Most politicians are all too happy to use errors & bad optics to their cynical advantage, unnecessarily degrading public faith in elections.
Most politicians are all too happy to use errors & bad optics to their cynical advantage, unnecessarily degrading public faith in elections.
You mean like Gore in 2000?
No, I mean like Dino Rossi in 2004, Norm Coleman in 2008, etc. The 2000 election is sort like pre-history in this regard — it was the archetype that set the tone for the many battles over #FRAUD!!!!! and #INTIMIDATION!!!!! to come — and the rhetoric was actually quite tame compared to what we routinely see nowadays in far less close, far less important elections.
The stupid Democratic rhetoric from 2004 in Ohio (which wasn’t really that close at all) is actually a better example than anything Gore did. Gore really just demanded recounts everywhere, which, considering that was the closest state presidential election, by far, in American history, isn’t too surprising or unreasonable. I don’t recall him ever accusing the GOP of stealing the election. Of course many liberals believe they did, but I don’t think Gore or any of his top aides ever said anything along those lines. Feel free to cite examples if I’m wrong, but I definitely don’t recall that.
Actually, as I recall, Gore initially sought recounts in only a few areas, 5 if I remember correctly, all of which were very favourable to him rather than his opponent … Gore didn’t want a full-state recount initially …
It has been long enough ago that I don’t remember all Gore’s aides, but try
here and
here and
here …
(grin) I can understand you not remembering such inconvenient truths …
You’re right, Alasdair, Gore initially sought hand recounts only in certain areas, though he also made a public offer to Bush that the two of them should jointly agree to a hand recount of the entire state. But his requests in court were more limited initially. Why? Because he was trying to win, of course. As I’ve always said, there was no moral high ground in that battle. Everybody was just trying to win. Nevertheless, my summary above was sloppy. My point isn’t that Gore was some sort of saint. Just that he wasn’t going around crying FRAUD!!!! from the rooftops.
As for your links, the first two prove nothing except what I’ve already admitted, which is that “of course many liberals believe” the GOP stole the election. (I can’t tell you how many heated arguments I’ve gotten into over the years with liberals who think this. So I’m well aware of it.) The question was about statements by Gore and his aides, not random liberal websites, so the first one doesn’t qualify, and the second one merely summarizes what I’ve already said (and gets certain facts wrong in the process, but I’ll leave that for another day). As for the third, uh, can you give me a quote? I don’t really want to read a 9-page Rolling Stone epic looking for the one out-of-context quote where Gore says something that you’re claiming is a statement that the election was stolen.
Ah, here it is.
So Gore, in an article 6 years after the fact, specifically refrains from saying the election is stolen, while a top aide speculates that he probably thinks it was. OK, fair enough, and very interesting, but that’s a far cry from showing that in the heat of the 2000 battle, contemporaneously, Gore & co. were fanning the flames by claiming it was a stolen election, as has become de rigueur nowadays when an election is close and there’s the merest whiff of any sort of error or “irregularity.”
Ahhh – you do help to educate me on US history, my friend !
OK – how about this one with the explicit text “The move back to Washington, along with newly aggressive comments by top Gore officials, suggested that Mr. Gore was ready to settle in for the long haul in the fight over the Florida ballots.” ? “newly aggressive comments” ?
Or … “But Rep. Peter Deutsch, D-Fort Lauderdale, said Gore should fight.
“The Republicans are lying,” he said. “They are trying to manipulate the public. They are scared of the rule of law. They understand that if the rule of law is followed, Al Gore will win the electoral votes and become president. . . . They are trying to steal this election.” “ (from this article …
but that’s a far cry from showing that in the heat of the 2000 battle, contemporaneously, Gore & co. were fanning the flames by claiming it was a stolen election, as has become de rigueur nowadays when an election is close and there’s the merest whiff of any sort of error or “irregularity.”
It is my contention that these actions became “de rigueur” because of the example Gore set in 2000.
I never knew Norm Coleman, Dino Rossi, and other prominent Republicans were so admiring of Al Gore, that they feel compelled to follow his example! LOL.
I have no problem with anyone that says we just want to make sure all the votes are counted correctly and by the elections standards.
Though toe nails on the butterfly ballot and all the other stuff that ended up costing Gore dearly in Florida. Shit happens.
If there is substantive proof of fraud or malfeasance that’s one thing. But beyond that, shit happens in an election. Ultimately there has to be a winner.
We could go to Louisiana rules, where you have to get 50% of the votes, but then most elections would need a run off, which adds substantially to cost and confusion.
As to Florida in 2000, given that the newspaper consortium recount after the election found that a hand recount of the entire state by any standard would result in Gore winning Florida by between 60 and 171 votes I think blaming Gore for the insanity that other recent close elections have brought is, at best, disingenuous. After all, by the rules of the game going in, Gore won the Presidency in 2000. And won Florida by 171 votes (Count based on the standard set by each county canvassing board).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_election_recount
But in fairness, and the problem, is the count that Gore wanted, as well as the other active recount activities as ordered by the courts would have resulted in a Bush victory of between 225 and 493 votes.
