Just wanted to note that you skipped my “favorite” – shipping in Republican interns from Washington DC to Florida to pose as “local citizens” who held disruptive “protests” to interrupt the recount process.
All of this comes down to one thing:
The election was too close to call, Bush ultimately won, and the Democrats are crying foul because it didn’t go their way, same as the Republicans would have if it had happened to them.
That’s it in a nutshell.
I’d be surprised if was just one Prez elected through the EC but not the popular vote.
I called him “shrub” even before he took up residence in the White House, why should I stop now? I don’t have a lot of respect for him, and I don’t agree with most of what he does. Truthfully, I’ve been known to call him things a lot less flattering than “shrub”. Americans can be very critical and vicious in referring to their elected leaders. At least we keep it to verbal violence and don’t take it to the streets. My theory is that allowing verbal nastiness serves as a safety valve and avoids a lot of the street violence and riots you see in other countries when there is a close or questionable election.
It was a weird thing - I went to sleep early on election night thinking “Oh, I’ll just turn on the TV in the morning and find out who’s President” Well, it didn’t happen that way. On the other hand, I also had every expectation that this would be settled in the courts (with maybe a trip to the House of Reps as in 1800) rather than by gunfire as has happened in some other countries in the world. I just sat back and watched the show.
But the fact is, because the election was so close and the courts did step in the results of 2000 will never be seen to be quite as certain and legitimate as, say, the election of 1980. Although Bush struts around like he has a mandate, fact is, he got the job only by the narrowest of margins. So the griping and arguing will never end on this one, although I hasten to point out that, day-to-day, it makes no difference as Dubya is unquestionably President at this point and even his politcal opponents will back him if it’s on an issue of national interest.
In actual fact, the US has had an appointed (that is, entirely non-elected) President -> Gerald Ford. For those of you who aren’t famillar with the situation, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned due to problems with his taxes. Richard Nixon then appointed Ford to be VP (which is within the law if the VP leaves office mid-term). Then Nixon resigns because of the Watergate scandal and Ford - who was never elected by anyone - is President of the United States. All perfectly legal and within the system, yet the manner in which he got into office still left a bit of taint (Who is this guy? No one voted for him!) and his granting of a presidential pardon to Nixon probably didn’t help either. Nonetheless, he was still the President for the remainder of that term with all the perks, privileges, and responsibilities of that office.
If Dubya wins the election in 2004 then the question of the legitimacy of his position will be ended (unless we have the same mess again). If he loses… well, the people will have spoken.
That electoral college thing: The EC exists for a couple of reasons. Remember, when the system started back in the late 1700’s there was no communication faster than a man on horseback. There was the problem of running elections over a large and largely undeveloped swath of land that was (relatively) sparsely populated. Local elections weren’t such a problem, but a national one could be. Choosing “electors” to take a state’s choice to a central area probably looked like a good idea. The founders of our republic also didn’t entirely trust the “common man”, who at that point had no experience with a representative democracy (One of the problems of bringing democracy to a place like, say, Iraq is that the people there have no experience with that form of government, which requires their participation in order to work. There’s a learning curve involved. Also, not everyone wants democracy, but I’m getting off track…)
So, perhaps in this day of instant mass communication the EC has outlived that purpose… but if we went to JUST a popular vote then national policy will be decided by New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and the Florida retirement colonies. Is that what you want? Take a look at either New York State or Illinois where the Big City (NYC and Chicago, respectively) enormously dominates the politics of the state, sometimes to the detriment of the less populated areas. If we went to straight popular vote then the big metropolitan areas will likewise dominate the rest of the country. Some of the strange looking aspects of the Constitution are there to prevent what the founders referred to as “the tyranny of the majority”. Just because it’s what the majority wants doesn’t mean it’s just or right. If you look at the Bill of Rights you’ll see a lot of this in them - freedom of speech, because even unpopular or minority opinions have a right to be heard. Freedom of religion, even if your religion is a small one.
Representation in the House of Representatives is based on population. Representation in the Senate is equal between states regardless of population. Why? Because both means of deciding representation have their merits and their problems. Most elections in the US are by popular vote, but in addition to the EC there are other situations that require more than just a simple majority because each system has it’s good points and bad points.
