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Jonathan Chait has an extensive profile in TNR of Ms. Harris' fall from grace even in the eyes of conservatives. Sort of a eulogy-during-the-middle-of-the-campaign, which I'm not sure I've seen so soon before an election.

• Not very long ago, the term conservatives most often used to describe Katherine Harris was "rock star." Writing in The Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz praised her as "a local official in Florida who looked to the letter of the law for guidance at a time when we needed the law the most." Among conservatives, this was one of the more measured assessments. In the eyes of her admirers, she was Mother Teresa, Marie Curie, and Joan of Arc all rolled into one--passionate, deeply moral, and honest as the day is long. Not only that, she was also smart as a whip and a looker to boot. ("In person, Mrs. Harris comes across as brainy, ultrapetite and softly glamorous," reported The Washington Times.)
  
  In the last few months, though, many of Harris's starry-eyed fans have undertaken a critical reappraisal of their erstwhile heroine. It turns out that she may not be a paragon of sound judgment after all. Today, conservatives tend to describe Harris with synonyms for "insane."
  
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  Harris's ongoing meltdown has rendered her politically radioactive. Her November opponent, Democrat Bill Nelson, was initially considered one of the most vulnerable Democratic incumbents in the Senate. Yet Harris's campaign has been such a disaster that polls show her losing by 30 points. A number of Republicans, including, reportedly, representatives of Jeb Bush, have pleaded with her to quit the race so the party can put up a stronger challenger, but she has adamantly refused, insisting that God wants her to be a senator. (This sort of rationale is notoriously difficult to refute.) Indeed, appeals to reason by her fellow Republicans seem only to have stiffened her resolve. Jeb Bush's efforts to recruit another GOP challenger "drove her crazy, but it didn't take her long to get there," former Harris pollster Ed Rollins told The Miami Herald.

Chait amusingly chronicles how this was so, but also raises the point that this rare moment of bi-partisan agreement that Ms. Harris is batshit crazy should cause us to reevaluate her role in Florida 2000.

• Harris, after all, played a singularly decisive role in making George W. Bush president. As Florida's secretary of state, she initially forbade counties from conducting their own recounts, delaying the process for weeks so that, when the recount eventually started, it could not be completed in time for the deadline to certify electors. As Lance deHaven-Smith, a Florida State University political scientist and author of The Battle for Florida, told The Tampa Tribune, "It would never have gone to the Supreme Court if she had simply allowed the counties to complete their recounts." Deadlock, The Washington Post's history of the recount, concurred: "What is clear is that Bush enjoyed an enormous advantage because of the presence of his brother in the governor's office and Katherine Harris as secretary of state." Democrats and Republicans still view the Florida recount as divergently as they once viewed Harris. Now that a new consensus is forming that Harris is a loon, though, shouldn't a new consensus on the recount she conducted follow?

Well, wait. Didn't news organizations conclude that even with a recount, Bush would've won?

• What aided Harris even more was a 2001 recount of the Florida ballots by the National Opinion Research Center, conducted for a media consortium, which seemed to suggest that Bush would have won even without her or the Supreme Court. The media recount came out just weeks after the September 11 attacks, and the participating newspapers appeared to bend over backward to avoid tainting President Bush's legitimacy. Some press accounts asserted that a statewide recount--which Al Gore had futilely pleaded with Bush to accept and which the Florida Supreme Court ultimately ordered--"would have favored Bush," as The Washington Post put it.
  
  This conclusion, however pleasing to the national psyche, was totally false. (See "Count Down," November 26, 2001.) It rested on the assumption that only ballots that had registered no vote at all--those pesky hanging chads--would have been counted. In reality, several counties were examining ballots that had been initially disqualified for registering two votes. There turned out to be a large net gain for Gore in such ballots, which typically included a vote for Gore as well as a write-in vote for Gore. The voting machines initially disqualified these votes, but a hand examination counted them because the intent of the voter was clear. And, if those votes had been included, Gore would have carried Florida.

Well, whatever. At any rate, the GOP clearly forgot the golden rule of what to do with officials who have material impacts on presidential elections: Lock them in Cheney's Basement and Withhold From Public View.

• Harris remained an icon among conservatives until very recently, and the degeneration of her image from wise public servant to nutbag has been abrupt. Most Republicans have chosen to treat her eccentric displays as a sudden and unforeseeable outbreak of delirium--ones that happened to coincide with the moment that she became a strategic liability for the party. After Harris floated unsubstantiated rumors that Joe Scarborough (a former GOP member of Congress whom Harris viewed as a potential primary rival) may have killed one of his interns, Scarborough noted, "That was the first clue that something wasn't right with Katherine Harris."
  
  In fact, there were plenty of clues to that effect from the very beginning. One such clue was Harris's oft-stated belief that she was the modern-day incarnation of the biblical heroine Queen Esther. ("If I perish, I perish," she would proclaim dramatically, perhaps confusing Esther with Jesus.) During the recount, Harris made this analogy to her staff so frequently that, as the Post reported, her underlings finally begged, "No more Esther stories!"
  
  Or there was the time, during the heat of the recount, when Harris told reporters, "I dreamed that I would ride into this stadium [the site of the Florida/Florida State football game] on a horse, carrying the FSU flag in one hand and the [election] certification in the other--while everyone around me cheered." Some of us took this statement as another fairly strong clue that Harris was something less than the dispassionate, ultra-professional public servant her supporters made her out to be.
  
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  Today, of course, it is the Florida Republican Party experiencing the frustration that once only Gore's legal team knew. As Harris likes to tell supporters, by way of defending her suicidal Senate campaign, "I have a little bit of a history of sticking to my guns."
  
  Florida may be the last remaining taboo of the Bush presidency. Conservatives have questioned Bush's domestic record, his foreign policy, even (in the recent case of Scarborough) his intelligence. None have bothered to reinterpret Florida. But the bedrock assumption of the conservative interpretation of Florida is that Harris is a sober, competent, and upstanding public servant. If you assume that Harris is none of those things, then the whole denouement of 2000--and, by extension, the very legitimacy of Bush's presidency--takes on a strikingly different cast.
  
  What do you say, conservatives? Now that some of you are willing to contemplate that Bush has been a disappointment--or even a disaster--is it too much to consider the possibility that he never should have become president in the first place?

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