kanicbird - are you currently a supporter of GW Bush?
I ask because I’d like to gauge something. Of the people who respond in this thread, where do you stand on the current spectrum? If you’re one of the 31% who currently approves of the job Bush is doing, let’s be honest, no Democrat’s ever gonna get your vote, because Zell Miller will never get nominated.
On the other side, someone like me has voted Dem in every presidential election since I’ve been 18 (although I came close in '88 to voting for any write-in who was 35 and born here), so saying I like Gore isn’t terribly interesting.
So indulge me. As you post your opinion whether Al Gore has what it takes, post where you stand, and if you care to, how you’ve voted in past presidential elections, and whether you’d realistically ever vote one party or the other.
The stain of cheating isn’t affixed to one man. It’s on both parties. It wasn’t just Gore who tried to finagle some ballot counting, it was a lot of people ideologically in step with him. It wasn’t Bush who push-polled McCain out of his candidacy, it was people loyal to him and his beliefs.
That’s why people are talking about the possibility of a third party candidate with less derision than usual.
The idea of “Sore Loser” (note that there is one “o” in “lose”) is stuck on Gore. I think if he does run, and I’ll believe that when I see it, that will be one of the sludgesticks frequently used by the conservative media to disparage him. In spite of that, it feels like its been a lot longer than 6 years since the 2000 election. If people are catching the “Clinton Nostalgia” it may be difficult to rouse those “poor loser” feelings to a fervor sufficient to counter said nostalgia.
Since the facts about New Mexico in 2000 aren’t getting explained here, allow me. Al Gore narrowly won New Mexico’s five electoral votes that year, by a mere several hundred. Because it was so close, the Bush team insisted on a recount there—which Gore never even slightly complained about. But anyone even mentioning a recount in Florida was tarred as some kind of enemy of democracy by the Bush campaign. ElvisL1ves’ point is a very salient one.
It’s November 2000. American democracy is in crisis. And you… are… there!!!
Honsetly, yes and no. True - I was a big supporter of W, but seriously disagree with him on many aspects which I see compromises national security and our economy.
Untill about 2 years ago I voted almost strict party lines, the last election you would not be able to tell party affiliation from my voting pattern.
This however is not the issue here. It was the public light that was put on Al Gore’s cheating. He (or the media, alternative and conventional) has become the posterchild for sore losers (thanks for the spell check Hung Mung), even inspiring a book about his win at all cost attitude.
The real issue is that people perceive him to be a cheater, even if everyone else is doing it, he was the one who was ‘caught’.
Now if his ‘cheating’ actually worked and he was elected pres, the story would have been different, as he would be making sure all votes were counted - but that’s not what happened and the public perception is that he help up a legitimate election process and tryed to discount many votes that went go against him all while claiming to count every vote.
Can someone willing to cheat to get elected by rigging the vote be called a character with no honor with our making compairson Al Gore IS KNOWN TO HAVE THIS PATTERN.
Back to the subject at hand: I agree that Al Gore has made his way through a stirring journey of personal development, but I don’t think he’s running. I don’t want to risk hijacking this thread again, so I’ll just link to a post I made today on my blog.
To sum up the post I just pimped, Gore’s stock-in-trade sure goes up if people talk about him as a presidential contender, even if he doesn’t run, or even if he does run but doesn’t make it very far in the primaries. It sure worked for the likes of Dan Quayle, Gary Bauer and Joe Lieberman, who were never serious contenders in 1996, 2000 and 2004, respectively.
Wait. You acknowledge that it’s only a perception (and I would add, only a perception among a minority) that Gore cheated. Even your cite used vague, seemingly damning-but-not-technically words like “schemed” and “plotted.” Everything Gore did, AFAIK, was legal and precedented.
Anyway, back to the point, you acknowledge it’s perception, not reality, then slip into calling him an actual cheater by saying he rigged the vote. He did no such thing. He’s not KNOWN TO HAVE THIS PATTERN.
