# Gore in '04: What's the problem? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 20, 2002, 1:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791 "2002-09-20T13:46:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Kirkland1244](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dc4da7/32.png) [@Kirkland1244](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kirkland1244)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2002, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/21 "2002-09-21T03:16:38Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Apos \* > \*\*Personally, I think the “liberal” media did him in: they softballed absolutely outrageous policy lies by Bush, and focused in obsessively on Gore’s throat sounds. Ridiculous Bush campaign spin was repeated verbatim without any scrutiny: while Gore spin was picked to peices mercilessly even beyond what was warranted. \*\* While they didn’t “do Gore in,” since he only really lost on a technicality, the press was harder on Gore than they were on Bush. This tends to be true in “fresh” election years without a Democratic incumbent. Why? Because the press is overwhelmingly going to vote for Gore, so in order to appear unbiased they’re harder on “their guy” than they are on “the other guy.” Read some books about the press coverage of McGovern in 1972 for examples of this. Kirk ---
**Author:** ![PosterChild](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/e274bd/32.png) [@PosterChild](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PosterChild)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2002, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/22 "2002-09-21T03:18:09Z")
Three factors that could prevent a Gore election: 1. War (presumably with Iraq). Although, it looks like Bush will discharge prematurely and the war should be over by then. 2. It’s the economy stupid. If it picks up by then (which it might) then Bush would be the unbeatable incumbant with a good economy. 3. Another terrorist attack (or recent dramatic arrests/events in the ‘War’ on terrorism). Ashcroft, I mean Bush, is running things with a secure (if heavy) hand and people won’t want to ‘change horses in midstream.’ Also, Bush may have a difficult time running again on the promise to end partisan politics and get the job done. PC ---
**Author:** ![barton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@barton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/barton)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2002, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/23 "2002-09-21T05:14:46Z")
I’ve said this about a million times now - it was hardly Gore’s fault he lost. It’s the fault of the millions of incredibly dumb Americans, including a lot of Democrats, who voted for Bush. There is no excuse for their performance. Gore isn’t perfect, but at least he’s Leader of the Free World material. ---
**Author:** ![Apos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/838e76/32.png) [@Apos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Apos)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2002, 5:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/24 "2002-09-21T05:40:39Z")
—People understand that in light of the economic downtown and necessary expenditures post 9/11, the budget had to suffer.— Actually, 9/11 and even the related expenditures were fairly minor in terms of actual economic impact, unless one wants to make a case for psychological market effects (which are a little dubious, but possible). The public has that wrong, in no small part to Bush simply lying about it (he knows better) because its a patriotic sounding excuse. The recession is by far the major reason the budget is suffering (drop in revenues) in the short term, while the tax cuts filling out the majority of the long term picture. The first event _cannot_ be attributed to Bush directly (though he’s shown 0 leadership in addressing it, and its arguable that his promise of future tax increases (which are the inevitable flip side of the current tax cuts) are keeping interest rates high). The second can. Of course “suffering” is very loaded language. The U.S. government is simply not like a corporation, and if there’s a good reason to run deficits, then by all means, run them. There is no inherent wrong in Bush’s chosen policy, provided he explains what the actual purpose of it is. But the Bush administration obviously doesn’t think they can sell honest explanations (which I wish they would, because it would go a long way towards showing what strong, honest conservative leadership can be like): instead it’s simply lying about the resurgence of the deficit, playing the same game they played during the campaign: pretending that they can hand the same dollar bill to several different people at once, to keep them all happy. ---
**Author:** ![Milossarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/3ec8ea/32.png) [@Milossarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Milossarian)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2002, 6:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/25 "2002-09-21T06:26:03Z")
> [@](#): > > \*\*Actually, 9/11 and even the related expenditures were fairly minor in terms of actual economic impact, unless one wants to make a case for psychological market effects (which are a little dubious, but possible). \*\* Say huh? Would you like me to drag up Wall Street’s performance post 9/11? Do you think it was not necessary post 9/11 to bail out the airline industry, destroy blatant Al Qaeda training camps in the Taliban-led Afghanistan, create an office of Homeland Security, etc? All that costs money. ---
**Author:** ![SPOOFE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c5a1d2/32.png) [@SPOOFE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SPOOFE)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2002, 7:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/26 "2002-09-21T07:42:08Z")
> [@](#): > > It’s the fault of the millions of incredibly dumb Americans … Because we all know that all intelligent people are automatically liberal… is that it? ---