My personal view is that the EC forces the presidential candidate to pay attention to the entire country, or at least a large portion of it, rather than merely concentrating on the densest population centers. For that reason, I’d favor keeping it. MOST of the time whoever wins the EC also wins the popular vote.
Butterfly and other ballots: In my fifteen years of living in Chicago I punched a lot of chads. Now, a ballot of any sort requires a certain literacy to use, and a typical ballot in an election in this country has a dozen or more races, judges, and local things to vote on. You can vote straight party (for all Democrats or all Republicans or all whatever other party is on the ballot - Chicago had a “Harold Washington” party on a local level, we have Greens and Socialists and even non-affiliated folks) Or you can vote individually for each separate race. It does require a certain hand-eye coordination. However, if you screw up your ballot you can ask an election judge for assistance (those are people stationed at the polling site to assist and observe, usually evenly divided between Dems and Repubs but independents and small parties can get involved, too). You can have the first ballot destroyed and get a new one. Those who are disabled, illiterate, or otherwise need assistance can also ask an election judge for help. After the voting is done you put your ballot into a locked box. Meanwhile, the Dems and Repubs are making sure no one is tampering with that box or stuffing ballots into them. The BIG advantage to paper ballots is that you wind up with a real, physical object that can be re-counted if necessary.
I will note that on every “butterfly ballot” I’ve ever used it VERY CLEARLY states that you need to punch thoroughly and NOT double-punch anything. So, to some extent, the Florida problem stems from the chronic inability of many upright bald apes to read the freakin’ instructions.
When I lived in Michigan, and now that I live in Indiana, I use a “voting machine”. This electronically counts votes. Well, there have always been problems with machines breaking down and malfunctioning - either through accident or malice. It doesn’t happen all the time, or even very frequently, but in a close election it could change the results. If they malfunction you can’t re-count, the best you can do is a re-vote.
In addition, absentee ballots are always on paper, so even in a state with voting machines of one sort or another you’ll still have paper ballots to deal with. Just not as many.
Well, when you have facts like:
A) More people in Florida intended to vote for Gore than for Bush.
B) The governor of Florida is Bush’s brother.
C) Many people involved in the whole election process and legal decisions afterward are either relatives of, or work for, the Bush family.
D) Bush wins Florida.
You can hardly blame people for thinking Bush stole the election.
However, I’m non-biased enough to realize that it may not have been a scheme by the republicans to use confusing ballots (and yes, those particular butterfly ballots were very bad), to not let certain eligible democrats vote, to use illegal republican ballots, to discourage minorities from voting, etc, that decided the election.
It may just have been an extremely close election that nobody could really be said to have won.
Maybe Sam Stone is right, and we should have revotes if the results are under the margin for error.
I also meant to say that the troubles of the election were largely due to a very poor system in Florida, but nobody complained about this system beforehand, and if the Democrats had won you can bet they would not have wanted a revote or anything because of how bad the system was. Hopefully the whole debacle will mean that systems all over the country will be improved.
It seems to me that the US stopped being a voluntary assemblage of states a long time ago. If we were a voluntary assemblage of states,
> the feds would not currently be conducting raids and arrests of people growing marijuana for, and dispensing it to, the sick and dying in states that have passed laws permitting the medical use of this substance,
> all fifty states would not have the same speed limit and the same legal drinking age,
> and going further back, the Civil War would not have occured – any state, or any group of states, that wanted to leave the union would have been seen as being free to do so.
It further seems to me that, in peacetime as well as during a war, the federal goverment has more impact on peoples’ lives than does state or local government. We may wish it were otherwise, but that’s the reality.
Priceguy,
Ignore all of the partisan nonsense you have read so far and look at it from the point of view of an alien.
The following is what I, as an alien from Mars, observed:
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A swarm of lawlerly hacks of the Democrat faith descended upon a small number (4, I think) of closely contested voting precincts in a place called Florida.
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Using methods that could best be described as a mixture of lawyerly intimidation, bullying, shouting, brown suit tactics and so on, they somehow managed to persuade the administrators, who were supposedly in charge of the electoral process, to review all of the rejected/spoiled ballots in those electoral precincts in an attempt to somehow divine, in a manner reminiscent of reading chicken entrails, what the voter’s intent really, coulda, shoulda, oughta have been.
By divining, I mean working out what a “dimpled” chad, a “hanging” chad, a slightly “bruised” chad, an “abused” chad and so on was supposed to represent.
