The Press v Al Gore: How lazy reporting, pack journalism and GOP spin cost him the election (laugh!)

The price tag on the spilled water was quickly calculated at $7 million. The implication was clear: In a clumsy abuse of power, Al Gore, a supposed friend of the environment, gladly wasted precious natural resources to stage-manage a political event.

Following the lead of the Washington Times, an unabashedly conservative outlet often hostile to Democrats, the rest of the mainstream press pounced, not only upbraiding Gore for his supposed hypocrisy but also suggesting that the campaign miscue was just the latest example of a foundering presidential run. The New York Times detailed the "mishap," the Washington Post ridiculed Gore's FOUR BILLION GALLONS FOR A PHOTO OP, Newsweek dubbed it the "photo op from hell," and CNN covered the "wave of criticism after floodgates are opened on a New Hampshire river to keep Al Gore afloat."

In retrospect, the most notable thing about the whole story was just how murky the facts were. Nobody from the Gore campaign asked for the water to be released. (Concerned about security, the Secret Service did.) As for the amount of water released, it was 500 million gallons, not 4 billion - a fact that Sammon reported a week later, long after other media ran with the original story. And the local utility company that operates the dam was already dumping millions of gallons of water into the parched Connecticut River every day. The routine release had simply been moved up a couple of hours to accommodate Gore's trip. The $7 million figure turned out to be completely inaccurate, since the water was not wasted. Instead, it passed through hydroelectric turbines and generated power that the utility company sold to other utilities.

"I felt like we'd fallen through the looking glass," says Sharon Francis, executive director of the Connecticut River Joint Commissions, who coordinated Gore's visit on behalf of the region and for days fielded press queries about the derided canoe trip. She describes the media coverage as "fictional" and "nasty" and "spun to sound like something corrupt."

Two years later, Sammon defends his work, insisting that the incident makes "a point about Gore's political reflexes, [which are] to spin furiously and resort to deception."

If the media charade surrounding Gore's Connecticut River trip had been a one-time event - nothing more than bored political reporters trying too hard to kick up some dust during a slow summer news week - this incident would be forgotten to history. Instead, it is emblematic of the way the political press operated throughout the campaign, falsely reporting trivia about Gore and challenging his character in order to score points.

The coverage was at times blatantly dishonest, and, worse, reporters seemed so determined to stick to pre-assigned scripts ("Gore is a phony") that they balked at correcting obvious errors that began to circulate. (For a complete chronicle of the press's factual missteps in covering Gore, go to dailyhowler.com, a Web site run by Bob Somerby, one of Gore's college roommates and close friends.)

Whether it was the misreported assertion that he'd invented the Internet or the ridiculously exaggerated brouhaha over his quickly corrected claim that he and his wife, Tipper, were models for the young lovers in Erich Segal's best-selling novel Love Story, Gore's close friends and admirers agree that Gore has a penchant for hyperbole. But in last year's election, the press elevated this relatively minor personality quirk into a character-defining issue.

"The coverage seemed to be much more aggressive and adversarial than I'd ever seen before," says Scott Shepard, a veteran newspaper reporter who has four presidential campaigns to his credit and who covered the Gore campaign for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"There was a fair amount of animus as time wore on with Gore," says James Warren, who was then Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, referring to the mood on the press plane. "People were overly hard toward him. He's a decent, honest fellow. He was not the greatest candidate, but he's not dishonest. And some in the press came perilously close to saying that."

Recalls one network-television correspondent who spent lots of time on the presidential campaign, "There just developed among a certain group of people covering Gore, particularly the print people, a real disdain for him. Everything was negative. They had a grudge against [Gore]. I don't know how else to put it."

