Okay, amidst the shouted accusations of Gore’s selfish, underhanded, sneaky [insert your favorite adjective here] attempts to steal the presidency back from the rightful hands of Bush, are there any honest Bush supporters out there who admit that they’d be rooting for Bush if the tables were turned and he was challenging the Florida ballots? Or do you honestly believe that Bush, noble soul as he is, would graciously concede to Gore’s margin of a few hundred votes?
I’ll admit it. I want more than anything to see Gore win — especially now that my hope has been rekindled after all but coming to terms with the idea of Dubya infesting the oval office for the next four years. If Gore can pull it off, more power to him. If Bush were grasping at similar straws, I’d be ridiculing him just as the Bush supporters ridicule Gore (and I’d be keeping my fingers crossed that he doesn’t succeed).
Come on, let’s at least be honest about our partisanship!
You know, I was just going to start a thread on this topic. I opened up this morning’s Chicago Tribune and there are (as you might expect) a number of articles about the whole Florida situation. On the back page is a photo of a guy holding a hand-made sign saying, “Go Home Crybabies.”
I just have this feeling that if the tables were turned, he’d be one of the “Crybabies” in question.
Interestingly there’d been fear that Bush would win the popular and lose the electoral vote. I understand that they had planned to challenge the vote as thwarting the will of the people.
I think that would have been wrong.
I don’t think we can fault Gore for doing what he’s doing. In something this close, it needs to be looked at to ensure the process was carried out properly.
I draw the line at any revoting though. Allow one county to revote knowing what’s at stake, and that empowers that vote, and disenfranchises everyone else.
I’d love to know where you heard that. I listen to Rush Limbaugh on a regular basis (oops, have I suddenly become an SDMB pariah?), and he has never even suggested that it should be challenged if that happened (prior to the election, that is). And if he wasn’t not suggesting it, I doubt any serious conservative was.
That, too, is a load of horse-crap. The process was carried out just as properly now as it’s ever been, and he knows it. And now, he’s got Jesse Jackson and Kweisei Mfume (sp?) making his case in Florida…is he trying to turn this into some sort of racial issue? (Boy, he’s come a long way since Willie Horton, hasn’t he?)
Chaim challenged this, but I saw it as well. I believe it was in this week’s New Republic (dated Nov. 13, but published before the vote, of course). I say “I believe” because a friend of mine showed it to me, and I’m pretty sure that was the magazine. It quotes somebody in the Bush campaign, though I’m not sure they’re named. Indeed, the quote does indicate that they would try to do just as Scylla says. The magazine makes a big deal of pointing out that perhaps some of the “strict constructionists” Bush talked about appointed to the courts might need to explain the electoral college to these folks.
I would certainly say so!
Agreed.
I’m wavering on this one. If the ballot was illegal and the law in Florida allows for a revote, then I think that’s what needs to be done. If the law is not so clear, then I don’t think a revote should be done.
Unfortunately, no matter what happens, you’re going to have almost half of the country pissed off. Not a promising start for a new president.
This 19,000 vote thing smacks of being a manufactured event. There is nothing special about these votes other than the fact that they occured in a democratically prone district, and that Gore’s campaign has focussed on them. Their like occurs throughout the country.
Gore’s emphasis on this is as smarmy as loading the buses in Philly, and trying to play the racial card in Florida.
I’d advocate the same course of action I’m advocating now- have recounts in the extremely close cases of Florida, Oregon, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Wait for the final returns (including overseas absentee ballots) before conceding or declaring victory (well, given that absentee ballots generally favor Republicans, one can declare victory with a win before all the absentee ballots are in).
But don’t push for lawsuits, and don’t try to claim foul (no matter how many people accidentally voted one way or the other or how many homeless people were given free cigarettes by the Gore campaign in exchange for voting in Wisconsin)- go with the final vote tallies and accept it.
I don’t begrudge Al Gore waiting until the recount was done. I wouldn’t even begrudge him waiting until the absentee ballots were in on the near impossibility that they carry the difference. I do begrudge he and his campaign claiming that “the will of the people has been subverted” and sending lawyers down to sue Florida into submission.
The problem with re-counts is that it biases the election if you allow candidates to force recounts ONLY in the areas they lost.
Imagine that pretty much every state makes some errors that amount to 1% of the vote. If Gore is allowed to demand recounts ONLY where he has nothing to lose, it gives him a chance to win areas he would have lost, while never risking areas that he already holds. That’s bias.
Since you’ve already seen that it’s possible for as many as 19,000 ballots to be spoiled, then in the interests of election accuracy there should at the very least be a re-count in EVERY state that was decided by a margin of less than 20,000 votes, or a similar percentage of the population, regardless of whether Bush or Gore won. This should ideally be codified before the election, so that it cannot be selectively invoked.
