardly since then, it resurfaced anachronistically in 1998.  The company that created the list, Database Technologies, was retained at $4 million by the state government.  It testified in later hearings that it was never obliged to edit its findings, despite the thousands of ambiguities that served the opposition so well.  If a John Jones anywhere in this country had once committed a felony, even if it was a John Q. Jones, then everyone named John Jones on the database list was denied the vote, regardless of race, gender, birth date, middle initial, Jr./Sr. and other distinctions.  In Leon County the Supervisor of Elections, who went over the list name by name, confirmed that only 33 out of the 690 alleged felons had been accurately identified, meaning that fully 95% of the people purged were innocent.  Another voter turned away was listed as having committed a felony in the year 2007.  In response, Katherine Harris, Florida Secretary of State and co-chair of the Bush campaign, ordered all conviction dates on the list to be blanked out, a total of 4,000 statewide, when they were listed.

      Jeb Bush further violated Florida law by purging ex-offenders who had moved to Florida from out of state, even though they had regained their rights before leaving.  Bush required them to request his permission in writing to vote.  A total of 2,883 voters were illegally purged this way, according to an independent statistician.    Where racism became illegal in 1965, computers quietly reinstated it in 2000, observed one of the interviewees.  Needless to say, Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris, though featured throughout in film clips, refused to be interviewed for Unprecedented.  A dramatic and articulate presence, though, was the reappearance of the prosecuting attorney and best-selling author Vincent Bugliosi, whose sharp and telling criticism of the Supreme Court Five was published in The Nation as “None Dare Call It Treason” and expanded into the bestseller The Betrayal of America.  One of his most strident points is the “mangling of the Fourteenth Amendment,” and the further ruling that the decision in this case would not be “precedent-setting.” Were it otherwise, then every election throughout history might have been nullified because of inconsistencies among the various electoral districts.  Supreme Court decisions are supposed to set precedent. Bugliosi saw this act as the darkest day in Supreme Court history, if not U.S. history.  The corruption rampant in Florida in the course of election 2000, blatant, uncamouflaged, ultimately admitted to when it was too late to change our grim reality, is certainly unprecedented; but the allusion at least in part is also to the partisan nature of the decision.  A legal scholar from Washington, D.C., opined that the Supreme Court has always been politicized; here the blatancy was lethal, however.  I do not remember a time in history when this “august body” received a derogatory nickname. Pity those accomplished Motown musicians.  I do.

      Beyond the illegal database lists, viewers of Unprecedented were also shown the various ballots that engendered so much voter confusion: the infamous Palm Beach butterfly ballot, another type of ballot with instructions to indicate choices on every page, even though two pages in succession contained presidential candidates; the hanging chads, the dimpled chads, the ballots with boxes to check and also a space at the bottom requiring that “the name of the candidate be written in,” so-called “over votes,” all of which legally should have been counted “where the voter intent is clear.”

      We were painfully reminded of the Florida law that requires complete recounts in a situation where the totals were so close.  Further exasperation was the news that in 1997, as governor of Texas, Bush himself had approved a voter recount bill, far more liberal than Florida’s version. We learned that referral to the U.S. Supreme Court, agreed to by both Bush and Gore, nearly guaranteed a conservative response, in that, according to another interviewee, federal courts are as conservative as state courts are liberal.  We reviewed the Republican bullying that stopped the crucial recounting process in Miami/Dade County, a Democratic stronghold.  Other details about the battle between the liberal state supreme court and the Bush-Harris faction?  Her refusal to count net gains from Democratic districts even though extension of the deadline at that time would have been legal.

     The author of Jews for Buchanan, John Nichols, reminded viewers of the failure of involved family members of Supreme Court Justices to recuse themselves – Clarence Thomas’s family, for instance, Scalia’s son, the famous quotation from Sandra Day O’Connor that she would not be able to retire, which she was planning, if a Democrat was elected; Scalia’s quote that allowing the recount to continue would do “irreparable harm to Bush,” misquoting an important statute. Most forceful among the dissenters was Stevens.  “Though the winner may never be known,” he wrote, “the loser is clear: the nation’s confidence in the impartiality of Supreme Court Justices.”