After the specialist “Impartial” panel of God Knows Who perused these spoiled/rejected votes, they were then put into the “valid” ballot pile and counted as per the panelists divining.
In your country, as in mine, any swarm of brown suited lawyers who tried to pull a stunt involving intimidation of duly authorised electoral vote counters would, on the orders of the Chief Returning Officer (or equivalent) be taking a very swift trip to the cooler and be obliged to explain their brown suit behaviour to an anal retentive Magistrate the next morning.
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The Supreme Court of Florida approved of the actions described in (2) above and stated that these actions should continue for an indefinite period, and as long as necessary, until the lawyerly brown suits were satisfied.
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The US Supreme Court, after a second referral, found this process to be constitutionally invalid and called an end to the farce. Details of the Court’s finding, and the reasons therefor, is accessible on the net and you can look it up yourself if you so desire.
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The US Supreme Court made this finding with a vote of 7-2.
(The much more publicised vote of 5-4 was in respect of remedy).
I will never understand this. Surely the important question about the Florida election is, who really got the most votes? This is the important question because the candidate who got the most votes was the legitimate winner. Whoever got the most votes was entitled to Florida’s electoral votes. If the guy who got the most votes in Florida was not the one inagurated, a major screwup must be seen as having occured.
People say that if the partial recount the Gore people requested had been finished, Bush would have won, as though that means that Bush is absolutely,positively the legitimate winnter. They ignore the much more important result of the count by the consortium: that in a complete recount of the whole state Gore has more votes – which means that Gore was the legitimate winner, not Bush. Bush landed in the White House due to the inadequacy of Florida’s election laws*, plus the partisan decision of the Supreme Court.
(Of course, had Florida managed to hold a fair and competently-run election, Gore would have been the clear winner. We wouldn’t be wrangling over the recount, as none would have been needed.)
*For example, in a disputed election, it should not be up to the candidates to pick and choose as to what counties to recount. Once the election has been held, what’s important is to find out for sure who really won. We should not allow the wrong guy to be declared the winner because of tactical errors by the other side. Neither side should have the opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot this way. It’s not their interests that count, after all. Once the election has been heldt, what counts is the voters’ right to have their votes count, and the country’s right to have the correct winner determined. The law should mandate a complete, statewide recount. Also, there’s the arbitrary deadline. What need was there for it? I see no reason why they needed to certify the results any sooner than the day before the Electoral College met.
Except that that’s not what was happening in the state. All the claims about bush ‘stealing’ the election have to do with two main things: Katharine Harris putting a deadline on the first recount, and the SCOTUS stepping in and putting a halt to the whole proceeding. The point is, if those two things had not happened, and if Gore would have gotten everything he was ASKING for, he would still have lost the election.
Part of the blame for this falls squarely on Al Gore, something you guys on the left are never willing to acknowledge. Rather than do the fair and honest thing and demand a statewide recount right from the beginning (which he might actually have had a chance of getting, and which might have resulted in a win), he decided to try to play the situation to his best advantage by demanding selective recounts only in areas where he thought it would help him. That was wrong, and the SCOTUS stopped it.
Yes, quite right, the offical results of the election were indeed too close to call.
IMO, there were either two problems with the Florida election, or three, depending how you define certain things.
First, the Republican shenanigans that gyped Gore out of votes. In the absense of these shenanigans, Gore would have won. The shenanignas have been listed by a number of posters. Probably the main one (the one that had the biggest effect) was the illegitimate purging from the voter rolls of people likely to vote for Gore.
Second, the honest mistakes that deprived Gore of votes. (Not everyone accepts that these were honest mistakes; some would put them in the shenanigans column.) In the absense of these errors, Gore would have won. The main one was the poorly designed ballot in West Palm Beach. The Gore votes that went to Buchanan as a result of that ballot were enough for him to have won Florida had he received them.
The third problem was inadeqate election laws. The election results were tainted, but the laws did not provide any solution for this. Furthermore, the official results were a statistical tie – and the laws did not provide any solution for that, either.
(Definition: In any election, there is a margin of error in the counting methods. If the gap between the two front runners is less than the margin of error, you have a tie. You can’t be sure which of the two front runners really won. Stephen Jay Gould said at the time that the best solution would be to decide the winner by the Chief Justice flipping a coin.)
