Washington watch

A campaign to stop Richard Holbrooke becoming Kerry's secretary of state is already in gear. And why the election may be decided in the courts — again
September 25, 2004

Anyone but Dick (Holbrooke)

John Kerry has yet to win this thing, but a band of EU ambassadors is already discreetly lobbying Kerry advisers to stop the abrasive Richard "Dirty Dick" Holbrooke of Kosovo fame from becoming secretary of state. Indeed, so many luminaries of the foreign policy establishment have joined the ABD (anyone but Dick) lobby that Holbrooke himself has been saying privately that he would really like to be appointed presidential envoy to the middle east. That could be tricky, since Kerry wants Bill Clinton for that job. And with Sandy Berger out of the running after being accused of taking top secret memos from the national archives, the frontrunner for the state department is now Democratic senator Joe Biden, a Kerry chum whose own presidential ambitions collapsed in 1988 when his speeches were found to bear an uncanny resemblance to those of Neil Kinnock. (Not that Biden is a complete Anglophile: during the Bosnian war, he became so fed up with John Major's soft-on-Serbia line that he complained of hearing "the tap tap tap of Neville Chamberlain's umbrella at Munich.") But the people really worried are those at the CIA, who fear Holbrooke may end up running them.

Will the courts decide (again)?

There are over 100,000 lawyers in the greater Washington area, and it's not easy to find one who has not signed up for the various "task forces" (Democrats) and "battle groups" (Republicans) that are gearing up to make the disputed Florida vote count of four years ago look like a tea party. About 18 per cent of voters across the country will still be using the same chad-producing punch cards that caused the trouble in Florida. And in spite of a $3.9bn fund voted through by congress to improve the voting system, 41 of the 50 states are seeking waivers from the new requirement to have full registered voter databases installed by election day. The Pentagon has asked for early delivery of postal ballots for the 140,000 voters in uniform in Iraq; on current form, there will not be time for the troops to get the forms, complete them and send them home in time for election day. A dozen states have invested in new electronic voting machines, but most are holding back because the new federal Election Assistance Commission has not yet completed its specifications for reliability. A federal court has upheld California's decision that all its voting machines must have a paper trail of every vote, which few of the new machines can produce. The best known company making such machines, Diebold, has been banned in several California counties because of reliability problems in the March primary. Diebold's reputation was not helped when activist Bev Harris found the source code for Diebold's system on the internet. Diebold has also been hit by the publication of a Republican fundraising letter from its CEO, Walden O'Dell, saying he was "committed" to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to Bush. Meanwhile, Republican lawyers are challenging Democrat voter-registration drives among the homeless, and collecting lists of felons to challenge the voter rolls in Democratic counties. This election may be held in polling booths; it will be decided in courts. Again.

Too late to sack Cheney

Despite increasingly public agitation from moderate Republicans that he be dropped from the ticket, or rather that he finds his weak heart is forcing him to step down, Dick Cheney is probably safe. Replacing him now would not just look like panic, it would seal the Republican succession in 2008. As long as Cheney remains vice-president, the next Republican nomination remains wide open - which leaves the field clear for the governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, to continue the dynastic tradition in what might be a race against Hillary Clinton. But Senate majority leader Bill Frist has his eye on '08, as do Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and New York's Rudi Giuliani. Giuliani is not backing the public appeal to ditch Cheney from former New York senator Alfonse d'Amato. The latter will never forgive Giuliani for having endorsed the incumbent Democrat governor of New York Mario Cuomo, which helped d'Amato lose the race. So d'Amato is plotting for Bush to replace Cheney with the current New York governor George Pataki, which would make him the frontrunner four years hence.

Bearing gifts

The state department's annual list of gifts to top US officials includes 300 pounds of raw meat (lamb) donated to President Bush by Argentinian president Nestor Kirchner and $128,000 of "fine jewellery" from Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Talking of gifts, visitors to the Kerry home in Boston's exclusive Beacon Hill during the Democratic convention were impressed to see a grand mirror with their wedding announcement framed above it. Kerry was vague about its origins, but Teresa gleefully confided that it was a gift from Mr and Mrs Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Name change?

Tumbler is considering a name change. The nom de plume was originally chosen because it was the secret service codename for George W Bush. But unhappy with its accident-prone implication, Bush demanded a new moniker. He is now Trailblazer. But we had better wait until we see whether Tumbler might have to become Minuteman, which is Kerry's codename, or even Speedway, if Edwards were to win. But Tumbler is baffled by the name for Teresa Heinz Kerry - Mahogany.