Message-ID: <5937191.1075854650049.JavaMail.evans@thyme> Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 12:52:00 -0800 (PST) From: bthoskins@hotmail.com To: brian.hoskins@enron.com, ebass@enron.com, hcampos@enron.com, leninej@hotmail.com Subject: gore Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-From: "Brian Hoskins" X-To: brian.hoskins@enron.com, ebass@enron.com, hcampos@enron.com, leninej@hotmail.com X-cc: X-bcc: X-Folder: \Eric_Bass_Dec2000\Notes Folders\Discussion threads X-Origin: Bass-E X-FileName: ebass.nsf November 29, 2000 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Some Road to the Presidency Al Gore is contesting the Presidential election not from clawing ambition, his spinners tell us, but because he has divined that he really won. Maybe so. A mind that can count a dimpled chad as a vote is capable of believing about anything. Mr. Gore's professed high-mindedness would be easier to credit, though, if it were not washed in the casual attitude toward the truth that we have come to expect from the author of no controlling legal authority, the Buddhist Temple fund-raiser and the iced tea defense. The Vice President in his Monday speech to the nation repeated the professions of supermouthpiece David Boies, for example, that there were 10,000 votes in Miami-Dade uncounted. These are in fact votes that were machine-counted for other offices but did not register a vote for President. The common-sense view of such a ballot is that the voter wanted to be heard on other offices, but did not like either candidate for President. There were 175,000 such ballots across the state of Florida, and 1.25 million across the nation. What Mr. Gore really wants is to pour over the 10,000 Miami-Dade ballots in search of the mysterious "dimpled chad" votes for him. Bear in mind that the county's board back on Nov. 14 shut down its first recount after a sampling of three precincts turned up only six more votes for Mr. Gore. That seemed in retrospect to be the sort of reasonable action so thought to be missing from this endless exercise. The Democrat sued, forcing Miami-Dade to resume. The Gore team currently argues that Miami-Dade is an undiscovered motherlode of Gore votes because in the 135 of 614 precincts counted they produced a Gore gain of 157 votes. But the recount went through the precincts numerically, and the first tranche, heavily Democratic, are known to have voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Gore. While those 135 initially counted precincts gave Mr. Gore 73% of their vote, the Vice President's share of the whole county was 53%. Those potent projections of Gore numbers from a full recount that they're citing are undoubtedly an exaggeration. The Gore lawsuit against Palm Beach is richer still. Here they are literally arguing that poor Judge Burton and his colleagues didn't use sufficiently low dimple standards, what the lawsuit calls "incorrect legal standards," to accept Gore votes. Here as well we have a Democratic county and board, upon whom the Gore folks were heaping praise less than two weeks ago, which they're now suing. In Seminole County, "independent" Democrats have sued to kill absentee ballots certified for Governor Bush, who carried those votes by almost 2 to 1. Their case: The county's elections supervisor broke the law by letting GOP office workers enter voter identification numbers left off of request forms sent in by absentee voters, who had otherwise complied by signing the form and listing the last four digits of their Social Security number. Want more detail? Normally the ID numbers are preprinted on the forms before they're sent out, which is what the Democrats did, but the GOP's software. . . . Oh well, the Democrats are suing. So let's review the story so far. We had a Florida count Nov. 7, then a recount, and then we let Al Gore pick several famously Democratic counties to hand-count; we've let various amounts of ambiguous chads be counted, let his party officials eyeball the ballots, often going his way by a 2 to 1 vote, let a GOP counter in Broward resign, extended the pre-established deadline and, let's see, what else? Oh yes, Mr. Gore still lost. The Gore/Boies strategy now is essentially to sue everyone in sight, hoping that some cache of votes reopens (Dade) or closes up (Seminole). His lawyers argued yesterday that he'd already be ahead if so many military ballots weren't counted. This is not "counting every vote"; it's asking lawyers to overturn an election, not once but several times. And it's becoming increasingly apparent to the American people; two national polls put support for a Gore concession at 60%, a strikingly high number given the close election result. As to the Democrats, a few have wavered publicly on joining the Gore long march, but mostly the party is circling the two exhausted candidates, on the one hand standing behind Mr. Gore's attempt to reverse the election, while simultaneously demanding to share power with the incoming Bush Administration. All this said, we have in fact found one Gore gambit to really admire: Identifying that five-minute seam of network time for a speech at 8:55 p.m., five minutes before the start of Monday night football. Pretty clever. The dimpled-ballot standard may not stand up, but opening up that 8:55 prime-time window for political speech may last forever. ______________________________________________________________________________ _______ Get more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com