The hostility was evident throughout the campaign as the press, in a series of questionable endeavors, worked overtime to portray Gore as a fake. For instance, after combing through twenty years' worth of public statements, the Boston Globe last year ran a typical, and contemptuous, 3,000-word exposZ exploring the vice president's propensity to exaggerate. Or, as the paper tsk-tsked, "Gore has regularly promoted himself, and skewered his opponents, with embroidered, misleading and occasionally false statements." No doubt uncharted territory for a major American politician.

After all that research, what did the Globe's Walter Robinson and Michael Crowley find to be among Gore's most egregious exaggerations? "Starting in 1994, Gore has added two years to his journalistic experience, upping the figure from the five years he once claimed to seven." This may seem to be the very definition of trivial - "gotcha" journalism carried to its absurd extreme. But it's also wrong.

By biographers' accounts, Gore spent two years in the Army as a reporter, or "information specialist," and five years working for The Tennessean. That's seven years. The number has never changed. Asked about the discrepancy, Robinson now argues that Gore spent only nineteen months in the Army and that his five years at The Tennessean were interrupted by two years in law school, when he worked part-time at the paper. "It was another example of Gore sort of rounding things up to his advantage, trying to make it into something bigger," says Robinson.

Of course, the Globe article set aside space to mock Gore for his claim of having invented the Internet. Perhaps the most famous of Gore's fictional missteps, that over-the-top brag became convenient shorthand for pundits to ridicule a man so uncomfortable with his own skin, the conventional wisdom went, that he felt the need to chronically inflate his achievements. Clearly, he'd say anything to get elected. (And pundits, doubling as shrinks, even knew why: "In all likelihood, his exaggerations reflect a yearning for a kind of approval and admiration that he never got from his dad," said Gore biographer Bob Zelnick.)

The fact that Gore never said he invented the Internet didn't stop the press from telling, and retelling, a story that fit into its prepackaged narrative: Gore is a liar. But it was the journalists, trying hard to paint a damning portrait of Gore, who played it loose with the facts and perpetrated what added up to a complete fabrication.

Here's what happened. In 1999, candidate Gore was taping an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer in which he said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." He was no doubt referring to his landmark "information superhighway" speeches, as well as his well-known support of high-tech research that stretched back into the 1980s. (For the record, Vinton Cerf, often called "the father of the Internet," not to mention futurist Newt Gingrich, have both publicly vouched for Gore's role in helping to shepherd the Internet to life.)

So who coined the phrase "invented the Internet" and attached it to Gore? His Republican opponents, who faxed out a press release suggesting Gore had claimed to have done exactly that.

It's no surprise that GOP operatives would willfully misinterpret a statement from a Democratic presidential candidate. What's amazing is that the press went along with it so uncritically. Was it accurate? The press didn't care, as virtually every major media outlet in the country followed the Republican lead and reported over and over again Gore's claim to have invented the Internet.

Concerned about losing the election on traditional campaign issues such as taxes, Medicare and crime, topics that, according to polls, favored Democrats, the GOP worked to turn the election into a character contest. To do that, Republicans had to link Gore with President Bill Clinton by dismantling the vice president's long-standing image as an earnest Boy Scout and replacing it with that of a phony liar. The New York Times cheered the Republicans' Internet move as "clever" and "ingenious."

As would become its custom, the Gore camp responded timidly and slowly. Seeing the Internet story was taking on a life of its own, some aides suggested the vice president pop the balloon by quickly addressing it. Gore, though, waited more than a week before publicly cracking a joke about how the night before the CNN interview, he'd been up late "inventing the camcorder." By then, the story had legs. And by trying to finesse the issue with humor and adopting the fictitious premise that he "invented" something extraordinary, Gore simply gave the damaging story credence.

"The Republicans did a very good job pushing that stuff, and the press reveled in it," says Tony Coelho, who served as Gore's campaign chairman until June 2000, when he stepped down for health reasons. "They wanted to bring down 'Prince Albert.' "

Often, the GOP didn't even have to prompt the press to create Gore exaggerations - reporters did it all on their own. During a September campaign stop, Gore recalled to a crowd of union workers that his mother used to sing him to sleep at night using "Look for the Union Label" as a lullaby. The press started digging and discovered the story was a fraud and "must be labeled untrue," as USA Today's political columnist Walter Shapiro reported. The TV jingle was written in 1975, when Gore was twenty-seven years old. The story was quickly picked up by cable TV's talkers and print columnists as another "bizarre fabrication."

