WHO Is To Blame?

[Segami]

If you had to choose, WHO would you blame (directly or indirectly) for Al Gore losing the 2000 presidential election?

50 votes, 1 pass | Time left: Unlimited
	Ralph Nader
	6 (12%)
	Al Gore
	2 (4%)
	Bill Clinton
	4 (8%)
	SCOTUS
	36 (72%)
	George Bush
	0 (0%)
	Monica Lewinsky
	0 (0%)
	None of the Above
	2 (4%)
	1 DU member did not wish to select any of the options provided.
Show usernames Disclaimer: This is an Internet poll

[Segami]

1. Bill Clinton.

Go to the genesis of the problem and Bill Clinton's actions totally affected the elections and voter mood change.

[oasis]

2. Nader/Sarandon with Scalia a close second. (eom)

[brooklynite]

3. Name a stirring message the Gore campaign presented...

He was a mediocre candidate who lost 10 States Clinton won (including his home State of TN); if he'd won any of them, Florida would have been meaningless.

[Zynx]

4. I really do put a lot of blame on those who couldn't see a difference between Bush and Gore.

I was only 14 and the difference was plain as day.

[JaneyVee]

5. SCOTUS of course

[reddread]

6. it was stolen.

[Hiraeth]

7. Chad was hanging around as I recall. Blame Chad !!

[Agnosticsherbet]

8. There is more than one culprit - Bush, SCOTUS, Nader, Katherine Harris, Brooks Brothers riot by

Congressional aids, and there were reports that Bush Srs old CIA contacts had a hand.

Trying to affix blame to one person is an attempt to create a fictional narrative.

[farleftlib]

18. Right on

Your list is comprehensive and I'm sure there's more we don't know.

I knew we weren't in Kansas anymore when the M$M flipped FL from Gore
to Bush. There's plenty of blame to go around and they all deserve it.

[MattP]

9. Joe Lieberman laying down for Cheney in the vp debate!

Could have swung at least a couple thousand in Florida

[G_j]

10. when they come for your vote..

http://commondreams.org/views/2016/04/20/when-they-come-our-vote?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork

By Hank Edson

People supporting Hillary Clinton often compare the “Bernie or Bust” movement to Ralph Nader’s third party campaign in the 2000 election, angrily accusing Sanders supporters in advance of handing the election to the Republican Party’s worst candidate ever. But a progressive challenge to the Democratic Party’s weak nominee is not the aspect of the 2000 election that ought to be remembered in 2016.

What should be remembered is the failure of Al Gore to fight against the political corruption in Florida, the GOP, and the Supreme Court. Florida, the GOP, and the Supreme Court stole the presidency from Al Gore and he never should have conceded the election, not even when two corrupt Supreme Court justices, Scalia and Thomas, failed to properly recuse themselves from participating in the hearing of Bush v. Gore, and the Supreme Court mangled the law in order to put their political preference in the White House, the integrity of our democracy be damned.

Gore's decision to give up did not turn out to be, as he hoped, for the good of the country. We paid dearly for our failure and for Gore’s failure to keep fighting. We should have been out in the streets. We should have surrounded the Supreme Court with tens of thousands of protesters. We should have demanded impeachment hearings for Scalia and Thomas. We should have demanded executive branch action from Bill Clinton. Had we stopped what we were doing, filled the streets of our nation and refused to go about business as normal, more than a million people would not have been killed in the Iraq War. Just think of that. It sounds extreme, but where is the line when theft of the people's government requires the citizenry to stand together to stop it? What consequences must we face before we demand unambiguous integrity in our political process?

Instead, of taking a stand in 2000, we allowed a coup d’état, a forced takeover of the people’s democracy. We sat by and watched. And we know what ensued: Manufactured evidence to drive our nation into am imperialistic war of aggression littered with every kind of war crime, more than a million dead, and the funneling of trillions of dollars of our tax payers' wealth into the industrial-arms complex. We had a right to stop society still in its tracks for as long as it took for justice to prevail and our vote to be restored. We, and Gore, preferred not to fight and this is the mistake we must learn from.

