Don't misunderstand me. I want Gore to challenge every vote ever cast in Florida. I want him to recount them 20 times if that's what it takes to get an honest total.
Come on. We're all big boys and girls here. Let's get past the PR and the rhetoric. I hope no one here is naive enough to swallow the "stuff" coming from either party at this time.
Neither of these candidates is looking to determine "the will of the people" or to determine "an honest total" at this point. The truth of the matter is we have one candidate that has apparently won the election by an extremely small margin and another who has lost. Both candidates appear to believe that the margin is small enough that with the proper stirring the results might change. The winner wants to keep the current vote totals and has everything to lose if they change. The loser has no real idea if he should have won but has nothing to lose and everything to gain if the totals change. After all, the worst thing that can happen to the loser is that he loses by a bigger margin.
This is now about getting vote totals to come out with a desired result. Everything else, the calls to determine "the will of the people," the protests of humans being less accurate than machines, the stories about the cross-eyed droolers in Palm Beach County, Jesse Jackson, etc, is Public Relations and theatrics. Nothing more.
I agree with your assessment of the two camps and Bush's arrogance in crowning himself before the votes are in. His decision to get a court order to block a hand-count is another major error.
Bush is using the tactic of declaring himself so sure that he is the proper winner that he feels he should proceed with the transition. He has to at this point because if he says that he may not be then he has handed Gore the ability to ask for anything he wants and Bush couldn't really complain. Bush's real mistake was not calling for a state-wide manual recount when Gore called for his extremely selective Democrat-intensive recount, believing, I guess, that these evil punch card ballots worked perfectly everywhere else in the state except Democratic strongholds.
Even though it is past the 72-hour deadline to call for a manual recount (and hats off to the slick Gore team to wait long enough to call for it that the Bush team didn't have time to react), if (when) the Bush team loses their court case they should file another in state court to argue that since a manual recount is being done in a specific few areas that the only fair thing to do in a race of this importance is to grant an exception and manually recount the entire state. The court may agree since the entire Palm Beach County is now being manually recounted when the Gore team didn't request that. How can Gore object since he believes this is more accurate and he really, really wants to determine "the will of the people?"
Wouldn't it be funny, though, if a glitch occurred and the recount didn't finish in time and the Palm Beach County results were thrown out? |