The only problem was that Gore told the tale as a joke, confirmed by the video of the event, which showed the audience of Teamsters laughing at the mention of the so-called "lullaby." A week later, an editorial in USA Today addressed the issue and actually sided with Gore: "A review of the videotape gives plausibility to that explanation." But Shapiro stands by the column: "I was in the room [when Gore spoke], and I didn't feel it was a joke, and my tape recorder didn't feel it was a joke. I didn't hear people laughing. But if they were laughing, it was at Gore's awkwardness."

On October 6th, 2000, New York Times reporter Richard Berke referenced the union song prominently in a lengthy piece about Gore's "tendency to embellish," stressing "how Mr. Gore recalled a childhood lullaby that did not exist." Not once did the paper inform readers that both Gore and the members of the audience considered the line to be a throwaway joke.

Like most reporters quizzed about their Gore coverage, Berke agrees that the vice president was the victim of some shoddy press but that he himself did not contribute to it. And more important, says Berke, Gore did exaggerate, so even if some careless journalists made mistakes documenting the alleged embellishments, the story itself was legitimate.

But lots of well-known embellishment stories were not legitimate, such as the infamous Love Canal incident. When Gore spoke at Concord High School in New Hampshire on November 30th, 1999, and urged students to take an active role in politics, he recalled that it was a letter years before from a student in Toone, Tennessee, that got then-Rep. Gore interested in the topic of toxic waste. "I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing," Gore told the students. "I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue - and Toone, Tennessee, that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all."

The next day, both the Washington Post and the New York Time botched the quote, erroneously reporting Gore had bragged, "I was the one that started it all."

The Post's Ceci Connolly, who covered Gore campaign for eighteen months and made the error, today insists that her miscue "did not change the context" of Gore's original statement. She contends that the key quote, the one that catches Gore embellishing, was the quote "I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal." Yet clearly from his response, Gore used the term "found" in reference to "looking around the country for other sites like" Toone, and in no way suggested he uncovered the Love Canal toxic-waste disaster.

Thanks to the high-profile misquote, though, the media's echo chamber erupted, with MSNBC's Chris Matthews mocking Gore for being delusional, while ABC's George Stephanopoulos lamented that the vice president had "revealed his Pinocchio problem." (In a press release, the ever-helpful Republican National Committee cleaned up the mangled quote, changing "that" to "who" in order to make the misquote grammatically correct: "I was the one who started it all.") This time Gore responded quickly but was again too humble, calling a reporter the morning after the Concord visit to say he was sorry if his Love Canal comments had not been clear enough.

It was actually local students, enrolled in a media-literacy course, who had to set the record straight by taking the unusual step of issuing their own press release under the headline TOP TEN REASONS WHY MANY CONCORD HIGH STUDENTS FEEL BETRAYED BY SOME OF THE MEDIA COVERAGE OF AL GORE'S VISIT TO THE THEIR SCHOOL.

It took the Post and the Times a week to run Love Canal corrections. Yet one month before Election Day, the usually reliable Associated Press reported confidently, "Gore's exaggerations have placed him more centrally than warranted at the creation of . . . the Love Canal toxic-waste investigation." The episode fit a distinct pattern: Journalists just refused to drop unflattering Gore stories, no matter what the facts revealed.

For instance, the candidate was ridiculed endlessly after the infamous Love Story flap. Actually, what Gore mentioned to two reporters in an offhand comment was that, according to an old Tennessean article,Love Story author Segal had made that claim. After Gore's quip, Segal corrected the record by saying that The Tennessean had gotten it wrong, and that both Gore and his Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones, had served as models for Love Story's male protagonist, but that Segal did not base any character on Tipper.

