Pushkin. Hey, Leon here, Before we get to this episode, I want to let you know that you can binge the entire season of Fiasco bush v goor right now ad free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the Fiasco Apple podcast showpage, or visit Pushkin dot fm slash plus. Now onto the episode. On Thanksgiving morning nineteen ninety nine, a Florida man from outside Fort Lauderdale named Donado Dalrymple went on an impulse
fishing trip with his cousin. The water was choppy as they took their motorboat out into the Atlantic Ocean in search of Mahi mahi.
My cousin he said, look for seaweed and debris, anything floating on the ocean. And I point out with my finger and I said, like that inner tube that's there. He goes, Yeah, let's go around that inner tube.
Dalrymple was thirty nine years old and he wasn't much of a fisherman. He owned a house cleaning business, which he still does. Out on the water, he followed his cousin's lead as they scouted for a good place to throw out their lines. Then dal Rymple saw something.
We were about twenty five yards from the inner tube, never that close to it, and I told my cousin, I said, there looks like there's somebody on there, but they look like they're dead.
When dal Rymple got closer, he noticed a tiny hand moving in the inner tube. His cousin jumped into the water to investigate.
My cousin's in the water and he's screaming, it's a baby, and he's pushing up and I'm leaning over, almost falling into the water. That's how rough the seas were, and I snatched what we know today as Ellon Gonzalez.
Eleon Gonzalez was five years old. His mother had to bring him to the United States from Cuba in a small aluminum boat. He had just barely survived the journey. His mother drowned along with ten other people. After dal Rymple and his cousin brought Elean ashore, they delivered him to the Coastguard. When it was discovered that Eleon had a great uncle living in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami, the boy was sent to stay with him and his family.
Eleon's story was seen as a miracle by some in the local Cuban community.
He was highlighted in the local news. This little kid survived, the mother died, everybody died.
This is Carlos Saladriguez, a Miami businessman who fled Cuba in nineteen sixty one. Because of his deep ties to the city's Cuban American community. Saladriguez was able to watch the Elian Gonzales ordeal unfold from close range.
There were rumors circulating around that dolphins had saved the kid from drowning and from being eaten by charge.
He was safe by God, but the dolphins.
Is a miracle.
A few days after Eleon's rescue, his father back in Cuba made it known that his son had been taken to America without his permission.
The father, back in their hometown of Cardinis keeps asking his son when he's coming back, and demanding his return by the United States.
The custody battle instantly ballooned into a diplomatic crisis, as Cuba's President Fidel Castro started putting pressure on the US to send Elyon back.
Now to the young refug j caught in the custody dispute between the US and Cuba today.
And that sort of became an opportunity to hidelight the plight of the Cuban victims of the communists, and all of that, he had all the qualities of becoming a good political football.
Relatives here claim Eleon's father is being pressured by the Cuban government to ask for his son's return.
Miami Dade County was home to six hundred and fifty thousand Cuban Americans, many of them first generation exiles. These were people who hated Cuba's communist regime with a passion to them. It didn't make a difference what Eleon's father or Fidel Castro said. The boy's life would obviously be better if he was allowed to grow up in America.
The US government did not see it that way. In January of two thousand, six weeks into Elyon's stay in Miami, the Clinton administration announced that he would have to be sent back to Cuba.
The US Attorney General Janet Reno says the child should be returned to his father in Cuba as soon as possible, especially in light of the hardships he endured coming to this country.
The news did not go over well in Little Havana.
Dozens of Cuban Americans were arrested while protesting the US government's decision to return Eleon Gonzalez to his father in Cuba.
A standoff ensued as Eleon's Miami relatives looked for ways to keep him in the country.
Because it was a child, he sort of brought down the political issue and gave it a human face and the face of a of a young child who lost his mother. And it just became a very emotional and deeply emotional issue, and it consumed the Quean American community into that drama.
As the custody battle over Eleon dragged on, many Cuban Americans in Miami came to despise the Clinton administration for its handling of the case.
President Clinton, have you no shame.
But in the end, it was not Bill Clinton who had to answer for the Elyon case. It was the guy running to replace him.
Vice President Al Gore today formally declared himself a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Today I announced that I am a candidate for President of the United States.
Al Gore was five months into his presidential bid when DONALDO. Dalrymple and his cousin pulled Eleon Gonzales out of the water. There are those who believe that Gore's fate was sealed right then and there, that the Elyon controversy placed the vice president on the path to inevitable defeat in Florida. But as you're about to hear, the real story of Gore's loss in two thousand was messier, richer, and harder to arrange in a straight line of cause and effect.
And none of it could have happened anywhere but Florida. I'm Leon Nafok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries. This is fiasco Bush v.
Gore.
The rice with the White House is incredibly close.
It's election like we haven't seen in decades.
Uncharted Territorge Tonight, the outcome and history itself on Home and the battled ground is Florida.
