Until I saw Lloyd Billingsley’s post, I hadn’t realized that Joe Biden awarded Al Gore, among others, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The White House’s press release is here.
This year’s recipients were the usual mixed bag, but I want to focus specifically on Gore. This is what Gore’s citation says:
Al Gore is a former Vice President, United States Senator, and member of the House of Representatives. After winning the popular vote, he accepted the outcome of a disputed presidential election for the sake of our unity. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for his bold action on climate change.
Let’s dissect that: “After winning the popular vote…” This is completely irrelevant. The “popular vote” does not elect the president. The point is to emphasize what follows: “…he accepted the outcome of a disputed presidential election for the sake of our unity.” That is what Richard Nixon did, but not Al Gore. Gore went to court to challenge George W. Bush’s victory in Florida. After Gore lost in the trial court–correctly–four partisan Florida Supreme Court justices tried to steal the election for their man by purporting to award him Florida’s electoral votes. That triggered a further appeal. Gore fought for the presidency until the last dog was hung in the U.S. Supreme Court. And even thereafter, he claimed that he was the rightful winner, as have many Democrats ever since 2000.
Obviously, the only point of Biden’s ahistorical tribute to Gore is to contrast him with Donald Trump, who also took his case to the Supreme Court and lost. But one fact that is almost always lost in retrospectives about the 2000 election is that Florida shouldn’t have been particularly close. Gore almost won Florida, only because the news networks collaborated in trying to swing the election his way. They called Florida for Gore while the Florida panhandle, which is on Central time and is heavily Republican, was still voting. They did this in order to suppress Republican votes–unless, of course, you are willing to believe that their election preparation was so inept that they didn’t realize that a substantial part of Florida was still voting.
An outraged Karl Rove pointed out that the networks were premature, that voting was still going on, and that Bush was going to carry the state. But only after the polls had closed, and the damage had been done, did the networks withdraw their erroneous call. Later analyses showed that their calling of the state for Gore depressed Bush’s vote total in the panhandle by thousands of ballots. Without that collaboration by the left-wing media, none of us would ever have heard of “hanging chads.”
