GOP Governors Reflect, Fume at Florida Gathering

The Republican governors were supposed to be George W. Bush’s secret weapon for election day, but many couldn’t deliver key states. Now they’re in Florida watching nervously as their Texas colleague still fights for the presidency.

“We are watching a circus going on in Florida, that’s all it is; P.T. Barnum would have been proud,” said South Dakota Gov. William Janklow, taking a jab at the Democrats. “They are going to steal the election. We ought to put the right face on it.”

The decisive count in Florida--where the nominee’s brother Jeb Bush is governor--has not been settled, and results have been put off until the state Supreme Court considers a tangle of lawsuits. Some of the Republican governors, who are here for a meeting unrelated to the Florida election controversy, expressed frustration that the court blocked a scheduled Saturday certification of the vote.

“This is an activist court,” said North Dakota Gov. Edward T. Schafer. “They are themselves trying to direct the law instead of trying to interpret it.”

Several also called for efforts to modernize the nation’s voting procedures and complained that absentee ballots were still being counted, for example, in California and Washington state. Kansas Gov. Bill Graves called the current voting arrangement “a Crock-Pot process in a microwave age.”

Republican governors in some swing states conceded that they were out-organized at the grass-roots level regarding voter turnout. They were frustrated they couldn’t guarantee a Bush win that could help them gain influence in the White House and perhaps administration jobs.

“We’ve done everything right except to close the deal,” said New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. Whitman and governors of states where the election was closer--for example, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin--all had the same explanation for why they couldn’t win their states for Bush: a superior Democratic voter turnout effort. They cited unions, the black vote and their own inability to fare better with Latinos.

“There’s a concern about unions, there’s a concern about reaching out to African Americans,” Whitman said. “What do we do to make sure we have the appeal to voters?”