Episode one, Homestead. What happened in Florida before everything else that happened in Florida. I'll just tell you now. Al Gore lost Florida to George W. Bush by a margin of five hundred and thirty seven votes out of nearly six million cast. The outcome played out in slow motion over thirty six days, as vote totals across the state came under dispute, Hundreds of thousands of ballots were recounted, and the two campaigns went to war with each other
in the courtrooms of Tallahassee. Now, many people believe, quite reasonably that Gore lost the two thousand election because of the way the recount played out in Florida. But the roots of Gore's defeat can be traced back to the earliest days of the campaign itself. Because what's striking when you think back on two thousand is that, in most respects, the fundamentals of the race were strongly in Gore's favor.
Now, Governor Bush likes to say that we should go back to the policies of eight years ago.
I think that reflects perhaps a fuzzy memory.
This is the asan al Gore's deck, as it were, the strength of the economy.
It's probably too late for George W.
Bush.
He had been vice president for nearly eight prosperous years. The economy was booming, crime was down, the budget was balanced, and the country was at peace. Yes, Bill Clinton's sex scandal and impeachment created a serious challenge for Gore, but on paper, at least, it should not have been that hard for him to convince voters to stay with the winning formula.
Bill Clinton worked hard to get this economy right, and I'm pledging to you here today, i am not gonna let the other side wreck it and take it away from us. We're gonna keep the prosperity going.
So what happened? What was it about Al Gore and his candidacy and the way he ran his campaign that made the race so incredibly close? The general election was ten months away when the Clinton administration announced that Elian Gonzales would have to be sent home to Cuba. The situation placed Gore in political quicksand if he sided with his own administration, he would surely forfeit the crucial Cuban
American vote in Miami to his Republican opponent. But if he broke with the White House and pushed for l On to stay in America, he would alienate his own party. We'll be right back. Gore was never going to have an easy time winning the Cuban American vote. For decades, the perception had been that Democrats were soft on Castro
and soft on communism. In nineteen eighty, about eighty percent of the Cuban American vote in Dade County went from Ronald Reagan and in nineteen eighty eight, the same percentage voted for George HW. Bush.
President Bush is a beacon of hope for the millions seeing Cuba who want liberty and democracy. President Bush has shown his loyalty to the Q and people.
But despite that history, al Gore had reason to be optimistic. For one thing, he had an ally in the powerful mayor of Miami Dade County, Alex Penelis. The rare Cuban American politician who also a Democrat.
Alex Panels has propelled himself to the center of South Florida's political stage. He's making himself heard far beyond his state.
Panellus was considered a rising star in national politics. In nineteen ninety nine, he was named America's sexiest politician by People magazine.
With two million constituents, he is Florida's second most powerful politician after the governor, and some say the most influential Hispanic politician in America.
In addition to Penelus, Gore owe his chances in Little Havana to Bill Clinton, who had made a steady and concerted effort over the course of his presidency to make inroads with the Cuban American community. Here's journalist Michael Grunwald, who wrote about Clinton's courtship of the Cuban American elite in his book The Swamp.
And Bill Clinton is a political animal. You know, he's a precinct by precinct vote counter, and he knows the demographics, and he knows who matters in each demographic. And he recognized that Cuban American voters who had been traditionally extremely Republican could be made somewhat less Republican, and in Florida, margins really matter.
The charm offensive dated all the way back to Clinton's first presidential campaign. During that spring of nineteen ninety two, Clinton voiced his support for a hardline bill to intensify the Cuban embargo, a bill that George H. W. Bush initially declined to support. Then the following August, when the Category five storm Hurricane Andrew caused twenty five billion dollars in damage across South Florida, Clinton was presented with a chance to build ties with the Cuban American power brokers
who would be steering the recovery effort. One of the worst hit areas in Hurricane Andrew's path was a small city in Dade County called Homestead. Before the storm, the city's economy had revolved around the federally owned Homestead Air Force Base.
Homestead received the most damaged.
Witnesses say almost every building was damaged, many destroyed.
Homestead Air Force Base was almost completely destroyed in the storm. The base had been there since nineteen forty two and had played an important role in military relations between Washington and Havana. When more than a thousand prisoners of war returned to the United States after being captured during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, they landed at Homestead.
It certainly looked like a happy New Year to the eleven hundred and thirteen captives returning from Cuba. Homestead Air Force Base, Florida was their first taste of freedom after being Castro's prisoners for twenty months.
In Clinton, on a campaign swing through South Florida not long after Hurricane Andrew visited the ruins of the Homestead Air Force Base and made a promise that if elected president, he would use the power of the federal government to revitalize the area. Here's Michael Grunwald again.
So he had a sort of kitchen cabinet of some prominent Cuban American advisors, and they let him know early that Homestead Air Force Base was a good issue, not just on the merits where it seemed like the right thing to do to rebuild a destroyed air Force base, but that it would be a way of sort of signaling culturally that he cared about South Florida generally and the sort of Cuban American slice of South Florida specifically.