I know the OP urged us to avoid discussing the 2000 election – but there’s just no way. This is a thread about Al Gore running for president, after all. If he does, everything that happened in 2000 will be dredged up and rehashed over and over, and the ongoing argument between me and Elv1sLives on one side and kanicbird on the other will be duplicated in the media between famous pundits, over and over. So it goes.
That’s probably the worst thing about Al Gore’s political future, too. If Gore had legitimately lost the electoral vote, no muss no fuss, this issue wouldn’t come up to cloud his future. Unfortunately, that’s always going to be the case, and at this point there’s no possible way to talk about Al Gore 2008 without bringing up the Florida frenzy 2000.
This isn’t entirely without precedent, either. After the 1896 election, many voters felt that the McKinley campaign had “stolen” the election through voter intimidation, where many industrialists were known to openly threaten anyone who was considering voting for Bryan, and a number of them also talked openly about closing factories if Bryan won. The vote counts, both popular and electoral, favored McKinley, but that sentiment was still there and helped lift Bryan’s followers to mount a fresh challenge in 1900 (which he also lost to McKinley.)
The workers had a point where the intimidation charges went, but then, Southern Democrats intimidated enough black voters regularly, so it’s sort of reasonable that they evened out, fraud-wise.
Anyway, if Gore were to run again, we’d have to sift through rehashes of the recount until people either start talking about Gore’s hypothetical 2008 platform, or stop talking about Gore altogether. If Gore runs, he’d have to go through that; charges of election theft, no matter how accurate, can only get him so far at this point.
No I don’t acknowledge this nor deny it, because it is the perception of the public that matters, not the truth, not the spin that matters, but what the voting public thinks really happened that matters.
Right now there is a percentage of the public that thinks Al Gore is a sore looser and a crybaby. Some think he tryed to steal the election through underhanded and dishonest means. The fact is that people beleive it. If people beleive this it could influence their vote.
Even if you can prove that Al Gore did no wrong, and really tried to count every vote, it dosn’t matter - you are just one small voice and there will be others with contradicting ‘facts’.
I think only a very small minority thinks Gore cheated. Certainly I think he has cleaner hands than Bush in the majority’s eyes, and thus is somewhat injured.
Maybe, but a larger percentage would think he was a sore loser - IMHO.
Besides Bush I-S…N-O-T…R-U-N-N-I-N-G , this statement is self defeting. The people who believe that W has dirty hands will not be impressed by the statement that my hands cleaner then his.
Kanicbird, just give up. People like Elvis will NEVER let go of their conspiracy theories and it’s a waste of breath to argue with them. they’re not interested in facts, all they want to do is endlessly go round and round proclaiming that they “won”, the election was “stolen” blah, blah, blah. It’s liberal porn, an imaginary, fantasy version of real life, and has about as much grounding in reality as sexual porn does.
As to the subject of Gore running, I’d like to see that. I voted for the man in '00, I might do so again. I certainly think he’s the strongest Democratic candidate I’ve heard proposed yet, and represents a movement back towards the middle that many of the hard line Democrats have been vocally loath to make. Right there might be his biggest problem, just getting the nomination in the primaries where the spectrum of Democratic voters swings harder left. Yes, baggage from 2000 is something he’ll have to deal with, but I don’t think that that’s an insurmountable obsticle. Straight in the teeth is the way he’ll have to play that one, any waffling on the issue would be fatal. At this point in time I like McCain an awful lot, but Gore is a candidate whom I would consider on par with McCain. A lot would depend on each candidate’s specific positions as the campaign gets underway. So, I most definitely could see myself voting for Gore on '08. Weather I wind up doing so is dependent how he presents himself and what his stand on various issues is.
Problem is, W won’t be running in 2008, so his (team’s) conduct in 2000 will not be at issue, except as it reflects on the Republican Party as a whole.
Oh, I understand that. I shoulda been more clear. I think most people see Bush as having been as dirty in 2000 as Gore (whatever truth there is in either assertion, what matters is perception, especially as kc laid that out as an axiom), but he won in 2004. I honestly can’t see how the “stain of cheater” could realistically hurt Gore if it didn’t hurt Bush in 2004.