Simple, right? Three years later, Newsweek still could not figure it out. Busy documenting embellishments weeks before Election Day, the magazine's Bill Turque wrote that the vice president "was not the basis for the Oliver Barrett character in Love Story." That sentence continues, ". . . author Erich Segal says Barrett was a combination of Gore and his Harvard pal Tommy Lee Jones." So why, then, was Gore belittled for his association with Love Story? Turque concedes the sentence "could have been more artfully worded" but insists "it is not fundamentally contradictory."

Regardless, Gore's team should have "stuck a knife in those exaggeration stories early on," concedes Mark Fabiani, communication director for the campaign. Instead, the tales lived on in the press and ultimately "came back to haunt the campaign."

The consensus among the press corps, according to Bob Woodward, assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, was that there were enough instances of Gore playing loose with the facts that the legitimate issue was raised as to whether he "could apprehend reality." Says Woodward, "It set off alarm bells in reporters' heads, and it should."

Perhaps nowhere were those bells going off more loudly or more often than in the head of Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly. Her dispatches, frequently heavy on spin and regularly filled with biting jibes, were often the talk of campaign journalists, not to mention Gore officials.

Connolly was one of the reporters who botched Gore's Love Canal quote more than once. In her first dispatch on the matter, she used the twisted quote to mock Gore for dissembling about his record, a theme she had been hammering for months. In her follow-up story the next day, she printed it again, jeering, "The man who mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie Love Story and to have invented the Internet says he didn't quite mean to say he discovered a toxic-waste site."

Incredibly, none of the three examples Connolly offered to highlight Gore's compulsion for exaggerating were based on fact. Eleven months later, and just three weeks before Election Day, the Post returned to the topic of Love Canal, reporting how Gore's "clumsy" statements "suggesting he discovered the Love Canal disaster" had made him an easy target for ridicule.

At the same time that the paper was busy propping up the Love Canal story, it suddenly decided that the Love Story hoax was no longer based in fact, pointing out on October 15th, 2000, "Gore never claimed he and his wife were the models for the book Love Story but instead referred to an article in which author Erich Segal was misquoted as saying so." It just proved, the Post emphasized, "how closely Gore's anecdotes and statements are being watched" and that his every utterance will be "fact-checked."

Connolly dismisses the criticism. "I was very tough on Al Gore," she says, "the same way I was tough on George W. Bush when I covered him briefly" during the campaign. Tough? Traveling for just a few days with the Bush campaign, Connolly wrote that the candidate "evoked memories of another governor-turned-president: Ronald Reagan." The young Republican candidate, with "just a bit of swagger for the party faithful," was a "cheerful patriot" with a "sunny disposition" who "jauntily plays to the cameras and crowds." Compare that to a single dispatch from the Gore trail, in which Connolly derided the vice president as "boring" and "programmed to the point of seeming robotic" and mocked his "rarely seen human side."

Nineteen months after putting words in his mouth and then disdaining him for his supposed Internet claims, and fifteen months after spinning pure fiction about his canoe trip down the Connecticut River, the press erupted over another trivial pursuit. During the first presidential debate, Gore told the tale of Kailey Ellis, a student at Florida's Sarasota High School, and how, due to severe overcrowding, "she has to stand" during her science class.

Forget that affluent Sarasota voters last year voted down a school-budget referendum, which left the district with a $17 million shortfall or that 100 of its teachers had been laid off or that high school classes in the fall of 2000 had nine more students per classroom than the year before. The fact that the acclaimed Sarasota school system was grappling with severe budget cuts and real overcrowding was of no interest to the pundit press corps. They only wanted to know one thing: whether Kailey "has to stand during class." The answer was no, but at one point, she did have to.