In an election where cheating and/or errors have caused the official results to be incorrrect, the best solution is a “do over”. In an election where the results are a statistical tie, the best solution is a runoff election. In both cases, you need to have another election. If the results of the first election were tainted, you hold a new election including all of the candidates who ran in the original election. In the case of a statistical tie, you need an additional election including only the top two vote getters from the first eleciton. And, IMO, there should also be a runoff election in any case where the candidate with the most votes has less than 51% of the vote.
The concept of runoff elections is one that has been around for a long time. Does anyone think a runoff is wrong, improper, unfair? Seems to me, if having a runoff election is considered proper, having a “do over” election should be as well. I don’t understand why the idea of a “do over” is so often rejected.
You can’t have a runoff or a “do over” unless the law provides for one.* But I would say that the example of Florida 2000 shows that we need to pass laws that provide for both. I would say that we also need to pass laws that require an automatic statewide recount when an election result is challenged. Don’t let either side choose only some counties to recount; make it automatic that all counties will be recounted. And let’s outlaw punchcard ballots! I’d also like to see repealed the laws that take away voting rights for life when one is convicted of a felony. Once the person has served his or her sentence, voting rights should, IMO, be restored.
*Or can you? Could the Supreme Court have ordered one?
IMO, that’s one of the things that went wrong wiht the FL election. As I said, it should not have been up to Gore to decide what counties to recount. When the results of the FL election were disputed, the sole objective should have been to attempt to determine who really got the most votes. Once the election has been held, it’s not the candidates interests that matter. What matters is the right of the Florida voters to have their votes counted correctly, and the right of the citizens of all fifty states to have the next President be the legitimate winner.
Neither Bush nor Gore should have had any say as to how the dispute was resolved, as they each quite naturally wanted to do whatever was more likely to cause them to be declared the winner, regardless of the facts. Impartiallity was needed.
Adequate election laws would have mandated a statewide recount. (If Florida had had good election laws, the whole mess would never have happened. Good election laws would have insured a reasonably honest, fair, error-free election.)
Here’s a link to the ballot in Palm Beach. The article points out that 19,210 ballots were invalidated due to double-punching and that Pat Buchanan garnered 3,000 votes in Palm Beach…more than he got anywhere else in the state and that in a strongly democrat district. Remember Buchanan is even more right wing than Bush is and IIRC Buchanan himself said that result couldn’t be correct.
Are people stupid? Do they not realize they should get a new ballot if they screwed-up? Are they too lazy to have been bothered? Maybe yes to all those things but it doesn’t change the fact that clearly not all was right down there and the result of their stupidity (unless you assume they were tricked) was inflicting George Bush on the country and the world. The only reasonable and fair way to resolve that would have been to have everybody re-vote in that district but of course the law didn’t allow for that so that’s the end of it.
Electoral College:
It seems a common theme throughout this thread to vilify the Electoral College but I’d ask any of you willing to trash it to read this article first: Math Against Tyranny. A straight majority vote seems so much more fair and natural to us that I think many of us don’t stop to think about the implications. Certainly you might still disagree with the EC after reading the article but at least you’ll be better informed.
A few selected quotes (from the link above) to whet your appetite:
I’ll stop there to avoid offending the copyright gods but the article is fairly long and has much more meat than the snappy little bits I provided (just there to intrigue…not to prove anything by themselves).
Thanks for quoting the part of my post that I screwed up.
Nebraska and Maine as others have already pointed out, but the part about the # of electors should have read “electors are equal to the number of Senators + the number of Representatives”.
Wow, a lefty European who can see thru the partisan BS and realize that Gore did lose. I’ll be damned!
I congratulate you on your honesty here. I’ll bet, though, that many Bush bashers will say he used his incumbancy unfairly to make it a true test. But, we also have the dramatic 2002 Republicna gains in Congress as a pre-test of your argument. That wasn’t enough for you?
Sam, the deanline was a FL law, and KH was just executing that law. She did not set the deadline. The FL Sup Ct ruled that the deadline was not really a deadline. Interesting concept since the law said basically “the Sec of State shall certify the election by x date”. It didn’t say may, or can, but shall.
Sometimes an outsider sees the mess more clearly than an insider - impartiallity and all.