In nineteen ninety four, a group of Cuban American investors unveiled the proposal to convert Homestead Air Force Base into a commercial airport. The proposal promised to turn Homestead into a hub of international travel, but in order to get off the ground, it needed the Clinton administration's approval.
It was federal land, you know, as a US air Force base, and the Pentagon was going to be running the show in terms of what to do with this land. It was going to be a federal process, and you know, the White House clearly was going to play a role in directing the Pentagon which direction it wanted to go.
The promise of a brand new airport in Homestead gave Clinton in an opening to forge political alliances with the Cuban American power brokers who are pushing for it.
One way to show some of the Cuban elites that he was on their side was to really emphasize his support for this airport. He knew it was something that they wanted, and he knew that those business and political leaders had a fair amount of influence with making actual votes and dollars happen.
All of this behind the scenes work paid off. In nineteen ninety six, Clinton managed to get between thirty five and forty four percent of Miami's Cuban American vote. This astonishing result helped Clinton become the first Democrat to win Florida in twenty years. As Al Gore looked ahead to two thousand, it seemed possible that the Cuban community's goodwill towards Clinton would carry over to him. But then Elian Gonzales happened.
We will not forget Elyon, we will not forget his mother, and we will not live peaceably and until we see freedom.
Gore initially tried to step lightly around the Elyon issue. I would insist, he told reporters upon due process of law within the appropriate tribunal. On the substance, Gore was putting distance between himself and the Clinton administration by saying that the question of custody should not be handled by federal immigration authorities. But as far as Bold stands go, it left something to be desired and did not win
him a ton of credit. In Little Havana, George W. Bush, on the other hand, spoke about the Elyon issue simply and freely. The boy should just be given US citizenship, he said, and his father should be allowed to come to the United States and join him.
The man ought to be brought to the United States, given a whiff of freedom so he can see how wonderful our country is.
I want to say something about Cuban our hemisphere.
As anti Castro demonstrations flared around Miami Eli, young Gonzales settled into a strange life under the glare of international media attention.
Ellon today trying to roller skate outside his house in Little Havana in its stand off with the government and the boy's father.
A few days after his sixth birthday, his family took him to Disney World, where he was followed around by a pack of reporters and sheriff's deputies while people chanted his name.
The case of the smiling six year old is so entangled in American politics that even his new puppy came from a member of Congress.
Donardo Dalrymple meanwhile made regular visits to the house where Ellion was staying, driving there most days after work to spend time with the boy and his family.
I just felt that I wanted to see this child again. You know, it's not every day that you pull a child out from the ocean, and I want to know what was going to happen with his life.
What your name, sir, My name is Donado dal Rymple.
Dalrymple would regularly give interviews to the reporters camped out in front of Ellon's house.
To see this gift of God. I believe that's what he really is. To hang on the water for that many days. I don't know how long it was, but I mean, he's definitely a gift of God, and I'm really privileged to be now to him.
That's awesome, Thank you, that is awesome.
What a beautiful kid.
Soon, Dalrymple became a media sensation in his own right.
So who is Donando Dalrymple, the man widely known as the Fisherman.
In the Washington Post story headlined a Fisherman in his fifteen Minutes, Dalrymple was cast as the Miami equivalent of kato' kalan, the actor who lived in OJ Simpson's guest house and briefly became famous after Simpson was charged with murder. In the Post story, Dalrymple was described signing autographs and talking about how Howard Stern had mentioned him on the radio.
His own cousin, the same one who helped pull elli On out of the water, was quoted in the story saying that Dalrymple was a desperate man looking for publicity.
He says, you're.
Using the child for fame and glory, and that you believed from the start a child should be with his father.
I like to tell my cousin I love him very much and that it's very interesting, h how he's making these accusations. I've never made an accusation towards him or anybody, so I don't know where he's coming with that.
Dal Rymple, who was born in Poughkeepsie, says he came to identify with a Cuban American cause.
They embraced me as one of their own. And I listened to literally hundreds of stories of older men that were in political prisons in Cuba and they came here. And this is what made me see life a little bit different. Is when they seen Elion, they seen themselves.
Dal Rymple absorbed a great deal from his new Cuban American friends, including their resentment towards Clinton and their view of al Gore as complicit in the administration's policies.
I just thought that he was one and the same with him. They served together, and those decisions were made together. Bill Clinton just wasn't the be all end all. I mean he as a vice president, yet they have to consult each other. And if al Gore thought different, he might have stood up and said, you know, I don't think this is right.
That winter Gore watched that the Clinton administration became more and more radioactive in Little Havana.
I used to be a Democrat up to the time of the Leon Gonzalez incident. My loyalty did not belong in the Democratic Party. I believe that our government, the United acting in the best interests of all Americans.