That was the extent of Gore's "exaggeration": He used the wrong verb tense, saying "has" instead of "had." Looking back, Randy Ellis, Kailey's father and a registered Republican, says the national coverage of the Sarasota incident was "bizarre" and "unbelievable." "They just wanted to get a story saying that Gore was an exaggerator," he says. "Two weeks later, they were still going over and rehashing it. We couldn't believe it. It was a trip."

The press also went into a tizzy over Gore's casual comment during that first debate that he had traveled with James Lee Witt, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to Texas during a spate of wildfires. As vice president, Gore had traveled with Witt seventeen different times, but not on the date in question. Gore corrected the record the next morning, but the press treated his slip of the tongue as wildly important.

According to Fabiani, the Gore camp failed to perform a fundamental task: "The challenge of a campaign is to give people something to think about instead of the pre-existing story line. If you let people's pre-existing notions prevail, you deserve what you get."

"Gore felt like he won the debate," says Tony Coelho, "but what he did do was lose the spin." Gore's former campaign manager offers only praise for the senior Bush advisers, who, during that crucial period last October, deftly handled the press. "Karl Rove and Karen Hughes outmaneuvered and out-strategized us," he says. "We weren't in the same league with them at that point."

During the debates, though, Bush made a handful of blunders regarding military operations in the Balkans and Haiti, about the facts surrounding Texas' most celebrated hate-crime trial and about his own tax plan. Bush was free to botch facts about central policy issues and the press wouldn't question his intelligence. But if Gore were to misstate nonessential details, such as how long a student had to stand in a crowded Sarasota classroom, he was tagged a liar who couldn't be trusted.

Few journalists saw anything wrong with this double standard. In fact, some found it amusing. "You can actually disprove some of what Bush is saying if you really get in the weeds and get out your calculator, or you look at his record in Texas," Time magazine columnist Margaret Carlson told radio morning man Don Imus at the height of the campaign. "But it's really easy, and it's fun, to disprove Gore. As sport, and as our enterprise, Gore coming up with another whopper is greatly entertaining to us."

Who decided that covering presidential politics was supposed to be "entertaining" and "fun" for journalists?

The press responds to critics on the right by bending over backward not to look liberal," says Geneva Overholser, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and former ombudsman for the Washington Post, referring to the common conservative criticism of the so-called liberal media. "The cumulative effect is the opposite: They're tougher on Democrats." She, too, is convinced there was "something fundamentally wrong" with the 2000 election press coverage.

Last year, a review conducted by two nonpartisan groups, Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Research Center, found that a stunning seventy-six percent of the Gore campaign coverage in early 2000 centered around two negative themes: that he lies and exaggerates, and that he's tarred by scandal. "We call it the metanarrative," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of Project for Excellence in Journalism. "Journalists are looking for a story line, a narrative device, that plays out over weeks and months, and there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is if they let the narrative overwhelm the facts, then it becomes a distorting lens. It can lead journalists to ignore and mischaracterize facts as they try to fit them into the story."

Still, Beltway journalists defend their work. "I followed our coverage closely, and I thought it was excellent," says the Washington Post's Woodward. "It really was balanced." The former Watergate sleuth notes the challenge for reporters covering a fast-moving national election on a daily basis: "All these threads hang down - 'What about Bush's intelligence and Gore's truthfulness?' As a reporter, you don't know which one to pull. So you end up pulling on them all and ask, 'What is this?' If on balance you're pulling one set of strings too hard, then you have a problem." The truth is, while the press occasionally tugged a George Bush thread and ridiculed his garbled syntax, pundits were yanking on the Gore threads until they snapped.

What explains the press performance? All politics is personal, and as one theory suggests, Bush was simply friendlier and more open with the press, which translated into kinder, gentler coverage. Bush, the New York Times said last year, "not only slaps reporters' backs but also rubs the tops of their heads and, in a few instances, pinches their cheeks."

