Venue Shopping 2008 Election Winners Proves Gore Won in
2000
Back in the 2000
campaign, George Bush made a big point of Al Gore’s growing up in Washington,
D. C. During the dispute over the winner of the election, the fact that Gore failed
to carry his home state of Tennessee, which he represented in the House and
Senate, was used politically to cast doubt on whether he really won. If he couldn’t carry his home state, the
logic went, he must have lost the election, so let’s ignore the 538,000 vote
margin and stop counting in Florida and declare Bush the winner.
The line in 2000 was
that Gore “should” have won by a much bigger margin, so because his margin was
so close, he deserved to lose. Also, he
lost Tennessee. Let’s not mention the
Republican House staffers who went to Florida to demonstrate and disrupt
election boards trying to conduct a recount.
During the dispute
over the 2000 election, the Institute of Election analysis posited that it was
good that Gore lost Tennessee, then he would have been
under no obligation to give jobs in the national administration to his
supporters from his former constituency.
Gore would then have been a national candidate, like Eisenhower.
One of the problems of
presidential administrations is that the winner often populates his
administration with long time supporters from his home state. This not only strips his former state of much
of its governmental experience and talent, but it introduces a
parochialism into national decision-making that is often harmful.
Kennedy’s staff was
known as the Irish Mafia. Lyndon Johnson
filled his administration with cronies from Texas. Carter brought a string of nonentities from
Georgia. Reagan brought many of his former administration officials from
California. Clinton brought friends and
officials from Arkansas, where he had been Governor for the past eight years. Bush brought long time staff like Karl Rove,
Karen Hughes and Alberto Gonzales from Texas.
This year, all the
possible candidates are national candidates.
First of all, they come from the Senate and none have ever held
executive political office, so they have no former administration officials. Also, Clinton, McCain and Obama
are all venue shoppers.
Clinton grew up in
Illinois, lived most of her adult life in Arkansas and Washington, D.C. and has
only lived in New York, the state she represents in the Senate, for the past
eight years.
McCain was born on an
American base in Panama. The son of a
career officer in the Navy, he attended 20 different schools before settling
and going to high school in Northern Virginia.
After attending the Navel Academy in Maryland, he went to flight school
in Pensacola, Florida. After leaving the
Navy he moved to Arizona. When the issue
of carpetbagging was raised during his first run for
Congress, he said that Hanoi, where he was a prisoner of war for 5˝ years, was
the place he had lived the longest.
Obama was born and lived in
Hawaii. Then he lived in Indonesia. He went to college in California and New
York, law school in Massachusetts, and then settled in Chicago.
Historical trends are
interesting to discern. In light of the
2008 race, Kerry made a strategic error by trying to hide the fact that he
spent summers in France when he was growing up.
The United States has, however grudgingly, become an internationalist
nation. While the upper crust has their
heads stuck in the traditional isolationism of the history books, the people
who can’t afford college are actually being deployed to Kosovo, Somalia, Iraq,
Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, Korea and many other places around the world.
The American people
voted for Gore, the national candidate in 2000; not Bush, the partisan hack
from Texas who ran on a war platform.
But thanks to the Supreme Court, the first sentence of whose decision
said, “There is no right to vote under the Constitution,” and whose Justice
Scalia has defended that decision with the stirring words, “Get over it,” the
nation is stuck in war and a collapsing economy. If there is no right to vote under a constitution,
yet the government formed by that constitution can stop-loss soldiers to
ostensibly bring freedom and democracy to Iraq or can draft people to bring
freedom and democracy to Viet-Nam, then the United States is a dictatorship and
not a democracy. It is slavery if people
can be compelled to fight for rights for others they do not enjoy
themselves.
The very idea is absurd
on its face. The 15th
Amendment to the Constitution prohibits denying citizens the right to vote
based on race, yet, the Supreme Court held there is no right to vote under the
United States Constitution. It just
means that the Supreme Court is just another corrupt bunch of political hack
lawyers and Gore won the 2000 election.
Get over it. War and economic
collapse are the logical results of rigged elections. Look at Zimbabwe.
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