The idea that George W. Bush "stole" the 2000 election, while having died down over the years due to the
total ineptitude of the Obama administration, is still pushed by
some far-Left zealots who will go down to their dying breath
hating and blaming Bush for everything wrong with the world. But as the far-Leftist News rag, the NYTimes,
even admitted to (albeit reluctantly), Bush did get the most votes in Florida that year. Then too, the idea that somehow the Supreme Court's decision to stop Al Gore from finding enough votes to win in 2000 was biased and filled with errors, is
again being debunked:
Last week I wrote that "count all
the votes" emerged comparatively late in the game of the Bush v. Gore
saga. A number of people have pushed back, here and elsewhere, have
pushed back. Gore, they say, offered to do a hand recount of all 67
Florida counties on November 15th; if Bush would support it, and
withdraw his lawsuits, Gore said he would withdraw his lawsuits too.
Bush turned him down. This is supposed to prove that Democrats always
had a committment to counting all the votes.
Well,
not so fast. For starters, when Bush turned him down, Gore didn't go
and start asking for recounts in all 67 Florida counties. His
committment to "counting all the votes" was conditional on Bush
withdrawing all of his lawsuits. It was a second-best alternative to
just counting some of the votes, one which he offered when it looked
like he might be losing. When it was turned down, he went on with his
partial recount strategy.
And
because of this, the voices raised in favor of counting all the votes
were somewhat muted. A Nexis search for the phrase "Count all the
votes" in major newspapers turns up just 26 uses in the week after the
Florida election--before Gore had made his offer. In the first 17 days
of the recount, it occurs just 57 times.
Then, on November 24th, the
Supreme Court accepted cert for the Florida recount, with a hearing to
be held on December 1st.
Observers
knew that this meant the Florida Supreme Court ruling allowing partial
recounts was likely going to be overturned (if they weren't likely to
overturn, they would have just dodged the case on a technicality).
Suddenly, folks get very interested in counting all the votes: there
are almost 100 mentions between November 24th and November 30th, with
most of those seeming to come in the few days before the hearing. Then
things quite down for the three days until the court decides: just 25
mentions.
Then
on December 4th, the Supreme Court vacates the Florida Supreme Court's
order allowing the partial recounts to be included in the total, and
interest in counting all the votes explodes: 121 mentions in the 8 days
that follow. And almost all of that was clustered in the three days
immediately surrounding the court's stay of the recounts, and its
decision in Bush v. Gore.
Overall,
there are 73 mentions of the phrase "count all the votes" in major
newspapers between November 7th, 2000 and November 27th, 2000 . . . more
than halfway through the recount process. Over the next 20 days, it
occurs more than 250 times.
In
other words, people didn't get interested in counting all the votes
when Al Gore offered a statewide manual recount as an alternative to
lawsuits. They got interested in counting all the votes when the partial
recounts suffered legal setbacks. People are retroactively remembering
something that emerged several weeks into the recounts as having been
more central to the Democratic case than it actually was. "Count all
the Votes" became the central argument only after the Supreme Court had
squelched the preferred "count some of the votes".
People
remember having been outraged when the Supreme Court declined to "count
all the votes". But partisan fervor was already running very, very high
by late November.
Odds are that anyone who is old enough to remember
that election was very probably just as angry and passionate before
"count all the votes" emerged as the unifying rallying cry for
Democrats. Indeed, most of those very people were probably in favor of
counting some of the votes before they were against it.
They
remember this particular issue as having been more salient than it was
for two reasons: first, because all of us tend to remember the end of an
experience better than the middle, and second, because "count all the
votes" is a much easier grudge to nurse than "I wanted my guy to win,
and he didn't".
I
don't mean to suggest that Democrats are somehow specially hypocritical
here; I am personally skeptical, for example, that Katherine Harris'
maneuvers to cut off vote counts were motivated by her fervent
committment to administrative efficiency and strict deadline discipline.
Both sides had reasonable points, and reasonable grievances. But Al
Gore was running for president, not Santa. The procedure he chose--and
stuck with, until a court told him to knock it off--was not fair. And
by the time the case hit the Supreme Court, his supporters (and the
Florida Supreme Court) had already invested a huge amount of credibility
in coming up with creative reasons that it should happen anyway.
Ironically, I suspect that if Gore had simply unilaterally requested a
statewide manual recount, or the Florida Supreme Court had forced one
upon him, the United States Supreme Court would have probably stayed out
of it. But they didn't, and as they say, the rest is history.
RELATED: Gore Is Romney-Rich With $200 Million After Bush Defeat
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