"There was a certain sort of hubris and arrogance how the Gore people handled the campaign," reports the Chicago Tribune's Warren. One senior Gore campaign aide agrees: "We clearly made some mistakes. Especially in the beginning, we were very guarded about access to him. It played into the idea that Gore was not at ease with the press." Journalists did little to hide their contempt. During a primary debate against former Sen. Bill Bradley in New Hampshire, Gore was openly booed - not by Bradley supporters but by reporters. "The 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out," said a 1999 Time report. "Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of fifteen-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd."

Did bad press cost Al Gore the election last year? It's naive to think Gore's chronically caustic coverage didn't cause him to lose votes during a historically close election. Looking back, Gore's handlers accept responsibility for mistakes they made during the campaign.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/columnists/ponte/2001/ponte05-22-01.htm

Floridocracy: Gore, Florida, and Democracy Held Hostage

FrontPageMagazine.com | May 22, 2001

DEMOCRATS HAVE LONG DEPENDED on liberal judges to impose from the bench what the Left could not win at the ballot box.

During 36 days last November and December, Democrats took this tactic to a terrifying new level. They attempted repeatedly to use Democrat-appointed judges and media allies to carry out a coup d’etat, to remove duly elected George W. Bush and install Al Gore as President of the United States.

The coup plotters failed after holding America hostage for more than five weeks, but only because the U.S. Supreme Court was willing to trump that of Florida.

Now, as Mr. Gore reenters the public stage to begin jousting for the 2004 Democratic Presidential nomination – and after subjective "recounts" by the liberal media have quietly confirmed Bush’s victory – comes Washington Times Senior White House Correspondent and Fox News Channel political analyst Bill Sammon with a brilliant book that, if read by every American, would force Al Gore and the Democratic Party to kiss their aspirations for future power good-bye.

Fact by shocking fact, Sammon cuts through the smoke, mirrors, and propaganda to bring what happened in Florida into clear-eyed focus. Sammon is a soft-spoken, careful reporter, but he has skill and toughness honed from reporting corruption in his native Cleveland for The Plain Dealer and in Balkan war zones for The Stars and Stripes.

Most reporters, when promoted to a Washington, D.C., position at the knee of those in power, turn from watchdogs into lapdogs. The Leftist establishment has lots of goodies, such as exclusive interviews and inside scoops, with which to reward reporters who go along to get along, who skew their stories to favor Democrats. In a capital where 89 percent of a journalist’s peers are Democrats, reporters are expected to serve as megaphones for the Left and as critics of Republicans. The usual road to wealth and career advancement curves to the left, and woe unto reporters who refuse to bend a la gauche.

To his credit, Sammon has the courage, integrity, and individualism not to be seduced into joining the herd of journalist sheep on this crooked road. His reputation as a straight shooter sometimes even moves the liberal establishment press towards honest reporting.

Sammon, for example, broke the story of Gore’s own "Watergate," a press photo op in which the Vice President was to be pictured as an environmentalist canoeing down the Connecticut River. Sammon’s nose for news detected that in drought-stricken New England, while citizens were prohibited from watering their lawns, Gore’s advance team had arranged for the dumping of half a billion gallons of stored water – enough to flush a majority of all toilets in America – to raise the river so their boating boss would not scrape his bottom.

Sammon’s exposé was echoed by The New York Times and other establishment media, much to Gore’s embarrassment and anger. Gore might not have ordered this waste of water, but Sammon knew that the Vice President had been told about it immediately afterwards. Gore, however, to him later denied any knowledge of what had been done.

Gore’s general hypocrisy was no secret, but Sammon introduces his book with a larger lesson from this incident. "When caught in a jam," writes Sammon, "[Gore] reflexively resorted to deception…. He also made it his practice to dispatch staffers to attack the messenger and anyone else who dared question the message of the day."

