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Jewish World Review Feb. 22, 2005 / 13 Adar I, 5765 2000 changed everything By Michael Barone
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Sometimes a decision made in the heat of partisan battle has
reverberations for years to come.
One such decision was the one of Al Gore's campaign to selectively
challenge the results of the 2000 election in Florida by demanding hand
counts of votes cast in three counties — Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm
Beach. The latter two produce huge majorities for Democratic candidates,
and the election officials in charge of the hand counts were Democrats.
In other words, Gore sought new counts only in areas where he was likely
to gain votes and would not take the risk of a statewide hand count,
where those gains might be offset by others for George W. Bush.
We know now that, thanks to the news media consortium that recounted
ballots in every Florida county, recounting under any method and any
criterion they tested would not have overturned Bush's exceedingly thin
plurality.
But the Gore campaign, Terry McAuliffe during his four years as
Democratic National Chairman and John Kerry in his 2004 presidential
campaign encouraged rank-and-file Democrats to believe that the election
was stolen. They decided to delegitimize an American election for
partisan gain. And in the process, they did much damage to George W.
Bush and the Republicans, to the reputation of the American political
process and, inadvertently but to a far greater extent, to their own
Democratic Party.
The damage to Bush was obvious. A large minority of Americans has
regarded him as an illegitimate president. That has weakened his ability
to work across party lines and has helped to maintain the intense
polarization of the electorate. It made it more difficult for him to win
re-election in 2004.
The damage to the Democrats, I would argue, has been greater. Many of
them remained focused during the first Bush term on the Florida
controversy, and have done less than they might have to produce
attractive new policies. McAuliffe predicted that anger over the Florida
result would defeat Gov. Jeb Bush in 2002. But Bush won with 56 percent
of the vote. Democrats hoped that anger over Florida would produce a
huge turnout in 2004. John Kerry did win 16 percent more popular votes
than Al Gore. But George W. Bush won 23 percent more popular votes than
he did in 2000.
What might have hurt the Democrats even more, perhaps, is if Gore's
strategy had been successful and he had been installed as president,
thanks to the partial hand count sanctioned by the six-to-one
Democratic-appointed Florida Supreme Court.
We now have a test case of that in the state of Washington. There, the
2004 election for governor was exceedingly close. Something like half
the ballots in Washington are cast by mail and it takes a long time to
count them. On Nov. 10, the count showed Republican Dino Rossi up by
3,492 votes. Two days later, Democrats in heavily Democratic King
County, which casts about one-third of the state's votes, started
turning in affidavits to qualify provisional votes — something which
hadn't been done in more Republican counties. Then, the King County
auditor's office starting finding new ballots that had been misplaced —
10,000 on Nov. 16, 1,779 on various days between Nov. 23 and Dec 18.
A recount on Nov. 24 showed Rossi still ahead of Democrat Christine
Gregoire by 42 votes. But Democrats on Dec. 3 demanded a hand count,
which gave Gregoire a lead of 129 votes on Dec. 23.
Gregoire has been inaugurated as governor. But an examination of King
County records shows about 1,800 more ballots cast than names of voters
who asked for them. Republicans have brought a lawsuit asking that the
election result be set aside and a new election held.
By a 53 percent to 36 percent margin, voters believed that Rossi had
really won, and by a 51 percent to 43 percent margin, they favored Rossi
in a revote. A Survey USA poll showed 62 percent favoring a revote.
A selective recount, of the sort Gore sought in Florida, has made
Gregoire governor, at least temporarily. But it has cast a pall of
illegitimacy over her far greater than that cast over George W. Bush by
the Florida result.
Of course, no two cases are exactly alike. But now we have a better
idea of what a Gore presidency secured by a selective recount would have
been like. The negative reverberations from Gore's decision to seek a
selective recount would have been even greater than they were. It's
unfortunate that he didn't seek a statewide recount or that he didn't
follow Richard Nixon's example and decline to contest a close election.
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