In March, the Cuban American National Foundation announced that it would work actively against Gore's election. Meanwhile, on the Cuban exile radio station Radio Mambi, an influential commentator named Armando Perez Rua, sometimes referred to as the Cuban American Rush Limbaugh, called on his listeners to punish their enemies with their votes. Even the mayor of Miami Dade County, Cuban American Democrat Alex Panelis, took a hard line against the Clinton administration.
And if the Justice Department's handling of this matter, if their continued provocation leads to civil unrest and violence, we are holding the federal government responsible and specific Lee Janet Reno and the President of the United States.
To some, Panella seemed to be inviting trouble when he said local police would not participate if the government removed Elyon.
Panellis's aggressive stance was bad news for Gore, who had been counting on the mayor's enthusiastic endorsement in his quest to win over Cuban American voters. Penelos's support was Gore's best chance to convince people that he was his own man and that he shouldn't be held responsible for the sins of the Clinton administration. On March thirtieth, two thousand, Gore made a dramatic bid to distance himself from Clinton
on the Elyon issue. He did so by coming out in favor of proposed legislation that would allow Eleon to stay in the United States while his case was adjudicated.
The Vice President stepped elbows deep into the Elian Gonzales controversy quite suddenly.
This afternoon, Vice President Gore, now running for president, said that Congress should change the law.
That seems to put Gore in direct conflict with his own administration, which says the fight over Elion is an immigration issue, not the custody battle.
Gore's move looked transparently cynical. Republicans and Democrats alike criticized him as a craven political chameleon.
Already some Democrats, Congresswoman Maxine Waters on our air earlier when this news broke, said she would reconsider her support for the Vice president.
I was just overwhelmed, surprised, blindsided. I didn't think he would go so far as to support right wing legislation that would give him permanent status, Nor did I expect.
A few days later, Gore went on The Today Show to clarify his positions.
Mister Vice President, good morning, Good morning, Matt, how are you.
I'm fine.
Thanks.
It seems like we're about.
But when he was pushed on what he actually believed, Gore seemed to equivocate.
With all due respect, you haven't answered my question.
Should he be given custody of his son if he arrives in the United States?
If the father says on Free Soil that he believes that the son should go back to Cuba with him, that, of course, is likely to be determinative and will be determinative.
The Washington Post ran a story the next day under the headline, Gore struggles to explain his position on Elyon. The worst part was that Gore's break with Clinton didn't even seem to win him any points. One month after his last ditch effort to get on the right side of the Elyon issue, the Chicago Tribune quoted one Miami resident saying that she wouldn't vote Democratic if Gore came to Florida with a Cuban flag in his hands. That
more or less was where things stood. As Attorney General Janet Reno was conducting final negotiations with Eleon's Miami relatives. The question at this point was not whether Eleon would be sent back to his father, but how.
And when officials here say they're determined to reunite the father with his son, they describe Attorney General Reno as quote leaning toward action.
And if the Miami family resists, well, the government is ready to plan to deal with that as well.
On the night of April twenty second, TV crews, hoping to be on hand for whatever was going to happen, staked out Eleon's house from row of tents across the street.
As a crowd of Eddie Castro hardliners maintains its vigil outside the Miami house.
Inside, Carlo Saladriguez, the Miami businessman you heard at the top of the show, was helping Ellion's family with the negotiations.
You got to think of this simple house. He had a little living room, a couple of bedrooms, and in the back of the house was a family room in a kitchen. That's where we were sitting. In that family room, and in front of the house, there were hundreds of people demonstrating and there were media station even with towers built so that they could film from higher up, and mean everything was set up for a media show.
And so for now, much of the attention remains squarely on that small house in the section of Miami they call Little Havana, and the family inside that does not seem anxious to give up that little boy.
DONALDO. Dalrymple was at his home in Broward County when he heard on the news that Elyon might be seized by federal agents at any moment. It was around ten o'clock at night, but Dalrymple got in his car and drove the roughly thirty miles to Miami. He made his way past the reporters and into the house where Saladriguez and lawyers for Eleon's relatives conducted negotiations, and Eleon was
trying to fall asleep in his race car bed. At five pin fifteen in the morning, three white vans carrying a team of federal agents pulled up next to the house.
There was a battering ram at the door, and people were screaming. There was mayhem. There was so much confusion going on, and I thought to myself, I'm dreaming.
Dalrymple, who had been asleep on the living room couch, stirred awake as twenty heavily armed agents broke through the chain link gate in the front yard, sprang teargas and yelling for the gathered crowd to disperse. Dalrymple grabbed Eleon and ran into a closet as agents stormed the house
and demanded to know where the boy was. When one of the agents pointed a gun at the closet where Dalrymple was holding Eleon in his arms, a news photographer captured the moment in an instantly iconic snapshot.
