Free Down & Dirty by Jake Tapper Page B

will turn a narrow loss into a win, or c) creating doubt
     as to the outcome sufficient to require a new election.” They will contrast these goals with those of election officials,
     who “are concerned with accuracy, not outcome.”
    In the front of the plane sits Ron Klain, the guy who’s going to run the legal effort. He’s snoozing.
    Klain was Gore’s chubby, assertive chief of staff at the White House before Gore’s second campaign manager, Machiavellian
     former House Democratic whip Tony Coehlo, froze him out of Gore’s inner circle in May 1999. Coehlo had decided to run the
     operation out of Nashville and didn’t want Klain throwing in his two cents from the Old Executive Office Building in D.C.,
     nor did Coehlo want Klain leaving the OEOB to play a role in the campaign, frankly. Klain thought he was unnecessarily cruel.
     By August 1999, Klain had announced that he was leaving. To spend time with his family, of course.
    Despite years of loyal service to Gore, that was it, no postcards, no letters; he could barely even get through to Gore anymore.
     Gore looked away, as if Klain had never existed.
    It was a very painful year. He’d tried to keep a sense of humor about it. His new office at the D.C. office of O’Melveny &
     Myers featured cue cards from a monologue from the
Tonight
show with Jay Leno, autographed by the host himself:
    AND ANOTHER BIG SHAKE-UP IN THE AL GORE CAMPAIGN…. IT SEEMS HIS LONG TIME CHIEF OF STAFF HAS QUIT….
    THEY SAID TODAY ON THE NEWS THIS IS THE BIGGEST SETBACK FOR THE GORE CAMPAIGN… WELL… SINCE AL GORE.
    It had seemed like a big fall for wunderkind Klain. The Hoosier had come to D.C. in ’79 to go to Georgetown, and he immediately
     began interning for Indiana Democratic senator Birch Bayh. After Harvard Law, Klain clerked for U.S. Supreme Court justice
     Byron White, served as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, domestic policy adviser to Clinton in ’92, associate
     counsel to the president, chief of staff to Attorney General Janet Reno, and, as of November 1995, top aide to Gore.
    Superconnected. On March 19, 1993, Justice White called him at the White House and asked him to hand-deliver his resignation
     letter to Clinton. Clinton asked him to lead the team to pick a replacement. One of Klain’s first calls was to the Senate
     Judiciary chairman, Delaware Democratic senator Joe Biden. He knew them all.
    He was moving, always moving, working his ass off, downing Cokes and M&M’s while his wife raised their three kids. In 1994,
Time
magazine had named him one of America’s fifty “most promising leaders” under age forty. Now what?
    To Gore, people are expendable. Klain was just one of several dissed in the Coehlo era—Jack Quinn and dying media man Bob
     Squier were two notable others. And as Gore tore through campaign managers like the rest of us go through a box of Kleenex,
     Coehlo was soon shoved aside as well. It helped that he had been sick, a better excuse than that “spend time with my family”
     bullshit, and in June 2000, when Commerce Secretary Daley was brought in to get the campaign functioning better, Klain was
     no longer persona non grata. He was, again, persona grata—though slightly demoted. That summer and fall, Klain ran the campaign’s
     war-room effort, getting out instant response to Bush attacks against Gore’s policies and character.
    Now, however, Klain has an opportunity to be in charge again, to run things for Gore, to get him elected president.
    At around 8:30 A.M. , Klain, Sandler, Young, DNC spokeswoman Jenny Backus, and a few others get off the plane in Tallahassee; it will also stop
     inTampa and Fort Lauderdale. As Backus is interviewed by a local TV station—in a town like Tallahassee, it’s kind of hard to
     miss a plane with “Gore-Lieberman” painted on its side—another plane lands. It belongs to Gov. Jeb Bush. He talks to the camera
     after Backus concludes.

    At dawn, a plane leaves Austin packed