Gore Gets Gonged

© 2000

(CBS) It is both ironic and educative that Vice President Al Gore’s address to the nation Monday night was laced with half-truths.

It is tempting not to take words very seriously right now, since there is so much indigestible verbiage spewing from the candidates, their surrogates and their lawyers (not to mention pundits). But it is instructive to take rhetoric seriously. So let’s decipher Gore’s plea for patience Monday night (which he repeated nearly verbatim on Tuesday, in the sunlight).

"All we have asked since Election Day [is] a complete count of all the votes cast in Florida," Gore said. "Not recount after recount as some have charged, but a single, full and accurate count."

That is just silly. He must really think we’re chumps.

There was, immediately after Election Day, a recount of the votes mandated by Florida law and endorsed by Gore. It was a recount of all the votes, in all the counties. Then, at the request of the Gore campaign and local canvassing boards controlled by Democrats, there were manual recounts in selected Florida counts. Gore wants some of those recounts amended.

So how can he assert that he has not advocated multiple recounts but just one "full and accurate count"? Simple: by defining "full and accurate" as "Gore wins."

This part of a bigger charade where Gore and Lieberman pretend that the goal of targeted recounts in counties where Democrats control the canvassing boards is not to acquire more votes than Bush’s margin of victory.

If Gore’s goal were really a "single, full, and accurate count" he would have demanded manual recounts in all 67 Florida counties. And his forces would not have tried to suppress the heavily Republican overseas absentee vote. And they would not have fought so desperately to make select Democratic counties use select methods for counting ambiguous ballots with "indented chads."

Gore would be better served by giving up the pretense that he wants recounts as part of a national civics lesson. It’s almost as offensive as when Bush pretends he wants to block recounts for reasons of high principle.

"Ignoring votes means ignoring democracy itself," Gore intoned solemnly.

Except when the ignored votes happen to be, say, overseas absentee ballots.

Gore is trying to have us believe that since there are votes that machines could not count (the so-called "undervotes"), there still hasn’t been a "full and accurate count." And in arguing that he seeks a "full" count not a "recount," Gore is using the same flim-flam semantics he made famous with his "no controlling legal authority" locution.

Gore, of course, does not want all of the "undervotes" in Florida to be counted, just those in three Democratic counties.

Gore and his forces also do not want to acknowledge "undervotes" are a fact of life in modern elections that use vote-counting machines. In Cook County, Illinois alone, the machines were unable to count 120,503 ballots. By ignoring those votes, according to Gore’s logic, we are "ignoring democracy itself."

And what about the 30,602 uncountable presidential ballots in Washington State? The 101,740 in Georgia? The 175,938 in California? The 92,378 in Ohio? Across America, voters who failed to fully impregnate their chads are disenfranchised, unheard voices. Horror of horrors!

"In one county [Miami-Dade], election officials brought the count to a premature end in the face of organized intimidation," claimed Gore.

Never mind that the Democratic canvassing board in Miami-Dade says they stopped they recount because they couldn’t meet the deadline set by the Florida Supreme Court, not because protestors intimidated them on November 22.

Never mind that the canvassing board was unconvinced a recount was needed in the first place. On November 14, Miami-Dade officials completed a sample recount of three precincts and decided a countywide recount was unnecessary. Under pressure from Democrats, the board again changed its position three days later.

"A vote is not just a piece of paper, a vote is a human voice, a statement of human principle, and we must not let those voices be silenced," the vice president declared.

With soaring rhetoric and fuzzy logic, Gore has equated an "undervote" – a botched ballot uncountable by machines and uncounted by hand – with a disenfranchised voter, with a citizen denied rights. Voters do get disenfranchised. Ballot boxes do get dumped into Louisiana bayous and citizens of cemeteries vote in Chicago sometimes twice. But the fact that some ballots can’t be counted by machine or by hand because voters made mistakes is not an unjust "silencing of voices."

Compounding this fallacy, Gore goes on to use a kind of scorched-earth demagoguery:

"And if we ignore the votes of thousands in Florida in this election, how can you or any other American have confidence your vote will not be ignored in a future election?"

