'The Campaign Continues': Gore in Florida, step by awful step - Albert Gore, Jr.; disputed election results in Florida

National Review, Dec 18, 2000 by John J. Miller

On the night he wasn't elected president, Al Gore made it perfectly clear he intended to keep on running for the office-and running, and running. He didn't speak the words himself. He sent out his campaign chairman Bill Daley to declare, in front of cheering Nashville partisans, before the sun rose on November 8, "Our campaign continues!"

Indeed it did. Republicans have said for a long time that Gore would say or do anything to win. They used to mean it mainly as a criticism; they should have taken it as a warning. Gore essentially lost the state of Florida-and therefore, the presidential election-four times. First he lost the initial vote count. Then he lost the machine recount. Next he lost the late-arriving absentee and overseas ballots added to the machine recount-the result Secretary of State Katherine Harris intended to certify. And finally he lost the hand recount mandated by the Florida supreme court-the result Harris did certify. This litany of defeat has become a familiar GOP talking point, but it remains a powerful description of how events in Florida unfolded. In the face of these failures, Gore remained a study in ruthless persistence. "I have an obligation to the 50 million plus voters who supported the agenda that I laid out during the campaign," he explained in a New York Times interview published after Florida's certification on November 26.

Say this much for the vice president: He understood from the get-go that he was involved in a smashmouth political fight. Just as his campaign was supposed to be winding down, he cranked up his base. By 7 a.m. the day after the election, the Democrats had lawyers loaded aboard a chartered jet bound for Florida to challenge the Bush victory. An army of attorneys-spurred on by e-mails from the American Association of Trial Lawyers-followed them south. Jesse Jackson was soon on the scene, hollering about "a replay of Selma." Union workers were summoned for recount observation, and given specific instructions not to engage in any public protests that might spark anti-Gore sentiment. It was an impressive mobilization that the Bush campaign was not able to match for several days. And there was something about it the Bush campaign never equaled: the Democrats' willful mixture of demagogic rhetoric, intimidation tactics, judge-shopping, frivolous lawsuits, and the politics of personal destruction.

Gore's initial strategy was to try to seize the high ground: He aimed to portray himself as the people's choice for president. He was able to attempt this because he received slightly more total votes across the country than Bush. This of course meant nothing, even though newspapers continued to publish daily tallies of the nationwide vote beyond Thanksgiving. If either side had thought the popular-vote totals mattered, they wouldn't have run the campaigns they did-i.e., ones designed specifically to win 270 votes in the Electoral College. As Daley carried on about "the will of the people"-a powerful if empty slogan-Bush maintained a lead over Gore at every moment in Florida, the one place that would be decisive.

In the days immediately following the election, Gore supporters acted like a pack of nasty kids poking at a turtle with sharp sticks in search of a weak spot. They desperately wanted to discover arguments that would mitigate the undeniable fact that Gore had come up short. They said almost anything that came to mind. Warren Christopher called the butterfly ballots in Palm Beach County "illegal"-but it turned out they were completely consistent with Florida law, and (in fact) designed by local Democrats. Daley suggested the butterfly ballot was unfair-something he hasn't repeated since Bush strategist Karl Rove produced a similar one that is still used in Daley's native Cook County. Then the Gore camp said Reform party candidate Pat Buchanan received a suspiciously large vote in Palm Beach County, and that many Buchanan voters really intended to support Gore-yet Buchanan won only eight-tenths of 1 percent of the Palm Beach total, which was comparable to his rate of support in other counties; and he had received more than twice as many votes in Palm Beach during the 1996 presidential primary, even though he never campaigned there. Finally-perhaps because Democrats really can't stop themselves-there were charges of racism. "In disproportionately black areas, people faced dogs, guns, and were required to have three forms of ID," said campaign manager Donna Brazile. "I mean, one day before we were ahead in Florida by three points and we lost? It's like, uh-oh, somebody's doing something they shouldn't." She offered no evidence for any of this. Florida's black turnout was actually up 50 percent from 1996.

Gore's rhetorical strategy had all the precision of a shotgun blast, but his legal challenges were aimed no more carefully. His lawyers went judge-shopping. One filed a federal lawsuit in West Palm Beach to halt certification of the county vote, but pulled it the same day when the case was assigned to Kenneth Ryskamp, a Reagan appointee. An identical suit was then carried to state court, where it was put before Judge Kathleen Kroll, a liberal who indeed blocked the certification of Palm Beach County's vote totals. There were frivolous challenges, too, such as the one claiming Bush wasn't entitled to the 32 electoral votes of Texas because the Twelfth Amendment forbids electors from supporting two candidates from their home state. (Cheney recently headed a company based in Dallas, but he is a legal resident of Wyoming.) When a Florida court rejected the suit, it was filed again, just hours later, in a Texas court.