Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mao II who wrote (83127)	11/21/2000 8:46:15 AM
From: Futurist	Respond to of 769670

Good limmerick! Here's another way of looking at it. November 21, 2000 FOREIGN AFFAIRS Can Gore Ever Win? By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN hile it all may sound like just partisan noise coming out of Florida these days, there's actually a big difference between how Al Gore and George W. Bush have been behaving. Mr. Gore has behaved as if this were the closest election in our modern history, and therefore every vote should be counted, recounted and hand counted, and should George W. Bush win Mr. Gore would have no problem declaring him the legitimate president. But one has to ask Mr. Bush: Is there any condition under which you would now accept Al Gore as the legitimate winner? I don't think so. Mr. Bush has behaved as if this were not a close election at all, as if he had won by a landslide, and therefore the notion that every last vote be hand-counted to determine the winner is only an effort to steal the election from him — the already obvious winner. And therefore, in Mr. Bush's view, under no condition can Al Gore ever be deemed the legitimate next president. By opposing any hand counts with a scorched-earth media blitz, Mr. Bush has left himself no room to be a gracious loser. He has left no scenario in which to say: "I lost fairly. Now let's all rally behind Al Gore." Mr. Bush needs to remember that he lost the popular vote in the country and he was ahead in Florida by only 300 votes out of six million before the absentees were counted. The fact is, this election was too close to call, and therefore conducting a hand count is both legal and legitimate, especially when it's being done under the same rules that apply in Texas. Mr. Gore made a fair proposal to hand-count every ballot in Florida, but Mr. Bush rejected that. Now that a more limited hand count is going forward, the Bush team is making wild, unsubstantiated allegations that the hand counters are engaged in fraud. No doubt there will be disputes, and mistakes, but there is no proof of systematic fraud. Where Mr. Gore is vulnerable is on which hand counts to count. Texas law allows for "dimpled" but unperforated ballots to be counted, and some Florida counties are doing that. But Mr. Gore needs to think hard about whether he wants to win on dimples. Either way, though, the Bush team will smear him. It is out to create an impression in the public's mind that if Mr. Gore wins by a hand count then by definition he stole the election. That is wrong, and so was Mr. Bush's spokeswoman, Karen Hughes, when she basically accused Mr. Gore of conspiring to have the absentee ballots of U.S. military personnel not counted, implying that this made him unfit to be commander in chief. Democrats and Republicans both know that many absentee ballots are always thrown out. Absentee balloting historically has been rife with fraud, so there are a lot of technical requirements — including that a ballot be postmarked by Election Day. And in this case the decision to follow the strict Florida absentee balloting rules, as opposed to the looser Federal ones, was set by the Republican secretary of state, Katherine Harris. I believe absentee ballots from soldiers should also be hand-counted to divine whether the absence of a postmark can be excused. But to allege fraud in this regard is utterly reckless. Our armed forces, the courts, the federal government — these are the nonpartisan institutions we need to hold our country together once there is a partisan outcome to this election. It was out of line for Ms. Hughes to imply that our armed forces are pro- Republican and that the Democrats were trying to prevent them from voting. Ms. Hughes might as well have called Mr. Gore a traitor. It would be like Mr. Gore accusing Mr. Bush of bigoted motives because he resisted recounts in counties with heavy black and Jewish populations. You just don't talk that way about the man who might be our next president. Mr. Bush needs to remember that there is a difference between what you can say about your opponent during the campaign and what you can say about him after the election is over, with the outcome too close to call, and with each side legitimately seeking to ensure that every vote is properly tabulated. Smearing your opponent during the campaign is politics as usual; smearing him during the recount after a vote too close to call is a threat to our institutions and the next presidency.