Sammon’s fast-paced analysis puts a human face on the attempted Florida coup, starting with Florida panhandle businessman Bob Glass. Glass was a Bush enthusiast who worked hard to get out the vote for the Texas governor on election day. But, like at least 10,000 other panhandle Republicans, after hearing the networks announce that Gore had won Florida – projections made while the polls were still open in this western Central Time Zone part of the state – Glass went home in despair and cast no vote.

Why did the networks declare Gore the winner? Sammon provides chilling evidence of network Leftist bias, as well as a mix of bias and incompetence in Voter News Service polling on which the networks depended. He documents, too, that Associated Press polling contradicted VNS and showed Bush winning Florida by, at one point, 150,000 votes – but the reliable AP polling went unreported by the networks.

Sammon documents a systematic pattern by the networks of immediately crediting states won by Gore while declaring "too close to call" many states that Bush was winning decisively. I vividly remember Judy Woodruff of CNN, the Clinton News Network, with her eyes downcast looking like a shamefaced little girl caught lying as she told viewers that Virginia and Georgia were "too close to call." Her colleague Jeff Greenfield – never identified to the audience as a former Bobby Kennedy operative – opined that this was bad news for Bush, that Georgia was a state Bush "should have won goin’ away." In fact, Bush did.

This deliberate slanting of results was being broadcast while three-fourths of America’s populace was still voting, while in California people were just getting off work and heading to the polls – or, like Glass, were deciding to head home instead. Such dishonest calls by Gore-friendly networks easily cost Bush more votes nationwide than Gore now claims as the margin of his "popular vote" victory.

The networks had agreed not to project winners in any state until its polls closed, but they declared Florida – the state on which they had told viewers the election would hinge – won by Gore while its western polling places were still open. Was this an accident? Not likely, notes Sammon, because the then-obscure Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris had sent memos to all networks and the Voter News Service reminding them that much of Florida was on Central, not Eastern time. Gore, Sammon shows, later directly ordered his apparatchiks to smear Harris personally in an effort to destroy her credibility with the public.

Sammon provides shocking details of the coup, including many only half-understood even by news junkies. He lays out how Democrats used a polling firm to create doubts about the "Butterfly Ballot" designed by a Democrat in West Palm Beach. He analyzes the ever-shifting standards for counting chads by Democrat-controlled canvassing boards. He documents how Florida’s Attorney General had a conflict of interest intervening in the election process, being also Gore’s state campaign manager. And he goes farther, showing that AG Robert Butterworth had no legal jurisdiction in the process – yet the media never reported the impropriety of Butterworth’s maneuvers to help Gore.

Bob Beckel, who headed Democrat Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign in 1984, agreed that the early network calls for Gore cost Bush at least 8,000 Florida votes. But as Sammon describes, this did not stop Beckel from trying to persuade Bush electors to violate their pledges and cast Electoral College votes for Gore. "’I’m trying to kidnap electors,’ Beckel announced to Neil Cavuto of Fox News Channel…. ‘Whatever it takes.’" Some feared that, like Clinton-inspired sex revelations about Republican congressmen, Beckel’s probes into elector backgrounds was looking for fodder for blackmail. In a Gore coup attempt full of dirty tricks, many thought this among the dirtiest.

Sammon brings us up close and personal with Navy Lieutenant John Russell, on duty in the Middle East, who helped rescue the terrorist-attacked U.S.S. Cole. We learn of his patriotic sacrifices to safeguard democracy for all of us. And then Sammon details how Gore lawyers had Lt. Cole’s absentee ballot thrown out for lack of a postmark, even though the election board had date-stamped it as received the day before the election. Having used such technicalities in one county to destroy the votes of 149 Americans in uniform, writes Sammon, "a pair of jubilant Gore lawyers exchanged high-fives."

"A Republican, visibly shaken by this sight," writes Sammon, "demanded to know how they could celebrate the disenfranchisement of U.S. military members risking their lives around the world. One of the Gore lawyers glibly replied: ‘A win’s a win.’" Gore months earlier had told an aide "I’ll do anything to win," and that "anything" evidently including shooting down Americans in uniform so he could become Commander-in-Chief.

