Remember the so-called "Brooks Brothers riot" in Miami during the 2000 election recount?
The Brooks Brothers Riot – carried live on CNN and other networks – marked a turning point in the recount battle. At the time, Bush clung to a lead that had dwindled to several hundred votes and Gore was pressing for recounts. The riot in Miami and the prospects of spreading violence were among the arguments later cited by defenders of the 5-to-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Dec. 12, 2000, that stopped a statewide Florida recount and handed Bush the presidency. Robert Perry in The Consortium, 5 Aug 2002
One of the organizers of that "riot" now regrets he did so:
Consultant Roger Stone, the notorious political hitman who helped George W. Bush prevail in the 2000 Florida recount, tells The Daily Beast that he wishes he hadn’t. Benjamin Sarlin, The Daily Beast
First, some more details from Perry:
On Nov. 22, 2000, after learning that the Miami canvassing board was starting an examination of 10,750 disputed ballots that had previously not been counted, Rep. John Sweeney, a New York Republican, called on Republican troops to "shut it down," according to Down and Dirty. Brendan Quinn, executive director of the New York GOP, told about two dozen Republican operatives to storm the room on the 19th floor where the canvassing board was meeting, Tapper reported. ...
The canvassing board suddenly reversed its decision and canceled the recount. "Until the demonstration stops, nobody can do anything," said David Leahy, Miami’s supervisor of elections, although the canvassing board members would later insist that they were not intimidated into stopping the recount.
(It was called the "Brooks Brothers riot" because many of the participants were dressed in Brooks Brothers clothing - typical for young Republicans in DC; for "outraged local Florida voters," not so much.)
I remember to this day watching the news stories about that demonstration. The thing that still haunts me, even now, is the looks of hatred on the faces of the people trying to storm the doors, as well as the fear on the faces of those charged with carrying out the job of properly counting the vote.
And what was Roger Stone's role in all this?
Stone’s knowledge of the peculiar world of Miami led to what may be his most enduring political legacy—his role in the resolution of the 2000 Presidential election. ...
After our lunch, Stone summoned his chauffeur-driven Jaguar—he owned four Jaguars at the time—to take us downtown, so that he could walk me through the events that concluded the Miami recount. ... On the Republican side, according to Stone, "The whole idea behind what they were doing was that there had already been one recount of the votes, so we didn’t want another. The idea was to shut it down, stop the recount here in Miami." The New Yorker 2 Jun 2008
(The New Yorker article notes that others who were there dispute the importance of Stone's role.)
If the name "Stone" rings a recent bell, think of the now former governor of New York, Elliot Spitzer; it was Roger Stone who alerted the FBI to Spitzer's "hooker habit." He also had a role in last June's accusation that Michele Obama had used the "whitey" word, and claimed to have the tape.
So now he has regrets about what he did. About his tactics? No...
Stone [does not] regret dirty politicking. Stone still offers his services as a no-holds-barred strategist to domestic and foreign politicians alike, and claims his client list is full. [Daily Beast]
What he regrets, interestingly, is what Bush did with the office Stone helped get for him:
"When I look at those double-page New York Times spreads of all the individual pictures of people who have been killed [in Iraq], I got to think, 'Maybe there wouldn't have been a war if I hadn't gone to Miami-Dade. Maybe there hadn't have been, in my view, an unjustified war if Bush hadn't become president.' It's very disturbing to me." [Brackets in original. This is Sarlin, quoting Stone from the interview.]
Stone subverted the democratic process with that riot in a way that badly damaged our political system, and contributed to the anti-democratic attitude that still pervades the GOP. That riot, along with the Supreme Court's judicial coup engineered in concert with it, came very close to ending the Great Experiment in Democracy (and would have, if Obama had not won), and gave Bush license to think he could trash the Constitution. But Stone regrets none of that, only that Bush did things with that power Stone helped steal for him that he, Stone, does not approve of.
Is half a confession better than none? Yes, but only if it leads to a full confession. What Stone and the rest of the Lee Atwater disciples will not see (or at least not admit) is that, in playing their dirty tricks, they allowed Bush and others in the GOP to avoid having to debate the issues, to be forced to spell out their real plans, to have the kind of election the American system was designed for: a competition for the best policy for the nation. The American people never got the chance, either in 2000 or 2004, to hear what Bush's real policies were, nor to render judgment on them, and that is because Stone and the others engineered those elections that way.
Stone objects to those policies now, and regrets the politics that allowed them to be fulfilled. But he does not regret the principle of "no holds barred" behind those politics, only this one particular outcome. And it is the principle that it is the problem.