GORE MORE YEARS

I now realize that my own position on ballot-counting – that only the cleanly punched hole should count – was the only position that would have given Gore a wafer-thin victory. When I wrote that in The New Republic, my Gore-supporting colleagues couldn’t have disagreed more. Part of my argument was that such a clean rule would have been consonant with Gore’s traditional position defending civic responsibility rather than the leftist claptrap he spewed during the campaign. In other words, if Gore had stuck to his centrist principles, he might have won. In fact, the only way he could have won was by sticking to his principles. For all the posturing on all sides, it turns out I was a better friend to Gore than his acolytes were.