DADE COUNTY DEARTH

Interesting snippet from the Palm Beach Post survey of Miami-Dade County ballots. When all the 10,000 odd ballots with no vote for president were examined, using the most liberal standards imaginable – Bush actually gained votes. The point here is not to say we’ll ever know for sure who really won Florida beyond a shadow of a doubt. The point is rather to quash the notion, gaining ground among elites, that Al Gore obviously won the election and was denied victory because, as President Clinton put it, they stopped counting. Some Democrats need to believe this, because they need to believe that their candidate didn’t completely blow what should have been a landslide, and because they need to distract attention from the unprecedented way in which Gore and his trial-lawyers tried to overturn the result of a presidential election through legal maneuvering. But the truth is almost certainly more complicated; and almost certainly confirms Bush’s legal, constitutional, electoral victory. Of course, this rather important piece of news went completely unreported in the Washington Post and the New York Times. I guess they already know the truth and don’t need any new facts to get in the way.