And this was occurring within seconds. A woman appears in the room and right away I handed Ellon over to this woman and they all I heard this word I heard, and it's clear as I'm talking to you right now. I heard bingo and they ran out.
They got the boy.
They've got the boy.
They took the boy. They're got the boy.
Three minutes.
In three minutes, six year old elli On Gunzanes, dressed in a T shirt, draped in fee was gone.
Dell Rymple ran after the agents, carrying eli On to the van parkin street.
I wanted to go in this vehicle with them to wherever they were taking him, just so he'd have a sense of comfort. He knew me from the ocean, he knew me from for months playing down there with him. You know, I was thinking in my mind, how did this all go wrong? One minute we saved them, and now they're coming in with guns to take them out.
It was just so ugly and horrible. But they wouldn't let me in that vehicle, so I just I lingered behind with the rest of everybody else as they sped off down the road.
Soon, Elian Gonzalez was in a US Marshall's plane, destined for Washington, where his father would be waiting for him. It was just after six am. As the plane took off from Homestead Air Force Base. One of the federal agents keeping Elion company opened the window shade next to him so that he could see the sunrise over Florida. In the aftermath of the raid, the Cuban American community in Miami was left reeling, and their rage at the
Clinton administration intensified. Here is Carlos Saladriguez again.
The raid was the slap in the face. It was sort of the hurt, the wound that took a long time to heal. It was the snatching of this kid from her mist that subtle became painful.
Clinton would never live it down, neither would al Gore. The slogan that immediately took hold in Miami was we will remember. In November, days before the election, Armando Perez Rua, the Radio Mambi commentator, appeared with George W. Bush at a rally in Florida and reminded the crowd to think of Elion when they saw Gore's name on the ballot.
He was guilty by association. I don't think there is another instance in the history of the United States where you can look at one single evant and see clearly that he decided the presidency of the United States.
The idea that the raid on Elian Gonzales cost al Gore the two thousand election hardened into conventional wisdom November seven, when the vice president only received about half as many Cuban American votes in Florida as Clinton did in ninety six. But there was a second controversy that played out in Florida during the campaign, one that's much less well known two decades later, but which was arguably no less decisive
in shaping the outcome of the race. This second controversy was intertwined with the Elion case in tantalizing ways, and Gore's handling of it was strikingly similar. Yet in some respects, this one cut even deeper, both because it concerned an issue that was uniquely close to Gore's heart and because it lost him votes to a candidate who wasn't even trying to win.
Suddenly it's a two front war against George Bush and a new headache, consumer advocate, Ralph Nader.
While George W. Bush nibbled at Gore's margins on the right and in the center, Ralph Nader, representing the Green Party, attacked him from the left.
Don't worry about George doy Buss. The problem is Al Gore. We're going to pull Al Gore into progressive politics, and he's not going to be pulled. He's going to lose, and his Democratic Party's going to lose more and more year after year.
Nader had been America's pre eminent consumer protection crusaders since nineteen sixty five, when he published Unsafe at Any Speed, an indictment of the auto industry. Later, he found success lobbying Congress to pass the Clean Water Act, the Whistleblower Protection Act, and the Freedom of Information Act, But despite encouragement from his legions of fans, it was not until the nineteen nineties that Nator decided to run for president.
Because the inequities of power lead to huge inequities of wealth, which lead to huge inequities of income, which lead to cruelty to the children in our country and their parents who.
Care got a decent paying job.
Nader's goal in two thousand was to win just five percent of the vote nationwide. That was the threshold for securing public funding for the green Park in future elections. But Nader's visibility throughout the race belied his modest ambitions. By presenting himself as a fresh alternative to a corrupt and self perpetuating two party system, he attracted the support of young people, disaffected Democrats, and celebrities like Bill Murray, Susan Sarandon, Anita Franco and Eddie Vedder.
All these other.
Rallies that Ralph's done with ten thousand people that hasn't got any attention.
It's going to stop tonight because they can't ignore this.
May I love my commenture because my.
Computer While Bush and Gore held fundraising dinners for millionaires. Nator sold cheap tickets to massive rallies at venues like Madison Square Garden, and promoted the idea that Gore and Bush, for all their supposed differences, were actually cut from the same corporatist cloth.
Third world country.
Strike a harder bargain with these multinational corporations than we do.
You're gonna put a stuff to this once and for all.
With at.
Gore supporter saw Nader as a unique danger, a candidate who could siphon just enough votes from the Democratic ticket and key swing states that Bush could win them in a squeaker Nader rejected this argument at the time, and he still does.
Ralph Nader, the spoiler in two thousand, has no nuanced the way that media covers these things, and they get away with it by using the words spoiler.
This is Ralph Nader speaking to me about his role in the two thousand election.
It was not an exciting election. You had boring candidates. Al Gore is very boring candidate. George W. Bush was a boring candidate. Somebody counted once that Bush and Gore agreed with each other over twenty times in one presidential debate.
