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a lawsuit against the butterfly ballot at that very moment.
    Come to Nashville, Sandler says. There’s nothing you can do. The polls are about to close. And hopefully everything will be
     the way it’s supposed to be.
    So Berger gets on the plane.

2

“You don’t have to be snippy about it.”
    H e’s fucked!” Mark Fabiani, Gore’s communications director, cackles.
    I just told Fabiani that Bush is huddling back at the mansion instead of at the Four Seasons, where he was originally scheduled
     to watch the election returns.
    “He’s in retreat!” Fabiani says. “He’s running home!”
    It’s Tuesday, November 7, 2000, around 9 P.M . And at this particular point in the evening, it doesn’t look good for Bush. I do, in fact, picture Bush clutching his pilly,
     curled up in the fetal position, holding on to his daddy’s leg. The exit polls have been coming in all day, and they’ve been
     bad. Bush, not surprisingly, is glum. His chief strategist, Karl Rove, had been telling him that it was going to be a Reaganesque
     landslide. Not quite.
    Florida, a state Bush wanted to win, needed to win—little brother, Jeb, is the governor there, after all—is called for Gore
     at 7:48 P.M . EST. And with that, Bush’s odds of becoming president have plummeted.
    Jeb—an acronym for his full name, John Ellis Bush—calls his first cousin John Ellis in New York City. As luck and the fabled
     “vast right-wing conspiracy” would have it, Ellis helms Fox News Channel’s election decisionteam, which means he’s in charge of calling states. * Ellis has already spoken to George W. twice earlier in the day, reassuring the candidate not to “worry about your early numbers,”
     since “your dad had bad early numbers in ’eighty-eight, and he wound up winning by seven. So who knows?” 1
    But now the news he has for Jeb is far more pessimistic.
    “Are you sure?” 2 Jeb asks Ellis, after Fox News calls Florida for Gore, at 7:52 P.M ., after three other networks have done so.
    “We’re looking at a screen full of Gore,” Ellis replies.
    “But the polls haven’t closed in the Panhandle,” Jeb says.
    “It’s not going to help,” Ellis says. “I’m sorry.”
    So in a sudden turnabout, the normally cocky Bush abandons plans to watch the returns from a suite at the Austin Four Seasons
     and instead opts to run for the cover of the governor’s mansion.
    An election that his advisers had been predicting he’d win by 7 percentage points and 50 electoral votes is actually turning
     out to be too close to call.

    At the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, President Clinton is like a voracious animal, and what he wants is information about the
     election. In her quest for the U.S. Senate seat from New York, Hillary cruised to an easy victory, so the president’s mind
     is focused on his no. 2. In his suite, each time a state pops up on the TV in front of him (ABC News) or to his right (MSNBC),
     he commands one of the aides around him to get more information. More, more, he’s still not satisfied!
    Earlier, when Florida was still in play, he had his former senior aide, Jonathan Prince, call Nick Baldick, Gore’s man on
     the ground in Tallahassee. When Gore is trailing in Arkansas, Clinton called up his fellow Arkansan Secretary of Transportation
     Rodney Slater to see what he knew.
    Gore’s not down by so much, he tells Slater. “We’ve seen that turn around before.”
    Nevada comes on the screen.
    “Where’s Brian Greenspun?” Clinton asks, referring to the publisher of the
Las Vegas Sun
and a former classmate from Georgetown. “Get Brian Greenspun on the phone!” Clinton tells his aide, Doug Band.
    “He’s down the hall” at one of the First Lady’s many receptions, Band says.
    “Go get him!” Clinton says.
    West Virginia comes on the screen. A state that has gone for Republican presidential candidates only three times in eighty
     years—all three times when the Republican in question was the incumbent