Thank you. I’ll explain my personal reasoning about the presidential election of 2000 by a small detour through history.
In 1800, the presidency deadlocked between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. Not only had they tied the electoral college, they tied in the House three times. The deciding vote was finally cast by Alexander Hamilton. You must understand, Hamilton loathed Jefferson, their mutual animosity was legendary. Yet Hamilton voted for Jefferson - it was rather like Rush Limbaugh voting for Hillary Clinton. When asked why he had voted such that a man he hated gained the presidency, Hamilton’s answer was that, despite their differences, he felt Jefferson was the better choice for the country than Burr. (Considering that Burr went crazy a number of years later he was probably correct.)
So, when I stepped into the voting both I was confronted with three choices for president: Gore, Bush, and Buchannan. Frankly, I despised them all. I made the choice I did based upon which of these human beings would, I felt, be the best choice for my country even if I didn’t particularly care for them as human beings.
[SIZE=1](You may also note that I do not specify who I actually voted for. I make it a rule not to say so. You may guess all you like, but you only have one chance in three of being correct.[SIZE]
Nope. Not enough.
The Republicans made substantial gains during mid-term elections during the Clinton years, yet Clinton won two terms as President.
It is also not unusual for a state to elect a president of one party yet vote a majority of their Congressional reps from another party. Likewise, the party of the governor of a state may or may not have any relationship to the party of the Congressional officials or the majority of the State legislature. Indiana, for instance, has had a Democratic governor yet the same electorate in the same elections voted for a Republican for the White House and a Republican dominated State legislature.
Although many people vote by party, there’s a substantial number who do not. Even when people DO normally vote by party a particular candidate may swing them to the other party, for good or negative reasons. For instance, the current Illinois governor, Blagoevich, is a Democrat coming from the Chicago politcal scene, which normally would make him loathsome to both the Chicago suburban voters (heavily Republican) and the downstate rural crowd (also heavily Republican), which is why Illinois almost always has a Republican governor in recent decades. However, the previous governor, Ryan (a Republican) was so caught up in scandals that it tainted not only his administration but also the guy the Republican party choose to run when Ryan said he wouldn’t. Thus, repelled by scandal, many people who would ordinally vote Republican for governor voted for the the Democrat in that one race - they probably voted Republican everywhere else, though, since the composition of the State legislature didn’t change much.
Likewise, the American electorate is quite capable of sending a man of one party to the White House and electing a Congress dominated by the other party, and has done so multiple times. We even sent a third-party candidate to the White House once upon a time (Abraham Lincoln - at that point the Republican party was new and the government dominated by Democrats and Whigs. So much for those who say third parties can’t succeed)
Thus, a mid-term election may indicate people are pleased with the current administration, but you have to consider other factors. In our case, you can’t discount 9/11 and the military campaigns following. Republicans, right or wrong, are seen as “tougher” on defense, military (odd, since the military leans heavily Democratic), and crime issues and the feeling of vulnerability left by 9/11 may well have affected voter choices. There may have also been the feeling that by having the Repubs dominate the Federal government that government would work more efficiently in regards to matters involving national defense.
This also assumes that an efficient government is always best - it isn’t. I mean, an absolute monarchy may be very efficient, but most Americans wouldn’t want to live in such a place. And the Third Reich was extremely efficient - regardless of whether their goals were moral or not. Many aspects of our system were designed to slow down decision making because hasty decisions may be bad decisions. The President should not have a blank check - and neither should Congress. That’s the whole point of checks and balances in government, to keep things from getting out of hand.
So… I think the mid-term elections reflected at least somewhat the after-effects of 9/11. Remove that factor and their is no telling which way it would have swung. Prior to those attacks Dubya was not shaping up to be very spectacular, except in number of malapropisms produced per speech.
The real report card on the current administration will be delivered on Election Day next November.
Which just goes to show “partisan creep” at work. Too many Repubs phrase it as Sam did, but in this case John has the right of it. Ms. Harris’s job was to enforce the law, which she did. It was not her place to interpret the law - that is the job of the court system.
Gee, so far no one has mentioned my own personal favorite naked grasp for power, voters be damned. This came about as the Florida Legislature, dominated by the Forces of Darkness, announced that regardless of the cunning machinations of the Dems, as evidenced by cravenly seeking justice in the courts, they would return a Bush slate no matter what. If there were a recount, they would nullify it if it should produce an unseemly result.
