Recount

In fall 2000 I volunteered a bit for the Democratic Party in critical Sarasota County, a Rockefeller Republican county that was just off the ground zero I-4 corridor. A number of my students at New College were Green Party activists who somehow got Ralph Nader 3,000 votes in Sarasota County - 3,000 votes which - it turns out - had some of them gone to Vice President Al Gore - would have made it much more difficult for the Republicans to steal the 2000 presidential election ("I hope you're happy now" - yelled some of my Democratic-leaning students to their Green Party classmates election night). The center of attention shifted from the I-4 corridor to West Palm Beach, Miami, and Tallahassee throught the rest of the month. In Tallahassee a series of court hearings and protests headlined the election imbroglio. News trucks took over the town, and I attended a protest with Stephanie, Vincent, and Frisco that landed Vincent (standing behind Gore lawyer David Boies) on CNN. My chants - like "We love Barbara! We love Laura! But that George W. - he's a horror!" - entertained even Republican activists there. And the statewide recount continued in the third floor of the LeRoy Collins Leon County Public Library - which Stephanie and Vincent often visited - until that awful day when the 5-4 Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the recount.

At the time it was hard to imagine that subsequent events - like 9/11, Katrina, the 2004 Ohio primary, and the 2008 election - would block these events out of our memory. It's also hard to remember how unfair we thought the outcome was and how frustrated and horrified we were (after an emotional rollar coaster that included Dan Rather at 2 a.m. Election Night putting Florida back in the un-called column with a string of Texas-isms). Perhaps only some recent films - the beginning of "Fahrenheit 9/11," a short vignette in "An Inconvenient Truth" (with the Gore understatement "that was disappointing" or something like that), and - implicitly - in "W." - have captured that feeling.

We re-lived all of this on film again - at home - (plus learned some insider information) this past November - eight years later - on TV - as we rented a movie for the first time in a year and half: the cable TV movie "Recount," which excellently replays the events of November 2000. Excellent are Tom Wilkinson (formerly of "Full Monty" and "Michael Clayton") as former U.S. Secretary of State Jim Baker and Laura Dern (formerly of "Citizen Ruth") as Florida Secretary of State Katharine Harris (at whom Stephanie at a Bradenton FL parade four years later yelled "Go back home," when she was in fact from neighboring Sarasota and represented both in Congress (until her U.S. Senate campaign got derailed). But the moral center of the movie was two Democratic operatives, Ron Klain and Michael Whoulley (played great by Kevin Spacey formerly of "The Usual Suspects" and "American Beauty" and Denis Leary of "Rescue Me"). We subscribe to neither HBO nor Cinemax nor Showtime, and so these kinds of movie we can't watch when they come out - we have to rent them. This one was definitely worth watching.

-- Perry