If we were going to show the Republican’s Black-voter caging lists on BBC Television we’d better make sure they were not planted with false material. Were the documents bogus? The corpse of Dan Rather’s career was still swinging from the Bush campaign’s front gates after he used a questionable document in a basically solid story on the President’s Vietnam war days.
So we went to the horse’s mouth. Two weeks before the election, our BBC crew flew up to Washington to ask about the lists, but the Republican National Committee slammed the door on us. Back in Florida, we thought we’d ask Brett Doster, supreme commander of the Bush campaign in that state, straight up. . . .
In Tallahassee, the path to Doster’s door was blocked by a thick-armed blonde slurping on a supersize Coca-Cola: Mindy Tucker Fletcher, chief spokesmistress for the Bush campaign in Florida.
Brett, she said, couldn’t speak for himself; he’d canceled our appointment. She would do the talking on his behalf. . . .
After a little Q&A dance, I finally asked her if the Republican Party kept something called a “caging list” of voters.
Mindy: “I don’t know what a ‘caging list’ is. I don’t – I’m not part of that strategy.”
That strategy? Hmm. I showed her the list. I can’t say she started snorting cola out of her nose, but clearly, she was flustered.
She took the list inside the brick citadel, the George Herbert Walker Bush Republican Center, while I maintained a low-speed chase with her assistant, lobbing questions as he ducked into a stairwell.
Half an hour later, Mindy, painted with fresh makeup, a retinue of jumpy PR men in tow, asked to speak to our cameras.
Suddenly, she was an expert on caging lists. She began, “Clearly you don’t know a lot about politics if you don’t know this term ‘caging.’”
With the list in her hand she could not deny its authenticity, but there was an explanation. There is always an explanation.
Joseph Agostini, the Republican’s Director of Communications, nervously sputtered that the lists were made up of potential donors to the Bush-Cheney campaign. Really? On the one list we gave them were several residents at the Sulzbacher Center, a shelter for the homeless. “Do you get a lot of major donors from poor, African-American neighborhoods?”
Mindy cut Agostini off with a “shut it, fool” glare and stepped in with a different line altogether: “These are newly registered voters we mailed to, where the letter came back – bad addresses.”
No kidding. No one sends campaign junk mail first class; it’s too expensive – unless you had a reason to pay for a very expensive set of return addresses. Mr. Agostini, you wouldn’t be preparing to challenge the votes of Black folk, would you?
Agostini started jabbering: “You see, we wanted to save on the cost of postage for our campaign mailings so we wouldn’t be sending to the wrong address . . .”
“You’re telling me, Mr. Agostini, that you send clerical information, mailing address changes, to the chiefs of your state and national campaigns? You don’t have an office clerk handle it?”
Mindy shut him down with another “shut your gap” look. It was time for the boss lady to take over.
“This is not a challenge list,” Mindy said. “That’s not what it’s set up to be.”
“So you won’t use these lists to challenge voters on Election Day?”
“Uh, that’s not what they were created to do.”
Three points for Mindy: well-crafted words. Using the list might be legal, but creating the list to bleach the voter rolls white is not.
“Will you challenge the voters on Election Day?”
Mindy: “Where it’s stated in the law, yeah.”
She saw my eyes widen, so she added, “Every one does it, both parties, all the time. You can check.”
We did. Everyone does not “do it.” Certainly not in Florida. Our investigators called a dozen county election offices. Not one of them could recall a single Election Day challenge in their career, especially since the enactment of the federal law in 1965.
How did Soros bribe voters?