In My Time - Dick Cheney [157]
When copies of the decision were made available, television producers grabbed them and sprinted down the steps of the Court building to get the decision into the hands of their on-air reporters. I surfed the channels trying to find a reporter I could trust to be able to skim what might be a very complicated legal document and to report its meaning accurately. When I saw Pete Williams of NBC on the screen, I stopped surfing. I knew that if anyone could analyze the Court’s ruling quickly, it would be Pete. And he didn’t disappoint. We’d won the case, and we’d won the election. It was time for them to go.
I picked up the phone and called Jim Baker. “Hello, Mr. Vice President–elect,” he said. “Thank you, Jim,” I said, “and congratulations to you. You did a hell of a job. Only under your leadership could we have gone from a lead of eighteen hundred votes to a lead of one hundred fifty votes.” He laughed heartily. He knew and I knew that his leadership in Florida had been vital.
I hung up and looked around. I really was going to be vice president. And the only people there to celebrate the moment with me were David Kennerly and Mike Greene. Pretty soon Liz and Phil showed up with a bottle of champagne. It wasn’t the victory party I’d imagined, but it was sweet nonetheless.
The next night we gathered old friends, family, and transition staff at the Sheraton hotel near transition headquarters. As we sat watching Al Gore’s concession speech, a small press pool came in to shoot footage. Shortly after they departed, my three-year-old granddaughter, Elizabeth, strolled in dressed in a red and white dress, holding a sippy cup in one chubby hand and a cookie in the other. She stopped in front of the TV and announced loudly, but to no one in particular, “That’s Al Gore. We don’t like Al Gore.” I can’t imagine where she picked that up, but I was glad she’d kept her opinion to herself while the press corps was in the room.
As soon as the Supreme Court ruled, the GSA called. They were prepared, they said, to turn over the keys to the official transition space. It was slightly anticlimactic when, at a press briefing on December 14, the deputy GSA administrator and I posed for photographers as he finally handed me a plastic key card on a neck lanyard that would guarantee my access to the official transition office.
On the day after the Supreme Court’s decision was handed down, five moderate Republican senators—Arlen Specter, Susan Collins, Jim Jeffords, Olympia Snowe, and Lincoln Chafee—invited me to lunch in the Capitol. They wanted to talk about how the new Bush administration planned to govern. We had run and been elected on a conservative agenda of tax cuts, education reform, and a strong national defense. Since our margin had been historically narrow, my luncheon hosts assumed we would be trimming our sails, moving to the center, and looking for areas of compromise. I suspect they thought that would put them in a very powerful position. I also suspect that they were surprised when I made clear that we didn’t plan to alter our agenda at all. We had won, and we would deliver on our campaign promises. We weren’t looking for a fight, but we certainly didn’t plan to capitulate preemptively, either.
A few days later we made our first cabinet announcement. I flew with Colin Powell, the secretary of state-designate, to the Bush ranch in Crawford. George Bush, General Powell, and I went together to the local school gym