Nator had known Gore for decades, and back in the seventies and eighties he had considered him an ally, but the Al Gore running for president in two thousand did not strike Nader as a man who deserved theive vote well.
Because he was a front runner, he was too cautious, and because he was too cautious, he didn't take pioneering stands, and when napoles started closing in on him, he couldn't make himself into the original Al Gore. He didn't know who he was at any given time.
This was a common knock on Gore that he was a shape shifter who didn't have a core identity and took all his cues from polsters and political advisors. Early in the campaign, he came in for criticism and ridicule for hiring the feminist writer Naomi Wolf to serve as an image consultant for fifteen thousand dollars a month. Even a lot of Democrats saw Gore as inauthentic, tepid, and gauzy.
Here's Joan Walsh, who served as news editor at Salon during the two thousand election and wrote what is arguably the definitive analysis of Gore's political defects.
During the campaign, he would kind of pick up on issues and drop them. He really couldn't find a theme, a defining set of themes and stick to them, and all of these things I think kind of came together to create this image of a guy who didn't know what he stood for.
Walsher members coming across an old photograph of Gore dressed up for Halloween as Frankenstein's Monster, it just was.
Like, dude, don't do this, because this image of this guy who's been stitched together and you know, parts that don't fit and clothes that don't fit in bolts, and you know, some of it was just the stiffness of his persona, but also this sense that he had literally been stitched together.
For a small but significant subset of the Florida electorate. There was no better example of Gore's ideological wishy washiness than his stance on a fairly obscure issue dating back to the nineteen ninety two campaign. That issue was the proposed redevelopment of Homestead Air Force Base. Homestead, as your recall, was the city in Miami Dade County that was destroyed
by Hurricane Andrew. On the campaign that year, Bill Clinton vowed to help rebuild the base and revive the local economy, a commitment that endeared him to a group of Cuban American power brokers in Miami who wanted to replace Homestead Air Force Base with a new international airport. Here again is reporter Michael Grunwald.
This was an incredibly lucrative opportunity. This was going to be a massive construction project. The idea was that it was going to revitalize this area that was pretty downtrodden even when the air base was functioning, and was in real trouble now that the air base had been ripped to shreds.
Among the most enthusiastic backers of the airport plan was the Mayor of Miami Dade County, Alex Penelis.
Homestead Air Force Base has become all things to all people. Miami Dade County Mayor Alex Penelas, as well as South Miami Dade's political and business interests, support a commercial airport, toutas bringing in thirty eight thousand jobs and a billion dollars to the economy.
There was a problem, though, Homestead was situated in between two protected nature preserves Biscayne National Park to the east and the Everglades National Park to the west. To environmentalists in Florida, the idea of building an airport so close to these precious lands was obscene.
When Harry Truman established Everglades part and his speech was about how this is going to be a place of solitude, a place where Americans can come and appreciate the quiet of nature. It's this kind of lonely quiet place is part of what makes the Everglades the Everglades. I think the idea that right on its doorstep there was going to be this massive commercial airport seemed like it would really take away from the uniqueness of the Everglades.
All through the nineties, as the airport plan slowly advanced through layers of local and federal bureaucracy, environmentalists in Florida fought it however they could.
The Sierra Club is launching a new campaign against the development. Today's full page newspaper add his own the opening salvo, and it is promising a protracted court battle if necessary.
Environmentalists in Florida had every reason to expect that during the two thousand campaign, al Gore would come out against the Homestead Airport plan. Even putting aside his overall record on the environment, Gore had been a driving force behind major legislation to fund Evergwaye's restoration. And yet whenever Gore was asked about Homestead on the campaign trail, he seemed
only to hem in haw. Instead of just saying that the airport was a terrible idea, Gore would have his spokesman issue wan statements about how it wasn't appropriate for him to weigh in. The air Force was still conducting an environmental impact study, and the Vice President did not want to pre judge the project until the results were in.
At one point, Gore took the incendiary position that continued discussion was needed of how a balanced solution can be found that can help the community without hurting the environment.
Gore had a choice to make, and he decided to avoid the choice. It was waffle City.
What was going on. Gore was the most prominent environmentalist in American politics, the guy who, back in nineteen eighty one, had held the first ever Congressional hearings on global warming. As Vice President, Gore had traveled to Kyoto to help negotiate a transformative international treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Gore had never been shy about his passion for the environment, not even when his political rivals made fun of him, as President George H. W. Bush did in nineteen ninety two when he coined a special nickname for his opponent's running mate.
If you listen to Governor Clinton and ozone Man, if you listen to them, you know why I call him ozone Man. This guy is so far off, and the environmental extreme will be up to our neck in owls and out of work for every American.
This guy's crazy.
Is way out, far out man.
