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Strategies & Market Trends : NetCurrents NTCS -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: .Trev who wrote (4323)	11/12/2000 6:13:34 PM
From: Lane Hall-Witt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8925

When a prizefighter gets KO'd they don't wait for him to come round and concede, they just "Count him out". Isn't that what's happened already??????? Uhhhh, nope. They're still counting, and they will be until at least next Friday, when the overseas absentee ballots are all in. Baker is trying to get Gore to "concede" so there won't be a hand recount -- which, according to preliminary figures, looks likely to put Gore on top. Palm Beach County alone projects that, based on its initial 1 percent sample, Gore could gain as many as 1,900 votes in the county-wide recount that's now in progress. Another curious scenario is emerging: if, after the hand recount and the tabulation of overseas ballots is complete, Gore is ahead, will the Republicans accept the result? Or will they feel compelled to request recounts in certain Republican Florida counties? The GOP has blathered and litigated over the hand recount: wouldn't it be delightful if they themselves resorted to this "unfair and partisan" process in order to try to grab a few more votes of their own? I'm afraid I don't expect them to have the "honor and dignity" to stand by their stated principles and surrender their own legal right to a manual recount. And, frankly, I think it'd be ludicrous if they were behind and didn't ask for a legal recount. The difference between the candidates is well within the margin of error for the machines used to count the ballots . . . despite Republican claims about the accuracy and fairness of the machines. I suspect we'll see stupidity (the nonsensical arguments against a hand recount) followed by hypocrisy (the rush to demand hand recounts of their own) in this case. By the way, I'd expect another significant downswing in the market if the Bush camp starts requesting hand recounts, for two reasons. One is the obvious fact that more recounts will mean more delays in determining the winner. Second is that this will be a perceived as a sign that the Bush camp is nervous, and the market I think has remained confident that Bush would eventually emerge from this morass as the winner. If it looks like Gore has a shot at winning, the equity markets won't like it.