The election is over, and Al Gore has won, or so he keeps saying, and
yet he and his advisers continue to dissemble as they did when they were
trying to fool voters before they voted.
It’s one thing to tell whoppers during the campaign, as Gore did,
over and over, to get elected. But if the chips (or chads, in this case)
fell his way, there should be no need to torque the truth anymore.
Unless, that is, you’re still trying to fool people. Look at his
post-election whoppers, starting with the biggest:
“Thousands of votes that were cast on Election Day have not yet been
counted at all — not once,” Gore insisted Monday night.
The claim is a critical one, because Gore’s entire hopes of
overturning the election now rest with it.
But it’s a howling lie.
Despite the image Gore is trying to impress upon the public, there
are no boxes full of ballots screaming to be opened in the elections
offices in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties.
In fact, all ballots have been run through counting machines there —
not once, but twice — and Gore knows it. No voter’s ballot has gone
uncounted. And every single vote that was cast on those ballots has been
recorded.
This is a verifiable fact.
Yet the media elite nourish Gore’s lie by leaving it up to partisan
surrogates for President-elect Bush to set the record straight. Instead
of saying the truth on their own, they attribute it to “Republicans,”
which leaves a residue of doubt in the minds of voters watching from a
distance.
Personality journalists also cloud the issue by using inexact terms.
There’s a big difference between uncounted votes and ones that have been
disqualified due to voter error or simply left blank.
Yet the talking heads on TV use “uncounted” to mean both votes that
have never been looked at and ones that have been rejected or
unrecorded.
At Gore’s Tuesday press conference, reporters had a chance to call
him on his “not yet been counted” lie — which, again, is central to his
legal case right now — yet no one even came close. Even if they
believed it, as paid skeptics they should have at
least tested his underlying assumption by asking him to speculate on how
many boxes of ballots he thinks remain locked in those counties.
Instead, they just let him get away with it, wholesale.
If Bush tried to sell that canard, rest assured the press corps would
have snuffed it out in a heartbeat.
But that’s not the only post-election whopper Gore has told.
In his Monday night chat, he lubriciously suggested that unruly
Republicans bullied Democratic officials in Miami-Dade County into
shutting down their hand recount.
“Elections officials brought the count to an end in the face of
organized intimidation,” Gore said.
Yet a member of the Miami-Dade canvassing board has
said the demonstration by Republican observers, who
merely protested being locked out of the recount room,
was not a factor in his decision to stop the recount.
“It had nothing to do with the protest,” Supervisor of
Elections David C. Leahy said. He and other officials
just gave up after seeing they couldn’t meet the high
court’s deadline.
Note the Clintonesque parsing of words in Gore’s statement. He said
officials ended the count “in the face of,” and not because of, the
demonstration. So technically, he can say he’s not lying if challenged.
But such linguistic maneuvering suggests he knew in advance of no
connection, but decided to leave that impression anyway. In a way this
is worse than an unparsed lie, because at least then there’s a chance he
didn’t know he was really lying.
On Tuesday, Gore implied there was some kind of racist conspiracy to
disenfranchise minority voters in the Democratic counties in Southern
Florida where he wants manual recounts to go forward.
Isn’t it funny, he said, that those “low-income” counties still use
the old punchcard voting method, which lends itself to error, while
richer counties up North use the newer bubble-scan method.
What a reach. Palm Beach County uses punch cards and it’s the
third-richest county in the nation. It boasts more golf holes than any
other U.S. county. So much for that race card.
No matter. No one in the press corps corrected him, so the notion was
broadcast unmolested to the unknowing masses.
There have been other spasms of dishonesty, and the media have
pretended not to notice them, either.
For example, Gore and his surrogates have suggested that Gore has
some claim to the Oval Office based on his winning a fraction more of
the popular vote than Bush.
Of course, the popular vote has no legal relevance. The Electoral
College decides the presidential election, and Bush won more state
electoral votes.
But the Gore camp presses the issue by adding that Gore won more
popular votes than any other president besides Ronald Reagan.
Yes, and George W. Bush comes in a close third in popularity. In
fact, he won more votes than Clinton and Gore did in 1992 and 1996.
Then there’s the disingenuous assurance by Gore legal adviser Warren
Christopher that the founders wouldn’t want us fretting over all his
lawyers and their endless legal challenges that are delaying the
resolution of the election. He claims the founders
spread out the transition period between administrations expressly to
allow time to work out tight elections like this in the courts.
Anyone who’s studied the Constitution — and I assume Christopher has
— can tell you that’s a facile argument.
The main reason for the long interregnum was to accommodate travel.
Transportation and communication were so slow when the Constitution
was written that it would have been almost impossible for officials
elected in November to reach the capital in time.
After the country switched from horses to cars, politicians grew
weary of the “lame duck” period and shortened it. The 20th Amendment,
ratified in 1933, moved the president’s inaugural day from March 4 to
Jan. 20.
Expect more specious claims and shameless lies as Gore grows more
desperate.
He’s not acting like a man who won, but like someone who’s trying to
pull one over on the American people.
