Barry Good
Katherine Harris holding up a newly-purchased possum during her 2006 run for Senate.
I finally found HBO’s Recount online - the story of how George W. Bush stole the 2000 election in Florida - and promptly downloaded it. It’s been a while since the whole debacle of the 2000 elections happened, and thus my anger at the outcome had subsided a bit. Thanks HBO for making me mad again!
The film did an excellent job of making Republicans look like a bunch of greedy oligarchs, and Democrats a bunch of whiny underdogs. But the deck was stacked against them, and even though I’ve lived with the outcome for the last 8 years, I still held hope while watching that somehow Al Gore would pull through.
Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State, comes off as a vain, ditzy, power hungry hack. (Those attributes were on display again during her 2006 run for the Senate when even the state’s top Republicans refused to back her candidacy, while she futiley wasted millions of her own dollars.) Tom Wilkinson, who also played Benjamin Franklin in John Adams (another tremendous HBO project), does a great job as former Secretary of State and lead Bush counsel James Baker, winning the presidency for George W. Bush at any cost.
Neither of the candidates were portrayed by actors, but their voices were heard over speaker phones and in actual footage from the election. What struck me as most interesting - and probably to his detriment - was how hands off Gore was portrayed, leaving each move to former chief of staff Ron Klain, played by Kevin Spacey, who seemed vastly more dedicated to his cause. But of course, this is the Hollywood version. Even so, I felt like the Democrats should have fought harder, and had they made their point just as loud as the Republicans they wouldn’t have spent the last 8 years retreating from power.
Let’s just hope we don’t get a rerun in 2008. There’s no reason that anyone should think that John McCain is qualified to run our country. Robert F. Kennedy said, shortly before his death in 1968, that in 40 years it would be possible for an African-American to be president. That time is now.