In short, the election wasn’t so much stolen as thrown away. Or as Brendan likes to argue, statistically a tie.
Gore screwed up the PR and the legal on it. What he should have done is asked for a state wide hand recount of all the votes based on the canvasing board rules governing a hand recount. Public relations wise you just hammer on “we are trying to make sure every vote in the state of Florida is counted correctly by the rules of the election going in”. And legal wise it is the same argument.
I think the odds are you still loose that in the Supreme Court because reading the reasoning in Bush v. Gore asking for the state wide hand count would have not gotten Florida in under the safe harbor provision for which the Republicans had such a hard on. Though it would have substantially lessened Bush’s equal protection argument. Which by the courts Bush V. Gore reasoning means that every election since the passage of the 14th Amendment violated equal protection. And still does.
In other words, Brendan is right, Florida 2000 really is a special case.
Shorter answer:
Democrats Good, Republicans bad
gahrie, this has nothing to do with Democrats and Republicans. I’m sure had Gore been leading he would have made basically identical arguments as Bush’s lawyers did.
An election is, inherently, a highly partisan thing. Every argument is predicated on the most partisan gain.
Like I said, I have no problem with a candidate asking for a full and complete recount of the votes based on the election’s rules.
But don’t yell fraud unless you can prove it.
Gahrie, you ignorant slut. Did you miss the part where this blog post, the very thing you’re commenting on, IS PRAISING A REPUBLICAN? Or how about the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve had “many heated arguments…over the years with liberals who think” the Florida election was stolen — falsely, in my view — a point that I’ve reiterated repeatedly in my eight years of blogging. Or how about my criticism of liberals who claimed, ridiculously, that the 2004 election was “stolen”? Your accusation that my position boils down to “Democrats Good, Republicans bad” is laughable on its face. And so I shall now laugh at it:
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
(“You ignorant slut” is an old Saturday Night Live reference, in case you didn’t know. Just trying to be funny.)
Brendan, are you suggesting that I’m being over the top on the Florida Gore recount math here, or just that I have been in the past (which is true). If so, I’d be curious to know where you think I’m being unreasonable here.
Also, what dcl said. Especially this:
“Had Gore been leading he would have made basically identical arguments as Bush’s lawyers did.”
Indeed. I’ve always — ALWAYS — contended that there was “no moral high ground” in the Florida recount, that both sides were simply making whatever arguments they needed to make in order to try and win.
To the extent that Republicans felt otherwise — felt that Gore was some sort of uniquely sore loser for the arguments he advanced, and that a GOP candidate would never stoop to Gore-like tactics in trying to overturn an apparent result — the Minnesota Senate election conclusively disproved that, when Norm Coleman, supported by the national Republican apparatus and Conservative Outrage Machine, made basically identical legal arguments to Gore’s. And, as Al Franken-as-Stewart Smalley would put it, “That’s……okay.” There’s nothing wrong, or at least nothing unusual and outrage-worthy, about using good-faith legal and P.R. arguments in an effort to try and achieve maximum advantage in an election dispute. It wasn’t wrong when Gore did it. It wasn’t wrong when Rossi and Coleman did it. It wasn’t wrong here when Foley initially did it.
What is wrong, and deluded, is pretending there’s some sort of moral high ground in making, or rebutting, such arguments, some grand principle that’s being upheld, beyond simply trying to win. What’s also wrong is going beyond “good-faith” arguments, to the realm of accusations of fraud and malfeasance and “theft” in the absence of any evidence of such. Some candidates, and many MANY of their supporters, have crossed that line in recent years. Foley, a Republican, not only didn’t cross that line, but explicitly urged his supporters not to cross it, and went out of his way to say that Malloy’s win is legitimate and should not be questioned. That’s what I’m praising him for.
dcl, I’m responding to gahrie, not criticizing you at all. I think you’re right on the money.
Okay, just checking. I know we’ve argued on that particular point in the past, and that I have held an overly strident position on this topic. Ultimately, you convinced me, or at least most of the way on the merits of the theft meme in regards to Florida 2000. Mostly I now just think Gore was stupid… But that may just be hindsight that the best thing, mathematically / politically, to do was also the best thing PR / Legal to do. At the same time, my comment @ 9 does come tangentially close to the, we wuz rooooobbed arguments. But it seemed reasonable to me to point out what the different tallies ended up saying in demonstrating that Florida 2000 is substantively different from other recent cases.
Perhaps Florida 2000 “opened the door” as it were. But the merits of Florida are quite a bit different than the merits in other recent post election battles. And now we have people trying to drive oil tankers through a side door.
I have to hold my nose walking into the stench of this discussion, but I feel compelled to argue that the Coleman and Rossi situations were hardly as clean as what we just experienced in the Connecticut governor’s race. There were definitely certifiable shenanigans going on in those two races, the question is whether that would have been enough to turn the election in favor of the Republican candidate.