    The film ended with testimony from Washington Post and Orlando Sentinal reporters that more people in Florida had voted for Gore than Bush.  By fading out as he did, though there is in this context some legal rationalization to cover him, though he seemed convinced he was serving the country by not prolonging this agonizing, unprecedented controversy, Gore cooperated in disenfranchising the majority who voted for him.  And to this day the consequences reverberate, even as Gore speaks out eloquently against Bush’s many failures.  In hindsight, weary as we were, the controversy extended might have meant the survival of democracy.  “Who can we rely on, if not the Supreme Court?” asked Bugliosi.  I always thought the answer was democracy.  As we revel in Gore’s eloquent re-emergence from virtual silence, we must remember another crucial test antiquity supplied us: before we are overly seduced by words, let us examine the corresponding deeds.[1]  We need a go-to person.  We had one and dropped him, relying on Gore, who also dropped him.  Then, I am convinced, in extremis, Gore dropped us, the overwhelming and decisive majority.  It’s that simple.

     As a postlude to the movie, Greg Palast recalled a great moment in the history of alternative filming when he confronted Clayton Roberts, Director of the Florida Division of Elections, with some confidential documents from Katherine Harris’s office relevant to the database, which, Palast said, “they all knew was a fake.”  He ran off, jumping over the cables of the BBC camera equipment, locked himself in his office, and called in state troopers to escort them out of the building.  In the signed settlement between the NAACP and Katherine Harris and her crew last July, Palast reminded us that they raised his figure of 57,000 illegally eliminated to 94,000.  In time to ruin another election first, Harris has promised to restore all the names illegally eliminated in January 2003.

      One of the most salient points of the evening, however, was the airing of Counting on Democracy, another documentary investigating the horrors of election 2000, on various PBS stations scheduled before election 2002.   Some of the networks have refused to cooperate, but many major ones, in Manhattan, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami, have persisted, despite threats from Republican station members to “ruin” the supporters of the film.  It is not our place to criticize the intimidated stations, said Palast, but rather to praise those stations who will show the film and to give them our support.

     Added Barbara Handman, Senior Vice President and Director of PFAW, “We should be spending most of our time calling to be sure that all the people we know go to the polls this November.  It is critical that we win.”  PFAW has printed a brochure, “The Voters’ Bill of Rights,” detailing the legal rights we all have on Election Day. She urged us to hand these out and publicize them as much as possible.  Volunteers are desperately needed to poll watch and supervise in Florida.

      Desperately needed also is wider dissemination of Unprecented and other films, documentaries, and revelations before November 5.  Not only is our democracy failing, but so is the “fifth branch” of the government, the mainstream press.  The roomful of seventy press people on Tuesday evening might well have chuckled when an audience member suggested another title for the film, Getting Pissed Off All Over Again.  But what of those who don’t know enough to be angry? Or those unable to act on their anger to restore our democracy?  There must be some good use all those Republican skills can go toward.  How about democracy?

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People for the American Way, founded in 1981 by Norman Lear, Barbara Jordan, and other business, religious, and civic leaders, has now grown to 60,000 members in Manhattan and 600,000 nationwide working to affirm pluralism, individuality, freedom of thought, and other crucial ingredients of democracy. For more information, log on to www.pfaw.org.  For more on Unprecedented, go to www.unprecedented.org. According to filmmaker Rick Pérez, “Our website has an extensive list of nationwide screenings and information on how to purchase the video for those who cannot attend a screening.”  I have to admit I did not pay much attention to the background music, but the quality of the photography was superior, the sound clear and audible at all times, the interviewees concise and articulate, the editing excellent.  Kudos is well deserved by the filmmakers Robert Greenwald, Earl Katz, Richard Ray Pérez, Joan Sekler, and Amy Sommer.

                      Copyright © Marta Steele 2002. All rights reserved.