I’d be upset if the situation were reversed – Bush supporters claiming that their votes were incorrectly counted, an anomalously high turnought for, say, Nader in a heavily Republican county. I really do think that Bush would be fighting for it, too, and not stepping aside graciously.
We’re electing the leader of the country, who will go nose-to-nose with the Chinese or the Iraqis or whoever. Whatever else we may want that leader to be, I don’t think we want someone who is ready to step aside graciously. Unwillingly, at best.
Of COURSE they’re going to fight it out. This is the big Alpha Male contest. When there was a similarly close election and charges of voting fraud in the Hayes-Tilden election, each side ended up with something in the compromise, Nobody “tepped aside” for the good of the country. Why should we expect any different here?
I voted for Gore, and I am agonizing through the recount. However, we had a unique situation here in Missouri – which the rest of you may know as “the dead guy running for Senate.”
Well, the dead guy won, and his Republican opponent said that he would not challenge the results or support anyone else’s challenges. The Republican candidate for governor lost by about 1% of the vote, and announced that he would not ask for a recount, despite the voting “irregularities” in St. Louis City.
I didn’t agree with their politics, but both of them, IMHO did a fine job of knowing when to hold 'em and knowing when to fold 'em, and I hope that when the whole Florida mess is over, Gore will show the same class.
What annoys me the most about this whole thing is the way Bush & Co. are acting like they wouldn’t have done the exact same things had the vote gone the other way. For example, I just saw Baker on TV saying how Gore should admit defeat and stop calling for recounts. Unfortunately, I had previously seen CBS news breaking in to their programming and noting that Gore is allowed, under Florida law, to ask for the hand recounts he’s asked for. So, basically, Baker is saying that we should ignore the law and just walk away. But we all know damn well that if the situation were reversed, the Bush campaign would be asking for recounts.
So, overall, that’s the part that bothers me the most – the same thing that bothered me the most about the campaign: the hypocrisy.
As has been pointed out on another thread, Sam, you are misrepresenting the situation. Gore has asked for recounts in counties where he won a majority of the vote. By your reasoning, he would risk widening the gap. Of course, this ignores the actual justification for the hand count request, which is the anomolies in the machine counts recorded for the counties in question.
To date, the Gore campaign has filed no lawsuits and has not announced plans to file any lawsuits. they have stated that they would support some lawsuits initiated by private citizens.
I believe that was a mistake on their part, and I hope they reconsider their position.
I interpret Gore’s campaign manager’s statement to wait until the legal process is complete to be a pretty fair indicator that there’s a passel 'o litigation around the corner.
DAvid B-I read that very same blurb from The New Republic today in the library. You are indeed correct.
BTW, Chaim, I don’t believe GORE sent Jesse Jackson down there. WHEN has Jesse Jackson ever needed someone else to tell him to do that? He obviously just wants a peace of the action…the old media a whore.
For what it’s worth, I myself will laugh into a hemorhage if the military ballots come back for GORE…why is Dubya just assuming they’re for him? Hasn’t he learned that in this race, NOTHING should be “assumed?”
Chaim, I first heard it in the New York Daily News from which I will extract the following quotes:
[ul]*They’re not only thinking the unthinkable, they’re planning for it.
Quietly, some of George W. Bush’s advisers are preparing for the ultimate “what if” scenario: What happens if Bush wins the popular vote for President, but loses the White House because Al Gore’s won the majority of electoral votes?
…
The one thing we don’t do is roll over," says a Bush aide. “We fight.”
How? The core of the emerging Bush strategy assumes a popular uprising, stoked by the Bushies themselves, of course.
In league with the campaign — which is preparing talking points about the Electoral College’s essential unfairness — a massive talk-radio operation would be encouraged. “We’d have ads, too,” says a Bush aide, “and I think you can count on the media to fuel the thing big-time. Even papers that supported Gore might turn against him because the will of the people will have been thwarted.”
Local business leaders will be urged to lobby their customers, the clergy will be asked to speak up for the popular will and Team Bush will enlist as many Democrats as possible to scream as loud as they can. “You think ‘Democrats for Democracy’ would be a catchy term for them?” asks a Bush adviser.*
[/ul]
Why? When the statement was made there was at least one lawsuit was about to be heard in court, there was a recount (mandated by law) underway, and the Gore campaign was preparing to request a hand recount of several counties (as allowed by law).
Why would you assume that the statement referred to any legal processes not already announced or begun?
I am not saying that your interpretation was “wrong” – only time will decide that. I am simply noting that it is by no means an obvious interpretation based solely on the situation at hand.
So far, the only source I’ve ever seen for the allegations in the New York Daily News is that unnamed and obviously stupid Bush aide. It sounds less like an actual plan that the Bush campaign had made and more like macho posturing by an idiot completely lacking in the most basic knowledge of the Constitution. Assuming that Bush has someone on his staff with more than half a brain, that plan would never get approved, as it’s completely impossible to carry off, and would hurt the Republican Party as a whole.
