Angelenos Transfixed by Recounts in Florida

By ANNE-MARIE O’CONNOR

Nov. 22, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Remember voter inertia?

The mantra that the presidential campaigns were as scripted as reruns? The idea that the two major parties were so indistinguishable it didn’t matter which won?

Many Angelenos don’t feel that way now. Here in the Hollywood-driven world where some were turned off by the hyper-eroticized impeachment hearings, voters are electrified by chads, butterfly ballots and Palm Beach senior citizens.

Some people are even comparing the postelection fervor to O.J.

From chat rooms to coffeehouses, people who finally figured out how the electoral college works are debating its legitimacy with the conviction of constitutional scholars. For many, the postelection limbo suspending Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore has been a dizzyingly brutal lesson in the truth behind a once-lifeless cliche:

Every vote counts.

“It went from the most incredibly boring campaign to the most incredibly exciting election,” said Jerry Rosen, 50, a training consultant, as he sipped latte at a West Los Angeles cafe.

The engagement marks a sea change from the outright indifference with which many Southern Californians greeted the proceedings to impeach President Clinton just before Christmas two years ago.

Then, many Southern Californians went out of their way to avoid the spectacle of a U.S. Capitol obsessed with sex, lies and Linda Tripp’s tapes. Even the bizarre emergence of porn king Larry Flynt as a Clinton ally aroused just a flicker of morbid interest.

Then, Southern California seemed not just outside the Beltway, but across the Great Divide.

Now, with sex out of the equation and Thanksgiving on the table, politics are sizzling.

“Tell me another time all the stations carried a legal proceeding that was this widely watched since O.J.,” said Donna Bojarsky, a political consultant in Westside Los Angeles, a rarefied bastion of high-stakes Democratic fund-raising where O.J. allusions have heft.

“I think the nation is riveted,” she continued. “It’s about something. . . . The previously hackneyed phrase ‘every vote counts’ will never mean the same thing again.”

Arnie Steinberg, a Calabasas-based Republican political strategist with a polling firm, said the “voyeuristic curiosity” about the recount is spawning a whole new class of political urban legends.

“I’m stunned when I talk to people . . . They repeat to me the wildest rumors about what’s happening in Florida,” Steinberg said. “These are educated, otherwise informed people who will say things to me like ‘the election in Florida was fixed.’ People pick up on these rumors and they become fact and it just increases the suspicion.”

For Lataunya Rouse, an Inglewood security guard, it’s all elections, all the time. Rouse watches the latest vote-count judicial decisions in Florida on television, listens to them on the radio and reads about them in the newspaper. When she’s patrolling out on the street, she gets cell phone updates from her friends.

In the process, she’s gotten so lathered up she was planning to call CNN and volunteer as a populist pundit.

“It’s crazy. It’s really crazy,” she said. “I’m 35, and I’ve never seen an election like this. There’s some kind of hogwash going on.”

“It’s much deeper than O.J.,” Rouse said. “It’s about people’s perceptions. If Bush gets in there on fraud, he’ll be there wrongly. If Gore gets in it’ll be because he whined and got his votes recounted. And it’s all unfair to us, the people.”

In Los Angeles County, Gore got twice as many votes as Bush--giving a decidedly partisan tilt to the election angst.

“I’m upset because I supported Gore and I feel like he won,” said Greg Tedesco, 38, a Mar Vista construction manager. “He got the popular vote. If they had done better with the butterfly ballot in Florida, I think he would have won. But it’s unfortunate because I think we’re going to get Bush ultimately. I feel like the system failed me.”

Helen Rozas, a retired nurse in Marina del Rey, has an evenhanded compromise solution: “If it’s too close to call, I think we should have co-presidents,” she joked.

In Pasadena, computer analyst Dave Thompson didn’t think the country was facing a constitutional crisis. But he thinks the United States should abandon the electoral college system altogether.

“It may have worked in 1776, but I don’t think it does now,” he said.

Thompson, a Bush supporter, said the United States should base the elections on the popular vote, even if, this time around, that might hand the presidency to Al Gore.

“And the chad thing. If a pregnant chad is never used, well, it shouldn’t be used this time,” he said.

In Wilmington and San Pedro, strong pro-Democratic union enclaves that are home to the largest locals of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, longshoremen said they were paying close attention to the episodic recount battle in Florida. Some said the postelection difficulties exposed flaws in the process that must be addressed.

“What’s all the hurry? We got time for recounts,” said Joe Radisich, chairman of the ILWU’s political action committee. “There’s a lot of hypocrisy out there. The Republicans are complaining about the time it’s been taking. But they wasted the nation’s time for a year with Clinton’s impeachment.”

“If the shoe was on the other foot Bush would be doing the same thing,” said Ted Sadler, another dockworker. “Life will go on. That’s the beauty of a democracy like ours. We can take just about anything and keep pumpin’.”

Maybe. But some election fatigue may be starting to creep in.

Atiba Sylvia Thomas, 53, said this election is a particularly sensitive topic for her because of America’s history of preventing African Americans from getting an equal opportunity to vote.

“My people died to vote,” she said. “But I thought the system was working. I can’t believe I’d be so naive.”

Thomas believes the election has exposed corruption and flaws that Americans thought only existed in Third World countries.

But she’s sick of hearing about it.

“At this point I don’t even care who the president is,” said the Gore supporter. “Just have it happen.”

Times staff writers Dan Weikel, Joe Mozingo, Gina Piccalo and Alex Murashko contributed to this story.