For Harris, Humor Is the Best Revenge

Last Halloween, few people had heard of Katherine Harris, Florida’s secretary of state. Now, she’s a household name--so much so that she just made Mr. Blackwell’s worst-dressed list as a national symbol of the Halloween school of makeup application.

“The pretty, brassy lassie from Tallahassee needs cosmetic direction,” Blackwell meowed earlier this week as he released his annual who’s who of the tackily attired.

All the sniping about her appearance, Harris tells ABC’s Diane Sawyer tonight, is sexist and “just silly.” Male television reporters, she points out, “were wearing much more makeup than I was, and I didn’t think that was fair, because here they weren’t being attacked, and I was.”

Is this the week of the dragon lady at ABC News?

Following on the clacking heels of the Harris exclusive on “PrimeTime Thursday,” a surgically enhanced Linda Tripp will be interviewed by Nancy Collins on Friday’s “20/20.”

Like Harris, Tripp addresses all the negative energy lavished on her looks. As Tripp, who appears on the December/January cover of George magazine, told the doomed publication, “Someone said: ‘If she [Tripp] looked like Goldie Hawn, this never would have happened. Poor Goldie, she would never want my name used in the same sentence.”

Harris defends herself with humor in her first media interview since the Florida vote snafu catapulted her into the national consciousness. She tells an amusing anecdote about a trip to her local Target store. At the checkout line, she says, “The woman looked at my credit card and looked at me, and she goes, ‘Katherine Harris.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I only have on one layer of makeup. I’m incognito.’ ”

She freely admits that she wanted George W. Bush to win the presidency but denies undue coziness with any Bush family members, even if Florida Gov. Jeb Bush woke her up with a phone call at home after the polls closed, asking what they should do if a close vote triggered an automatic recount.

Yes, she says, she’s heard the rumors, the whispers.

“Sometimes that’s more difficult, but I am not a victim. I asked to do this.”

She says she hasn’t heard from the president-elect and has no plans to join his administration. She says she holds no expectation of being rewarded with an ambassadorship. “That is a dream for everyone,” she says, “but right now I have a job to do and am very focused.” Reforming Florida’s electoral process is at the top of her to-do list, she says.

Harris told Sawyer she had no way to know who would have won her state had every vote been counted, and based her decisions on the law, not her political leanings. But she defended the state election’s outcome.

“The law is what stands. It is the final arbiter, no matter what your personal preferences are.” She says she had no choice but to call for an end to the recounting and certify the vote within the state-mandated deadline. “I didn’t know what other alternatives I would have had if George W. Bush had not been winning and Al Gore had. I don’t know how I could have done anything but the same thing.”

She says she was unnerved by tactics that she says the Gore camp used to discredit her. “That type of intimidation tactic was not going to make me not follow the law.” It especially hurt when Democratic strategist Paul Begala compared her to Cruella De Vil, the villain of “101 Dalmatians.”

“I like Dalmatians,” Harris says. “I couldn’t believe he said that.”