The Electors by Roy Neel

The Daily News Journal

MURFREESBORO — Roy Neel knows a little bit about electors.

The Rutherford County native, Central High School alum and author of the new book "The Electors" served as chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore and head of the transition team of Gore's nearly successful presidential campaign in 2000. His candidate won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College and presidency.

Earlier this year, Neel, who still serves as Gore's chief of staff as an adjunct Vanderbilt University professor, published a novel in which a presidential election is disrupted by a terrorist attack and potentially unfaithful members of the Electoral College hold the campaign in the balance.

Neel is set to have an invitation-only book event at the Women's Club on Murfreesboro on Thursday and spoke to The Daily News Journal about his book and experiences in politics.

Could you walk me through the book and how you came up with the plot?

I came to Washington with Al Gore in '77. Then in 2000 I directed his transition planning, to put together all the pieces that would be required should he become president. That notorious recount period left me thinking that if you were to have some sort of national catastrophe happen during a period like that, the country would be in a real crisis.

And then came 9/11. We had a terrorist incident that was tragic and disrupting to the economy and the whole world followed by the invasion of Iraq and so on.

After the 2000 election, I began teaching at Vanderbilt courses in the presidency and presidential transitions and White House operations. I had a contract to write a book, a non-fiction book about presidential transitions.

As I got into this, the story came to me that put all these pieces together that could seriously disrupt the country. In particular, focusing on a real odd provision in the Constitution about the way we elect presidents. That had to do with the way the Electoral College works. As you know, we don't elect presidents. We elect electors to come together and vote.

As I began to research this for my classes at Vanderbilt, I came across this provision of how electors are identified and how they vote. Then it became pretty obvious to me where you have a situation where an elector could switch his or her vote. There's no constitutional way to bind electors. Electors are essentially free agents.

I came up with this story, this scenario, and ran it by a number of constitutional scholars that work in this area. I had it confirmed by everyone I talked to that yes, it could happen. It's essentially a time bomb waiting to go off. That's how this story got launched — a presidential election is thrown upheaval by the end of an election cycle by a terrorist incident. The president, the incumbent president, and his men hatch a conspiracy to steal the presidency back by manipulating the Electoral College.

You called the Electoral College a 'ticking time bomb'. Was that a surprise to you after the 2000 election?

Well, I was pretty familiar with the Electoral College, and I knew there had been occasions in the past where an elector had switched his or her vote, usually in protest. It wasn't consequential.

So yeah, I was surprised in particular that all the provisions that 28 states have are basically unconstitutional. That was a surprise to me, and the more I looked at it, the more I realized that this is a very bizarre situation embedded in the Constitution that was developed in a time where they couldn't conceive of the political scenarios we have now.

How else did your political experiences influence the book?

It gave me a window into how the White House works and how presidential campaigns operate, but also the tone of what goes on in the White House and the campaign. How different people react to crises, how they talk and how they interact with each other, and in a way how they are essentially able to pull the wool over the public's eyes and use the power of the White House to do that.

In that regard, I'm talking about how the Bush/Cheney White House manipulated intelligence information to essentially fool Congress into supporting the invasion of Iraq. I understood how that could happen, and I understand how they could do this using the tools they have.

How did you get into this field? Was there anything growing up in Rutherford County that got you interested in government or public service?

I was the sports editor for the old high school newspaper, and when I went to Vanderbilt I also worked as a part-time sports writer there. I got interested in politics primarily as a result of just being at a newspaper where politics was played out in a real rough-and-tumble way. The Banner was a very conservative paper, and The Tennessean was a very liberal paper, and they went at it mostly through politics. Now, I wasn't a political. I was probably the most liberal person working at the Banner.

But returning to Rutherford County, it wasn't so much a return to politics as it was being around writers. At our family home in Smyrna, there were always prominent writers coming and going. My uncle was a novelist, and my aunt was a writer, and they had lots of friends from that literary world. I had an early introduction to that.

What are your thoughts on the 2016 election and the upcoming Republican convention?

We've never seen an election like this.

You have large number of respected Republicans who are not only going to go to the convention to support Drumpf, you have a number of people who are openly hoping he'll lose in a landslide. Although they detest Hillary Clinton, they detest Donald Drumpf for any number of reasons.

The conventional wisdom would tell you that Drumpf is doomed, and that it could have a serious effect on down-ballot races. But we're just not so sure. This is uncharted.

What about the Democrats? Can Secretary Hillary Clinton get the Democratic Party to unite around her?

I think they will.

They may not be enthusiastic about the candidate, but enthusiasm about your candidate is usually not the most important thing. The most important thing is how much you absolutely hate your opponent. That tends to mobilize voters sometime more than the affection of your own party.