**Author:** ![Apos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/838e76/32.png) [@Apos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Apos)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2002, 7:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/27 "2002-09-21T07:42:42Z")
—Would you like me to drag up Wall Street’s performance post 9/11?— Uh, you can, but I’m not sure what you think that would prove. Most people seem to think its performance has to do with the bursting of a nasty tech bubble, explosion of corporate overvaluation, stagnation of productivity, and other such things that have a direct effect on the operation and outlook of the ENTIRE economy (as it pertains to stock investment), not just the loss, however tragic, of the WTC, the wing of the Pentagon, and countless invaluable people and their expertise, which however horrendous as a media event, is a very very small effect from a demographic and economic scale. —All that costs money.— Indeed, but compared to the operation of the U.S. economy… and the size of things like the yearly expenditure budget, the yearly tax revenue, the deficit, etc. it’s still a pretty small amount. Most people don’t even have a sense of the scale we’re talking here: which is one reason some people seem to think that we can drastically reduce the size of government simply by cutting a few social services. Check here: [http://www.cbpp.org/9-3-02bud.htm](http://www.cbpp.org/9-3-02bud.htm) Just the technical factors (i.e. projection errors alone) account for more than twice the expected cost of extra proposed military spending insofar as the dissappearance of the surplus. And this is deceptive in several ways. First, a lot of that extra military spending has little to do with fighting terror, but rather is part of the pork glut we experienced mid-season (like financing the development of fighter jets to face off with a next generation of MiGs that will never exist) and is pretty hard to justify in terms of the war on terrorism. A good portion of that is an increase in foriegn aid approved by the Bush admin. Finally, the CBO is required by law to work with numbers that understate a lot of important things. And remember: these numbers are only talking about what happened to the projected ten-year surplus, NOT the entire ten-year budget, which dwarfs all these things. And the government budget is itself a lot smaller than the U.S. economy. So, yeah. 9/11 was traumatic, but not a big player as far as economic impact. We were in for this recession long before it even happened, and the real sorts of factors one might look at, from high levels of public debt to overstocked inventories, have little to do with 9/11, or indeed much to do with government action in general. ---
**Author:** ![vanilla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/f19dbf/32.png) [@vanilla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vanilla)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2002, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/28 "2002-09-21T18:02:46Z")
Kirk! Welcome back ---
**Author:** ![SuaSponte](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/67e7ee/32.png) [@SuaSponte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SuaSponte)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2002, 6:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/29 "2002-09-21T18:18:13Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by SPOOFE \* > … Because we all know that all intelligent people are automatically liberal… is that it? No, no, no, **SPOOFE**. I’ll use small words, so you can understand, you poor conservative dolt. What **barton** was trying to say is that the liberal intelligenstia is both smarter and better than everyone else, because we _care_. In a truly just world, the Constitution would be amended to mandate rule be the liberal intelligenstia. Sua Member, Liberal Intelligenstia, S. Florida Branch Id. #523453 ---
**Author:** ![PunditLisa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/4af34b/32.png) [@PunditLisa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PunditLisa)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2002, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/30 "2002-09-21T18:46:08Z")
Gore and Bush were both incredibly weak candidates. The leaders of both parties should have been taken out back and flogged for giving us two bozos to choose from. Other than die-hard party liners, I know very few people who were comfortable with their vote. Riff or Raff? Did it matter? Gore in 2004? I think he would be a poor choice for reasons others have explained above. He should have been a shoe-in. He wasn’t. You can’t blame the media for that first debate. Can’t blame the media for his stiff demeanor and Dee Snyder makeup. Did he seem like a world leader? No. IMO that’s what lost him the election. Personally I hope it’s _neither_ Bush nor Gore in 2004. I would like to see 2 articulate self-made candidates who would be able to address domestic AND international concerns competently. I would like to see someone who is young but seasoned enough to know when to bomb the hell out of someone and when to back off and play the diplomat. One can hope. Psst. Sua. Next time you send your letterhead off to be printed, you might want to change the spelling of “inteligensia.” 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![rocking\_chair](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rocking_chair/32/2918_2.png) [@rocking\_chair](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rocking_chair)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2002, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/31 "2002-09-21T21:01:01Z")
gore in '04 what’s the problem? the problem is it rhymes. seuss speeches. ---
**Author:** ![Kirkland1244](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dc4da7/32.png) [@Kirkland1244](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kirkland1244)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2002, 9:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/32 "2002-09-21T21:40:10Z")
I kinda like that it rhymes. We used that all the time on Dole’s campaign in 1996: “Clinton-Gore out in four!” And for Bush 2000: “No Gore years!” (sounds like the oft-repeated “Four More Years”) “No More Gore!” It’s fun when your opponent has an easily mockable-by-rhyme name. 