Given this history, environmentalists in Florida were infuriated by Gore's refusal to come out against the Homestead Airport plan. One activist told The Washington Monthly that gore silence on the issue called into question whether he himself knew what his
campaign stood for. In a column for The Miami Herald, Florida novelist Karl Hyason wrote that Gore, who claims the greenest pro environmental credentials of all the presidential candidates, is showing a flash of yellow by deciding to wimp out and keep quiet on South Florida's most controversial environmental issue.
The Gore people could not believe they were even having this conversation.
You know.
Their attitude was, where else are environmentalists going to go? You know, he's Al Gore, leave us alone, and the environmentalist did not agree to do that.
Three weeks before the election, the Gore campaign sought to quell the growing mutiny in South Florida by sending a pair of Gore's advisors, Mitchell Berger and Katie McGuinty, to meet with environmentalist groups at the South Miami headquarters of the Tropical Audubon Society. During this tense meeting, McGuinty and Berger tried to convince the assembled group that Gore was on their side.
Here's Berger I remember saying to them, this man went to Kyoto and his risk, sacrificing his entire career for what he believes.
And this man, I know.
For a fact, orchestrated the purchase of forty thousand acres in the middle of the Everglades and fought everyone in the administration to do that.
They were just making the case. You know, Al Gore is one of you. He has spent his entire career fighting for places like the Everglades and specifically the Everglades. Why are you torturing him over this issue that is going to potentially cost him the election.
The anti airport activists were not impressed. Take our friendship back to the vice president. One of them said to mcguinteenberger, only a true friend will tell you what you don't want to hear. You are going to lose this election because of Homestead. If gordonn't condemned the airport plan, the activist said, a lot of environmentalists were going to vote for Ralph Nader. The environmental controversy around the Homestead Airport
was a perfect issue for Ralph Nader. It was a coherent, little emblem of everything that was wrong with Al Gore. During the final days of the election, Nader embraced Homestead with Gusto while campaigning in Florida.
I was at the Radison Center in South Florida, and it was packed, and all they wanted to talk about was the fungus attack that was destroying the citrus trees and the Homestead Air Force Base. And again and again the questions were, why doesn't Gore come out of it. A woman came up to me and kept saying he would get so many votes if you would just put out a statement, even now, this late in the game, and I too raised the question, why isn't Gore opposing it?
Nader believed that the answer was purely political. Gore was afraid of alienating the Cuban American leaders who had been pushing the airport project since Hurricane Andrew. The person Gore was most concerned with appeasing, Nator thought was Alex Penellis. Now, the game theory here is a little tricky to parts, but the idea was that Gore, having lost Cuban Americans because of the Elon raid, was trying to salvage whatever support he could by playing nice with penelas Al.
Gore was clearly concerned about the Cuban vote, but after Eleon one environmentalist told him, look, it doesn't matter if you come out tomorrow for landing the one hundred and first airborne in Havana. You've lost the Cuban vote. You are screwed with the Cuban vote. You have got to tend to your base, and you are losing your base because of Homestead Air Force Base.
Mitchell Berger, Gore's friend and advisor, told me unequivocally that when it came to Homestead, Gore was not acting out of political calculation. The actual reason for his reticence was much more mundane. Burger said, he really did just want to wait until the Air Force finished its study, because if he interfered beforehand, the developers would have standing to sue. This was not a reflection of Gore's cowardice or cynicism, but rather his commitment to process.
Gore said, I cannot prejudge this publicly by law, and that is what the boy scout did. He said, until it is re reviewed, I cannot prejudge it, and that's technically correctly true under the law. Notwithstanding what he said, no one heard it.
Whatever the merits of his position, Gore's refusal to take a stand on Homestead fit easily into a storyline that his opponents on both the right and the left had been tapping into all through the election. That he didn't know who he was, that he wasn't willing or able to say what he really thought, that even on the environment, he was driven to equivocate in the same way Gore's avowal of due process in the Ellon case had fallen
on deaf ears in Little Havanah. Gore's strict adherence to procedure in the Homestead controversy read to his critics as a cop out, and that provided an opening for Ralph Nader.
Nader amplified the narrative, and Nader was happy to use his ego to say this is why Gore is no different than anyone else.
It's worth noting that if Nader was right about al Gore's motivations on Homestead, if he really did hold his tongue because he was trying to placate Alex Panellis and make up for Elion, the plan didn't work at all. Starting in the fall of two thousand, Panellis declined to speak out in Gore's favor even once, and three weeks before the election, he left town for trip to Spain.
Alex Penellis, instead of endorsing Gore, left town deliberately left him at the podium in front of the Cuban community. Anyone who says that that didn't hurt Gore more than anything in Florida doesn't understand in my view of Florida politics.
Penellis, who declined to be interviewed for this podcast, became something of a pariah within the Democratic Party after the two thousand election. When he ran for a Florida Senate seat in two thousand and four, al Gore issued a statement calling him the single most treacherous and dishonest person he dealt with during the entire campaign. As for the Homestead Airport, it was never built, labeling the project inappropriate, the Air Force killed it just days before Bush took office.