Aren’t we being a tad melodramatic?

And doesn’t it now seem that the vice president is willing to risk doing some permanent damage to the legitimacy of the elections process that he claims he is trying to rebuild by "fighting" for a "full and accurate count" in Florida? (I know, consistency is for the small-minded.)

A common observation about this post-election campaign is that the "winner is the loser," meaning the candidate who doesn’t become president will go on to a better political career and a more generous place in history. Given how phony both Bush and Gore have been since the election, it’s an understandable sentiment.

But at this point, it sure seems like if Gore ultimately loses, he’ll really be the loser.

©2000, CBS Worldwide Inc., All Rights Reserved.

-- Anonymous, November 29, 2000

Answers

Ok Bob, will you be cool with it when Democrats storm the polling areas to prevent counting of votes in the next close election? When Jesse Jackson is in the street, yelling "Shut it down"?

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Amid the escalating Republican rhetoric, a mob of about 150 pro-Bush demonstrators stormed the offices of the election canvassers in Dade County on Nov. 22. The election board was beginning its examination of 10,750 disputed ballots, which had not previously been counted.

With the mob pounding on the walls and roughing up Democrats in the vicinity, the canvassing board abruptly reversed its decision. The uncounted ballots were discarded, amid cheers from the Bush partisans.

The mob action in Dade County effectively assured Bush's election to the presidency. Despite the use of intimidation to influence a decision by election officials, Bush and his top aides remained publicly silent about these disruptive tactics.

The Washington Post reported today that "even as the Bush campaign and the Republicans portray themselves as above the fray," national Republicans actually had joined in and helped finance the raucous protests.

These GOP operatives spotted among the demonstrators included Tom Pyle, an aide to House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and Doug Heye, a spokesman for Rep. Richard W. Pombo, R-Calif., the Post reported.

"Many of the out-of-state GOP demonstrators told local reporters that the Republican National Committee paid for their travel, room and board, putting a number of them up at a Sheraton in Fort Lauderdale," the article said.

The Wall Street Journal added more details, including the fact that Bush offered personal words of encouragement to the rioters in a conference call to a Bush campaign-sponsored celebration on the night of Thanksgiving Day, one day after the canvassing board assault.

"The night's highlight was a conference call from Mr. Bush and running mate Dick Cheney, which included joking reference by both running mates to the incident in Miami, two [Republican] staffers in attendance say," according to the Journal. [Nov. 27, 2000]

The Journal also reported that the assault on the canvassing board was led by national Republican operatives "on all expense-paid trips, courtesy of the Bush campaign." After their success in Dade, the rioters moved on to Broward, where the protests remained unruly but failed to stop that count.

The Journal noted that "behind the rowdy rallies in South Florida this past weekend was a well-organized effort by Republican operatives to entice supporters to South Florida," with DeLay's Capitol Hill office taking charge of the recruitment.

About 200 Republican congressional staffers signed on, the Journal reported. They were put up at hotels, given $30 a day for food and "an invitation to an exclusive Thanksgiving Day party in Fort Lauderdale," the article said.

The Journal said there was no evidence of a similar Democratic strategy to fly in national party operatives. "This has allowed the Republicans to quickly gain the upper hand, protest-wise," the Journal said.

The Bush campaign also worked to conceal its hand. "Staffers who joined the effort say there has been an air of mystery to the operation. 'To tell you the truth, nobody knows who is calling the shots,' says one aide. Many nights, often very late, a memo is slipped underneath the hotel-room doors outlining coming events," the Journal reported.

After their victory in shutting down the Dade County recount, the national GOP operatives from the Bush campaign and Capitol Hill celebrated at a party at the Hyatt on Pier 66 in Fort Lauderdale. The Journal reported that "entertainer Wayne Newton crooned the song 'Danke Schoen'," the German words for thank you very much.

'President-Elect'

-- Anonymous, November 29, 2000

Ok Bob, will you be cool with it when Democrats storm the polling areas to prevent counting of votes in the next close election? When Jesse Jackson is in the street, yelling "Shut it down"?

