In My Time - Dick Cheney [156]
After the certification Governor Bush also announced that I would be chairing the Bush-Cheney transition.
On the Bush ranch in Crawford during the 37 day recount. (Photo by David Kennerly)
For the last several days, we had been operating a skeleton transition from the kitchen table of our home in McLean. Most of the time we had to stand on the back porch to get decent cell phone reception. All of the phones in our house were cordless, and we worried about eavesdropping, so for the most sensitive conversations, Lynne dug an old “princess” style phone out of the attic. This relic from Liz’s and Mary’s high school days was placed in the middle of the kitchen table. Lynne also found an old bulletin board in the attic, and we leaned it up against the kitchen wall so people could tack up messages.
I scheduled a press conference for November 27, the day after the certification. In my brief, I explained where things stood. I said that even though the Gore team was still contesting the outcome and the General Services Administration was not yet providing us with the transition office space or funds normally available to the president-elect, we felt that we had an obligation to move forward with the business of getting ready to govern. “The transition affects the quality of planning, the building of relationships between the administration and the Congress, the capacity of a new administration to develop and execute a legislative program, and even the ability of the new team to deal with that first crisis when it arises, as it inevitably will,” I noted. Every day that we waited to begin the transition was another valuable day lost, and so, I announced, we were setting up a foundation to accept private contributions so that we could begin transition operations.
I also reiterated a point that had been made in the last twenty-four hours by Governor Bush and by Jim Baker:
Governor Bush and I have prevailed at each step of the election process in Florida. Now we have been officially certified, in accordance with the laws of the state of Florida, the winners of the state’s twenty-five electoral votes. Every vote in Florida has been counted, every vote in Florida has been recounted. Some have been counted three times. Vice President Gore and Senator Lieberman are apparently still unwilling to accept the outcome. That’s unfortunate in light of the penalty that may have to be paid at some future date if the next administration is not allowed to prepare to take the reins of government.
We find ourselves in a unique and totally unprecedented position. Never before in American history has a presidential candidate gone to court to try to change the outcome of an already certified presidential election. But whatever the vice president’s decision, it does not change our obligation to prepare to govern the nation.
With that, we began a period of seven weeks of intense work to fill the most important positions in the U.S. government.
It was important that the American people know that we were preparing to govern, so we arranged regular press briefings to report on our progress. At first these briefings were held in hotel ballrooms in downtown D.C., but as soon as we rented office space in McLean for our transition headquarters, eager volunteers moved heaven and earth to transform it into a place we could hold such events. I was most impressed when an energetic young advance man gave me a tour of an area that had been miraculously transformed in twenty-four hours from an empty space into a professional briefing room with yards and yards of blue fabric, a stage, a podium, and rows of chairs. I listened as he explained that the next step would be knocking down a wall so we could have direct access to the stage without having to walk through the room. I put the kibosh on that idea. I didn’t think we’d want to explain to the landlord that we needed to knock down walls in what was supposed to be temporary office space. But I was impressed with this young man’s creativity and energy.
On the night of December 12, Liz