All these years later, it's impossible to know how many votes Gore lost by refusing to speak out against the Homestead Airport, but there are those who believe confidently that it cost him the election. Among them is Ralph Nader, who received ninety seven thousand votes in Florida in two thousand and who is bold enough in our conversation to draw a causal link between Gore's stance on Homestead and the invasion of Iraq.
The tragedy is in the fate of human affairs. One can have a direct link between the loss of the votes on the Homestead issue and a million dead iraqis that's the way the winner take all system works. But who, of course, could have predicted that.
It's easy to spot mistakes when you look back at history. When you know how everything started and what it took for it to end, it doesn't require a lot of imagination to say, ah, if they'd done ex instead of why, it would have all turned out differently. Regardless of whether you think al Gore should have won the election, there are lots of hinge points like that in the story
of how he ended up losing. If only Gore had broken more sharply with the Clinton administration on Elian Gonzales, maybe he wouldn't have lost as many Cuban Americans to Bush. If only he had condemned the Homestead Airport plan, maybe
he wouldn't have lost as many Florida environmentalists to Nadir. Remember, this election was ultimately decided by just five hundred and thirty seven votes, with a margin that then it's not a stretch to say that one tiny decision out of god knows how many actually was responsible for the outcome.
And if our goal with this first episode of Fiasco was to explore why the two thousand election was so close, we could have focused on so many other things besides Elyon and Homestead, so many little subplots that moved the vote one way or another, we could have talked about how George W. Bush benefited from the fact that his brother Jeb was the governor of Florida, Or if we wanted to come at it from the other direction and explore how Gore came within spitting distance of victory, we
could have talked about Jeb's effort to end affirmative action in Florida and how that helped Gore by inspiring a massive voter registration movement among black voters. The point is the two thousand election was close for about a million different reasons, and because it was so close, because so many of the subplots were plausibly decisive, every little detail
looks incredibly high stakes in retrospect. This six part podcast will tell the story of how the two thousand election turned out the way it did, and what it was like during those five shaky weeks after election Day, when no one in the country knew who the next president was going to be, and every little zig and zag looked like it might decide the result. The process of breaking the two thousand stalemate was, by turns chaotic and deadening.
More than anything, it was a collective act of frantic improvisation conducted by a throne together cast of bureaucrats, partisans, and white collar gladiators. Along the way, all kinds of boundaries were scrambled, between lawyers and politicians, between truth and narrative, between hypocrisy and hustle. At around midnight and November seventh, seven hours before poles were set to open, Al Gore was in Miami Beach leading one last rally. Gore may have lost Alex Panelis and the rest of the Cuban
American community. He may have lost the environmentalists, but here he was flanked by John bon Jovi, Stevie Wonder, and Ben Affleck. Despite Elyon, despite Homestead, Gore's numbers in Florida had him running dead, even with Bush, who was seventy three degrees in the middle of the night, and Gore's crowd was energized. Addressing his supporters, Gore tried to articulate
what was at stake in the two thousand election. He spoke clearly and emphatically in a way that had often eluded him during the campaign.
We in this nation have the ability in this US election to make the United States of America what America is intended to be. I asked for your help and your vote, because I want to fight for you.
God, bless you, Florida, Thank you.
It was about to be over no matter what. In twenty four hours, the campaign would be done and the country would have a new president elect. Well probably, as Gore's top strategist saw it, there was a conceivable scenario that would take the game into overtime. Based on all the available data, it seemed possible that Gore would win the electoral College, but Bush would win the popular vote.
The Gore team was worried if that happened, how is the vice president going to convince the American people that his victory was legitimate? On the next episode of Fiasco, how election analysts working with America's top news networks got the two thousand election wrong, not once, but twice in a single night.
As much as we honestly believe that you don't want elections, so you have all the numbers, in some ways you can win or lose an election based on what.
The TVs say. For a list of books, articles, and documentaries that we relied on in our research, click the link in the show notes. Fiasco is a production of Prolog projects, and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Madeline kaplan Ula Kalpa and me Leon Nafock. Our script editor was Daniel Riley. Our editorial consultant was Camilla Hammer, and we received additional editorial
support from Lisa Chase. Our music and score are by Nick Silvester of god Mode, with additional music from Alexis Quadrado. Our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips and Why. Audio mixed by rob Byer, Michael Raphael and Johnny Vince Evans. A final Final V two special thanks to Luminary. Thanks to c SPAN, NBC News Archive, and CNN for the archival material you
heard in today's show. Additional thanks to Laura Castro de Cortes, Tasha Cole, Oliver Bernstein, Monica Meyer, c R. Rooters, and Matt Mullenwag of WordPress dot com for letting us have the prolog project's domain name. Thanks for listening.