Hell no...sucks when you're on the losing side, doesn't it?

-- Anonymous, November 29, 2000

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20001128.shtml

The planned recount

WASHINGTON -- Old Republican hands Bob Dole and John Engler thought they had seen it all in politics, but that was before they watched votes being "counted" in south Florida. They were stunned ("radicalized, " said one GOP operative) as Bush campaign observers experiencing a Democratic recount. Audacious though the Gore tactics were, however, the results have fallen short of expectations. Since the morning after the election, Al Gore's managers have planned to elect a president by milking votes out of three heavily Democratic counties in Florida. Although former Sen. Dole and Michigan Gov. Engler were stunned by the transformation of voided ballots into votes for Gore, the count by late Saturday was not up to what Democrats had hoped.

The Republicans, after a very slow start following the election, have toughened up. George W. Bush's campaign forced a fierce struggle, haggling over ballots by the dozens rather than the hundreds. Instead of Gore clinching the presidency within three weeks of election day as envisioned, nothing is certain.

The dispatching of Dole, Engler and a squad of other Republican governors to south Florida illuminated the vote-counting procedures in Broward and Palm Beach counties. As a totem of the GOP and the party's 1996 presidential candidate, Dole can always attract national attention, and he did so when he said he saw "votes being cast, not counted."

Engler told me the same thing -- with elaboration. In Broward, he said, "not one disputed ballot did I see that could be counted in Michigan. Not one. You really have to see it to believe it." The surreal quality for Engler stemmed from Suzanne Gunzburger, the fervent Democrat on the three-member Broward canvassing board; she gave Gore each and every questionable ballot. The result was 583 votes picked in the county, eating up more than half of Bush's statewide lead.

Their behavior was no aberration but in fact was the extension of the carefully plotted Democratic recount strategy. It is no accident that Democrats always seem to win contested elections, such as Sen. Mary Landrieu's notorious Louisiana victory of 1996. They have the blueprint and the experts, and they were mobilized for Gore even before anybody knew the 2000 election would be a dead heat.

"The Gore campaign didn't just send people to Florida fast," Ryan Lizza writes in an excellent article in the Nov. 27 New Republic. "It sent the party's top recount experts." That included recount ace Chris Sautter, who was one of many experts on call election night. As long ago as 1984, Sautter ran the recount campaign that unseated an Indiana Republican Congressional candidate already certified by the secretary of state -- an outrageous power play that permanently poisoned the atmosphere of the House of Representatives.

Lizza reports that Sautter spent election night ready in Washington. He received the call at 4 a.m. Wednesday and was told to take the 7:30 a.m. flight to Tallahassee. This crafty operative has been hard at work in Florida ever since, training party workers and seeking voter complaints.

The Bush campaign was totally unprepared for this conflict, spreading anger and defeatism in GOP ranks. "It's like the Polish cavalry against the Nazi tanks," said one senior Republican last week. Belatedly, the Republicans mobilized. Republican pressure contributed to tougher voting standards in Palm Beach County. The decision by Miami-Dade County to halt its count may or may not have been influenced by a noisy though non-violent demonstration, but that activity did not hurt.

Nor did Chris Sautter's handbook take into consideration the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court might spoil the Democratic game, threatening to overrule the politicized and liberal Florida Supreme Court. Super-lawyer David Boies, representing the Gore campaign, did not imagine it either.

This is no mere Senate election in Louisiana or House race in Indiana, and the recounting that "radicalized" Dole and Engler will not suffice. Vice President Gore has signaled he will do whatever it takes to achieve office, contesting administrative and court decisions. George Mitchell, one of the best and certainly the most partisan Senate leader that I have seen in 43 years of Congress-watching, was sent to Florida last week to add his considerable bulk. Clearly, creative vote-counting won't be enough.

-- Anonymous, November 29, 2000

Vice President Gore has signaled he will do whatever it takes to achieve office...

Enough said...

-- Anonymous, November 30, 2000