The Democratic Party’s search-and-destroy operation against military absentee ballots disqualified 1,420 votes cast by Florida soldiers, sailors, and airmen serving America. Gore goons later also tried, but failed, to use Democrat judges to throw out thousands of Bush votes in two counties. And as this went on, Gore hypocritically kept repeating his slogan that he wanted "every vote counted."

But despite such efforts, Bush won the initial count of votes, the second count of votes, and the absentee vote. The only thing that could keep Gore’s ambitions alive then happened. The Florida Supreme Court, all seven of whose members were Leftists and Democrat appointees, intervened to block certification of Bush as the winner. This action, by which these Justices usurped the authority of the legislature, would later be overturned as unconstitutional by the unanimous vote of all nine Justices, liberal and conservative, of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sammon reveals a detail about this that the Leftist media has suppressed. The Florida Supreme Court heard arguments, including that by Gore attorney David Boies using a "fake affidavit" from Chicago, and made a show of questioning both sides. But Republican lawyers learned that the Florida high court’s decision had been completely written before arguments began; they had in advance precise details of how many pages it would be and how it would find in Gore’s favor. The Florida Supreme Court behaved in Alice-in-Wonderland, "first the verdict, then the trial," fashion from the outset to make Gore president.

After being slapped down once by the U.S. Supreme Court, the four most extreme Leftist Florida Justices defied the constitutions of Florida and the United States again, adding illegal and non-existent votes to Gore’s total and ordering a capricious statewide vote recount to keep the Democrat standard-bearer’s coup alive. This was too much even for three Florida Justices. "The prolonging of judicial process in this counting contest propels this country and this state into an unprecedented and unnecessary constitutional crisis," dissented Chief Justice Charles T. Wells. "There is a real and present likelihood that this constitutional crisis will do substantial damage to our country, our state, and to this court as an institution."

Bush attorney Ted Olson – now himself the target of vengeful Leftist smears intended to derail his nomination to be Solicitor General – argued that if the Florida high court ruling prevailed, then "The judiciary in every state…could overturn, rewrite, revise and change the election law in presidential elections, notwithstanding Article II [of the U.S. Constitution], at will."

Seven of nine U.S. Supreme Court Justices agreed that the ongoing Florida recount was unconstitutional. Even Clinton-Gore appointee and Gore personal friend Stephen Breyer held that to be constitutional any recount required uniform standards, not the whim of each person counting as to whether a chad had been dimpled. Five of the nine Justices also ruled that the counting violated the "Equal Protection" clause of the Constitution.

But "Democrats and the press stubbornly refused to portray the Supreme Court’s ruling as a 7-to-2 decision," writes Sammon. Their apparent goal, he surmises, was to create a "myth" that Gore’s victory had been stolen by a scant majority of five conservative Supreme Court Justices. This myth would be used to mobilize Democratic voters and de-legitimize the Bush Presidency.

Sammon’s impressive book focuses on the five weeks during which Gore, by holding our politics hostage, "was unquestionably the most powerful person in the United States." Sammon does not discuss pre-election schemes, such as the Clinton-Gore effort to make it more difficult for military people to vote. Neither does he discuss whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s narrow rulings leave the door open for smarter state judges to manipulate elections. Future presidential candidates might need to hold back half their funds for post-election legal battles in which judges, not voters, would decide the winner. Call it Floridocracy.

Bill Sammon’s excellent dissection of what happened in Florida could inoculate America against Floridocracy infections of our body politic. Read this book to give yourself a healthy understanding of how black-robed terrorists at the dawn of this Millennium almost overthrew our Constitution. And buy copies for your children and grandchildren to strengthen their political immune defenses.

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The Press vs. Al Gore

How lazy reporting, pack journalism and GOP spin cost him the election