..more..

[Aerows]

41. This is the fact of the matter in a nutshell.

What should be remembered is the failure of Al Gore to fight against the political corruption in Florida, the GOP, and the Supreme Court.

In all honesty, I think Gore was either threatened in some way or paid off to do absolutely jack shit to contest the election results.

We can wave hanging chads and sound a chorus of Nader yelling all day long, but ultimately, it was Gore that gave up on us.

[cureautismnow]

11. If Gore had chosen Bob Graham for VP instead of the Schmuck,

Lieberman, Florida would have never been close. Still, 5 members of SCOTUS committed treason to hand the selection to the Chimp.

[hobbit709]

12. Combination of 2,3 and 4.

If Gore didn't have all the Clinton baggage and ran a more inspiring campaign, it never would have gotten to SCOTUS.

And for all those that want to blame Nader in Florida, more so-called Democrats voted for Bush there than voted for Nader.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

13. Gore. He failed to attract enough voters to secure the election.

It's not the obligation of the voters to convince the candidate to support them. It's the obligation of the candidate to convince the voters to vote for him/her.

He failed to do that.

[TheCowsCameHome]

14. Moxie and Spunk.

as well as a few others.

[firebrand80]

15. Gore was a bad campaigner

The reasons are a combination of all of the above

[rock]

16. SCOTUS

Without looking at a single ballot (the voter's choice) they declared the winner. Psychic or Psycho? You decide.

[Trenzalore]

17. Supreme Court

However Gore ran away from the success he was a part of for 8 years and bought into the right wing narrative about Clinton.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

19. The electorate.

1,2,4,5 all contributed, but ultimately, the problem was that lots of Americans wanted a Republican president.

Also slightly the founding fathers, for not having the presidency decided by popular vote.

[Henhouse]

21. Al Gore won the popular vote so, the voters clearly did not want a republican president. nt

[peace13]

28. Agree.

He won even with all of the thievery. I don't understand why people say he lost. They stole it from him.

[Henhouse]

20. You need to add "Hanging Chad" and Pat Buchanon...nt

[Samantha]

22. The Constitution delegates the right to run Presidential elections to the states

as long as the rules are outlined in the state constitution. In Florida, about a year or two or so before Election 2000 a mayoral race was overturned and the person occupying that chair was ejected and the opposition party installed. The latter had filed a lawsuit and won.

Florida revised its State constitution over this. When Election 2000 became a controversy, the Bush* campaign was using the superseded rules; the Gore campaign was using the new and correct rules.

The Florida State Supreme Court should have had the last word on that election. "The right to vote is paramount." It opened its finding with those words ordering a recount to continue. That should have been it.

The United States Supreme Court had zero standing to interfere. But once it jumped in, the laws it cited for halting the recount were laughable on their face. That Safe Harbor law was written right after this Country was formed. States sent their slate of electors to the Electoral College via Pony Express. Often the slates were late for the count. Thus a deadline was set for states to dispatch their Pony Express riders so that the votes would be received in a timely manner. So an approximately two-hundred year old obsolete law was used to discredit The Florida Supreme Court's decision -- rendered at the turn into the 21st Century. That alone is stunningly absurd.

That equal weight argument is also a manufactured legal argument. The Court held to allow the recount to continue and to incorporate the votes of those who had been unsuccessful in voting the first round would give those recounted votes more weight than those originally cast. And that would be unfair to those who had successfully voted the first round. That was the second justification used. It was more than fair to George Bush but less than fair to Al Gore and and a middle finger to those who had been disenfranchised in Florida.

The official final count for Bush gave him a margin of 537 votes. In preserving that margin for Bush in Florida, the Supreme Court effectively nullified the national popular vote margin of 540,000 votes Gore won. In my opinion, those were the voters whose votes did not receive an "equal weight" as a result of the Supreme Court's unconstitutional intervention. In other words, "we was robbed" and the impact to the Country and parts of the world was indeed a heavy price considering the administrations in office Bush* conducted.

