Ray
Monday, November 27, 2000 1:42 p.m. EST
We Have a Winner
George W. Bush will be the 43rd president of the United States. Last night, 19 days after the election, Florida's secretary of state certified Bush as the winner of Florida's 25 electoral votes, by a razor-thin 537-vote margin.
foxnews.com
In a short, conciliatory victory speech last night, Bush outlined his presidential agenda: "an excellent education for every child at every public school," "prescription drug coverage in Medicare," "reducing the marriage penalty and eliminating the death tax," and reductions in rates "for everyone who pays income taxes in America." He also named as his White House chief of staff Andrew Card, a former lobbyist for General Motors who served as transportation secretary in Bush's father's administration.
georgewbush.com
But Al Gore and the Democrats aren't willing to admit they've lost. Gore plans to address the nation tonight in what we suppose will become known as the "dimples speech." And an angry Joe Lieberman spoke almost immediately after the certification. He said:
From the beginning of this extraordinary period of time, Vice President Gore and I have asked only that the votes that were cast on Election Day be counted. . . . How can we teach our children that every vote counts if we are not willing to make a good-faith effort to count every vote?
We have to ask: Does anyone take this nonsense seriously? We're supposed to believe that it's mere coincidence that Gore and Lieberman are pursuing their own ambition, that what's really behind their desperate hunt for dimpled chads is their tender concern for the children? Note, too, that Lieberman, once known for his probity and piety, has learned to lie in the classic Clintonian style. When we listened to the speech, we thought we heard him call for every vote to count, and we thought: What about all those military absentee ballots that the Gore team relentlessly tried to suppress? But when we read the transcript, we saw the weasel words: Lieberman is calling for only those votes that were cast on Election Day to be counted. The men and women who risk their lives defending the country are out of luck.
foxnews.com
In fact, the Gore campaign is suing to throw out all 15,215 absentee ballots in Seminole County. There was no irregularity with the ballots themselves, but Republican campaign workers were allowed to add identification numbers to some 4,700 ballot applications after voters completed them. Bush got 4,797 more votes than Gore among the absentee ballots. Here are more than 15,000 voters the Gore camp is seeking to disfranchise on a technicality.
It turns out that even the statement about counting every vote that was cast on Election Day is a lie. Gore's lawyers plan to go to court today to contest the results in three counties. One of them is Nassau, which submitted results of its first count, rather than its machine recount, because the second count omitted 247 ballots, costing Bush a net 51 votes. Those 247 votes were cast on Election Day, yet Gang Gore is asking a judge to order that they not be counted.
washingtonpost.com
Hovering over all these legal challenges is the question of what the U.S. Supreme Court will do. On Friday the court hears oral arguments on Bush's appeal of last week's Florida Supreme Court ruling. (Bush's petition for a hearing, in PDF format, is here). Bush argues that the Florida ruling, which set aside the statutory deadline for counties to submit their results to the secretary of state, violates a federal law requiring presidential elections to be decided on the basis of "laws enacted prior to" Election Day. On the face of it, Bush would seem to have a fairly strong case: In their decision (also in PDF format), the Florida justices explicitly said they weren't following the law: "The will of the people, not a hyper-technical reliance upon statutory provisions, should be our guiding principle."
The Clinton administration is refusing to make transition funding and office space available to Bush. The press, too, seems largely to be accepting the Gore contention that the election isn't over. Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz reviews the press's "split verdict" over whether Bush is in fact president-elect. One of the odder press reactions comes in a Post editorial that blames Bush for the lack of finality: "If George W. Bush had not reset the clock with his appeal to the US Supreme Court, many Americans this morning might have been expecting Al Gore to concede the election. We might have been among them." This is either disingenuous or uninformed, since even if the justices rule in Gore's favor, that would merely uphold the Florida Supreme Court's modified procedure--the procedure that led to last night's certification of Bush's victory.
In the court of public opinion, meanwhile, Bush appears to be gaining. An ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that six in 10 Americans--including more than one in four Gore supporters--think Gore should concede.
Dimple Hunt
Transcripts from the Broward County recount, excerpted on the Drudge Report, illustrate the gymnastics the Gore camp went through to squeeze more votes out of dimpled chads and other undercounted ballots in Florida. Sen. Bob Kerrey, in Florida to defend the Gore campaign, couldn't see what the Democratic lawyers claimed was a dimple in a chad. "I better get out of here before I get you guys in trouble," Kerrey joked to his party's team, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reports.
sun-sentinel.com!36000000000132753,00.html
Loser Pays
One of the Democratic talking points is that Gov. Bush signed a Texas law providing for hand recounts. But as Kathryn Jean Lopez points out in National Review Online, the law was intended only to cover malfunctions of the vote-counting machines. What's more, if a candidate in Texas wants a recount after a successful test of the voting machines, the Texas law requires him to put down a deposit to cover the cost of the recount. If the result of the recount doesn't change the outcome of the election, the candidate who requested the recount has to pay the cost of conducting it. Lopez asks: "So, if the likes of Paul Begala suddenly think Texas law is so great, why don't they have Hollywood contributions pay for the Florida recounts of the recount?" As another National Review Online article points out, the public has no way of knowing if Gore's actual recount-related expenses are being paid by Hollywood, trial lawyers, or anyone else. The vice president's aides have promised to disclose the names of the secret donors eventually, but they haven't done so yet.
nationalreview.com |