🙂 Kirk ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2002, 4:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/33 "2002-09-22T04:41:20Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Kirkland1244 \* > Before the first vote in the 2000 Democratic primaries had been cast, Gore had secured teh support of all the Super Delegates, who comprised 1/3 of the total voting delegates to the convention. Bradley would have had to win about 75% of the delegates in the primaries to have won the nomination outright, or trounced Gore so badly that the Super Delegates would switch sides. Neither was the least bit likely. Sounds like you’re arguing that Gore had it locked up in advance, and nobody of _any_ stature could have taken him on in the primaries. That’s different from saying he lacked serious opposition. > [@](#): > > Digging up a cite would be difficult, but there were reports in 2001 that mail-in ballots in many large states that were blow outs for Gore were never counted because the number of mail in ballots was less than the margin of victory. IOW, no cite. Thanks for playing. > [@](#): > > Gore won by less than 0.5% of the popular vote, which is well within the margin of error for an election. “The margin of error”? This wasn’t a _poll_; this was _the vote itself_. But OK, let’s treat the voters as a sample of the electorate, and use some crude statistics on this ‘margin of error’ idea. In binomial probabilities, the sample standard deviation is sqrt(npq) where n, p, and q are your sample size and the probabilities of either result. Let’s round them off to 100,000,000, .5, and .5 respectively. We get sqrt(25,000,000) = 5000. The ‘margin of error’ is roughly 2 standard deviations, or 10,000. That’s dwarfed by Gore’s 537,000-vote margin. Half a percent is statistically quite huge when your sample’s 100 million people. ---
**Author:** ![Kirkland1244](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dc4da7/32.png) [@Kirkland1244](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kirkland1244)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2002, 5:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/34 "2002-09-22T05:41:58Z")
There is a margin of error in even electoral votes. Not in the common statistical terms, but in the fact that some votes are miscounted, many votes are cast in such a manner that they aren’t counted at all (think of the infamous “hanging chads”). Wherever you have humans involved there are errors. You cannot, with such a tight margin, state unequivicolly (damn, I mis-spelled that, but its not worth getting off the couch to grab the dictionary) that Gore won. Officially, Gore won the popular vote. I don’t doubt that he did. I also don’t doubt that he won Florida, per the intentions of voters but due to the “margin of error” we’re speaking of here, Bush was awarded the Electoral Votes. If there were a massive margin in favor of Gore, then you’d be able to say without question that he won the popular vote. But given that the margin is so close, you can’t. We know without question that votes in Florida didn’t get counted. We don’t know how many didn’t get counted across the country. But its not out of the question to believe that it may be more than Gore’s paltry “win.” And while Gore had it pretty well locked up, it wasn’t impossible to beat him. If a candidate strong enough to sweep 75% of the delegates had surfaced, that would have been a serious contender. As it was, Bradley was just a token contender. He never had a shot. Someone else might have. Kirk ---
**Author:** ![vanilla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/f19dbf/32.png) [@vanilla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vanilla)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2002, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/35 "2002-09-22T19:27:37Z")
“read my lips-no more Bush!” 😉 :o ---
**Author:** ![Patty\_O\_Furniture](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/96bed5/32.png) [@Patty\_O\_Furniture](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Patty_O_Furniture)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2002, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/36 "2002-09-22T20:18:53Z")
Don’t say that too loud. Hubby may start crying. ---
**Author:** ![december](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/838e76/32.png) [@december](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/december)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2002, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/37 "2002-09-23T00:36:00Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by vanilla \* > \*\*“read my lips-no more Bush!” > 😉 :o \*\* This is a whole new area. Let’s see… Hey, George Bush, Kiss my tush! If it will not trouble you, Please leave office, W. ---
**Author:** ![vanilla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/f19dbf/32.png) [@vanilla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vanilla)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2002, 1:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/38 "2002-09-23T13:21:56Z")
that was really good December! Maybe you should take this up as a hobby.🆒 ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2002, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/39 "2002-09-23T17:38:46Z")
Too many people are going to remember Sore-Loserman. He should have lost like a grown-up, and left it to his handlers to complain. Bush’s approval numbers are too high, and the Dems are afraid to attack while there is a war on. Neither Gore nor Hilary will ever be President. Fortunately. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Tejota](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/958977/32.png) [@Tejota](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tejota)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2002, 9:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791/40 "2002-09-23T21:35:11Z")
No, the _president’s_ approval numbers are high. But much of that is ‘rally round the flag’ effect. Bush’s _re-election_ numbers (i.e. approval of him in particular, rather than the idea of the presidency). are low. He could win a plurality with those numbers if he ran against two strong candidates. But he can’t beat any single challengers unless his number come up. Hell, Bush won’t even win the nomination unless no-one runs against him for it. On the other hand, if the press sandbag Gore in '04 like they did in '00. It’s gonna be another close race. It might be better for the Dem’s to pick a candidate that the press aren’t determined to smear at every opportunity. I see your Sore-Looserman and raise you a Bush-Cheated. Sore-Looserman lost a lot of it’s sting when it turned out that Gore didn’t act like a sore looser after SCOTUS ruled. But we now know for a fact that Bush cheated, while a the time, it was just a suspicion. Expect to see a LOT of Bush-Cheated and similar reminders of the 2000 debacle in '04. (assuming, of course, that he gets the nomination. 😉 ) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gore-in-04-whats-the-problem/128791.md?page=3)