We are still to this day trying to recover from the damage and will be for years to come.

Sam

[senz]

23. We should not forget the Florida voter purge and Kathleen Harris.

The Repubs were planning to do it.

That's how (ahem) righties operate.

[hrmjustin]

24. Realistically a mixture of all.

[Nye Bevan]

25. SCOTUS behaved abominably but Gore would still have lost if the recount he wanted had been allowed

to go ahead, so can't really blame it for Gore losing.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2001-04-03-floridamain.htm

Biggest problem was Gore's prudishness in keeping Bill Clinton at a distance in his campaign because of the Lewinsky scandal. Related to this was his choice of Joe Lieberman as VP. And of course Nader screwed him in FL.

[peace13]

29. I believe Gore won when all was said and done.

[Fresh_Start]

26. can we add the lovely ballot designer woman in FLorida?

whose name escapes me..something about butterfly ballots and hanging chads is swirling in my brain

[NCTraveler]

27. There was more than one questionable move.

I voted Gore for one simple reason. He had yet to exhaust all options. Get that. Knowingly not exhausting all options knowing Chenney is about to become President is not acceptable.

I like Gore but those weren't some of his finest moments.

[Uncle Joe]

30. The corporate media conglomerates.

Thanks for the thread, Segami.

[tularetom]

31. Clinton

I don't know if it's totally his fault, but I just dislike him enough to blame him for everything.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

32. No one is to blame

[redstateblues]

33. Nader voters in FL. "Not a dimes worth of difference"?

Thanks for BushCheney

[redstateblues]

34. I'm surprised nobody on DU has blamed Obama yet

[Fresh_Start]

35. I guess we don't have tea party republicans here

otherwise, Obama would have been blamed

[Maedhros]

36. Anyone who blames Nader for Gore's loss is hopelessly ignorant of politics.[n/t]

[Live and Learn]

37. I think Jeb played a part in it too. Ain't Karma cool? nt

[PufPuf23]

38. Nader is a myth by members of the Democratic Party neo-liberal establishment

that like to hippie punch and scapegoat the liberals.

Supreme Court, leadership of the Democratic Party, and GOP flacks and operatives that deliberately sabotaged the vote.

[baldguy]

39. In order: SCOTUS, Bush, Nader.

[pat_k]

40. Wrong Question. He Didn't Lose.

Whose responsible for the stealing the election? In this order:

1. Florida for appointing electors pursuant to an unlawful election.

2. SCOTUS for ensuring the electors were unlawful by stopping the recount.

3. Gore for conceding to an unlawful result.

4. Congress for failing to fulfill their duty to judge the legality of the electors, and throw out the unlawfully appointed Florida electors.



Ultimately, it was Congress the put the nail in the coffin. In Bush v. Gore, Justice Breyer told the nation -- and Gore -- exactly what needed to happen. As he noted in his dissent, the Electoral Count Act makes it the duty of Congress to ultimately resolve such a situation. In quoting the legislative history, he cites that:

They can only count legal votes, and in doing so must determine, from the best evidence to be had, what are legal votes…

And further that:

The power to judge of the legality of the votes is a necessary consequent of the power to count. The existence of this power is of absolute necessity to the preservation of the Government."

Bush v. Gore, J.Breyer dissent (11) December 12, 2000

Justice Breyer was explicitly instructing Congress as to what their duty was -- to object to, and reject, the unlawfully appointed Florida electors on January 6th, 2001.

If he respected the rule of law, Gore would have called on Congress to do it's duty.

You expect crooks to be crooks: Kathryn Harris, SCOTUS majority. But when the "good guys" betray the us by turning a blind eye theft, we are in deep shit. And 2004 marked a turning point for this nation when we allowed an election to be stolen in plain sight.

[Persondem]

42. Nader! He took votes out of Gore's pot that would have made the difference in 2 states. Either one

of which would have given Gore the election. If Nader ain't there, Gore wins. SCOTUS was late to the party and did what it was expected to do (screw Gore).