The debacle of 10.000 Jews for Buchanan runs a close second.
That’s the bullshit RNC spin in a nutshell.
The real story is that Jeb Bush and Catherine Harris rigged the election through felon purges and possibly confusing ballots. But the mandate for Gore was strong enough to overcome their efforts. So Bush went to court to prevent a full count of the votes during a period of time when he was ahead.
5 partisan Republican SC members put a stop to the counting and anointed Bush president. And they violated their own standards of constitutional interpretation to do soo.
A full count of all of the ballots by the media later showed that Gore won by any and all standards of counting questional ballots.
A full count of all of the ballots later showed that Gore won.
That’s the real story in a nutshell, the facts are clear. It’s just the Bush apologists who keep pretending that they arent.
Not true, there is also the illegal pre-election democratic voter purge and the confusing ballots only in democratic districts. But even if we assume that this is only about the recount, Gore wasn’t going to get what he was asking for. The decision as to how to handle the final counting was not up to him. it was up to a judge called Terry Lewis, and HE was going to examine all of the ballots in all of the counties. He had already ordered them to be brought to Tallahasee for that purpose. http://slate.msn.com/id/2058603/
There were so many bad acts by republicans that it’s hard to even pick just one as the cause for outrage. But if you want to boil it down it’s this.
Bush stole the election because he got the presidency while Gore actually had the most valid votes in florida. (not to mention in the nation as a whole)
You sir, are a liar. This HAS been ackowledged on this very board and in your presense multiple times. Furtheremore it has been explained to you multiple times that Florida law didn’t allow him to ask for a statewide recount. There was simply no mechanism to do so. Florida law only allowed him to request recounts in each individual county. And each county is permitted to refuse. So Gore went to the counties that had the largest number of discarded ballots. Yes these happened to be strongly democratic counties, but that wasn’t his fault. The mere fact that all the large clusters of discarded ballots were in democratic strongholds is all by itself pretty suspicious.
It’s just like a republican to blame the victim. And just like Sam to continue spreading a lie even after he’s had it shown to him to be a lie. 
SCOTUS could, in fact, have ORDERED that all of the votes be counted, but instead they stopped the couting entirely. If they had only wanted to correct for Gore’s bad action they would have ordered a full count.
Right. The people in Florida absolutely KNEW that it would come down to their state, so they embarked upon a massive conspiracy long before the election to design a ballot that even a moron could understand (the picture of it is linked in this thread and I looked at it), and yet when the people screwed up it was because the Republicans colluded to screw them up.
:rolleyes:
Oh, you mean the full recount that was completed long after the inauguration? The one that was “completely fair and impartial” that gave it to Gore by the slimmest of margins? The one that had results that were well within the margin of error in any case? The one that required “interpretations” to determine “the intent of the voters”?
What a crock.
Here’s the facts that you ignore:
a) The election was too close to call.
b) A decision had to be made in time for an orderly transition.
c) Gore and Bush were both guilty of dirty tricks during the recount.
d) At the time of certification, Bush was ahead. That date was a Florida constitutional requirement.
All of your wishes and desires, your insults and accusations, cannot change the fact that Gore lost. Period.
You are trimming the facts but slightly, yet trimming you are.
a) No election can be “Too close to call” if all the relevant votes are counted. Just as you say, an impartial survey after the fact revealed the results just as you stated them. Presumably you were hoping to project an air of sarcasm.
Squirm as you like, the fact remains: if the votes had had effect as the voters had intended, most especially as regards the butterfly ballots and the resultant 10,000 Jews for Buchanan, GeeDubya would not be misleading the country.
b) There was some urgency? The Republic was at some risk? What looming deadline threatened the nation? What dread consequence would have befallen the nation if taking more time proved to be necessary? Locusts?
c) Debateable. Even if true, what’s your point? The moral superiority of one candidate or another is not really in question here.
d) The urgent need to cringe behind a technicality reveals the weakness of your argument. Mine is simpler: as it is clear that the will of the voters in Florida was, by whatever means, hampered, frustrated and finally overuled, then it necessarily follows that Bush’s installation as President was fraudulent and immoral. If he was half the man he claimed to be, he would not have accepted it. He was not, he is not, and there is little likelihood that he will be tomorrow.