Posted on 06/19/2002 9:46:05 AM PDT by Jean S
The eleventh hour campaign revelation that then-GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush had been arrested in Maine in 1976 for driving under the influence of alcohol gave then-Vice President Al Gore the boost he needed to win the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election, Gore's former campaign spokesman Chris Lehane admitted late Tuesday.
"Obviously, I think it did have an impact on the election," Lehane told WABC Radio's John Batchelor and Paul Alexander.
"It was a very close election. All of our internal polls show that it was literally a dead heat," the former top Goreman added. "I think there was a small percentage but a critical percentage of people who were literally themselves up in the air until the last 24 hours."
Lehane continued:
"And when the DWI story broke, for a lot of people who were on the fence trying to figure out which way to go, that sort of pushed them to towards Gore. They had real reservations about Bush's judgment and whether he was up to the job."
Lehane's comments underscored the importance of the all but forgotten DWI story, which many suspected was a Democrat dirty trick designed to throw Bush off balance during the final days of the campaign.
Instead, "Beer-gate," as media dubbed the Bush DWI story, undoubtedly caused Bush's slim nationwide lead to evaporate overnight and precipitated the 37-day Florida recount fiasco that still has Democrats grousing Gore was robbed.
As NewsMax reported at the time, there was ample reason to believe that the "Beer-gate" bombshell was a strategically timed leak that had Gore campaign fingerprints all over it.
Clearly somebody was pushing very hard to get the 24-year-old DWI story on the big media's radar screen; a story which had already been passed up by the Associated Press and had received glancing coverage by PBS weeks earlier.
"There is something of a mystery that has unfolded since we broke the story," reported Fox News Channel's Carl Cameron just four days before the election.
"And that is that part of the arrest record and the state of Maine's documentation of George Bush's driving record and arrest record in Maine was faxed to news agencies all over the country after we were on the air with it at 6 o'clock Eastern time."
Cameron said he had no idea who was behind the Bush DWI blast fax, but former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson didn't have any doubts.
"If anybody doesn't believe that this came right out of Gore headquarters, you ought to sprinkle some Peter Pan twinkle dust on them," he told CNBC's Chris Matthews.
Newsweek's Howard Finemen said Democrats appeared ready to pounce on the Bush DWI report, with a prepared strategy to revive allegations about his involvement in "other drug related incidents." (See: Bush DUI Info Blast-Faxed Around the Country; Dems Ready to Pounce)
The next day Tom Connolly, a Bush-hating Gore delegate from Maine, told reporters that he had tried to fax court records of the DWI arrest to Gore campaign headquarters a week earlier.
But he claimed he gave up after just one try because the line was busy.
Instead, Connolly said, he gave his DWI documentation to Fox News Portland Maine affiliate WPXT, where reporter Erin Fehlau broke the news locally.
There it remained until someone blast faxed the Bush court documents into every newsroom in America. (See: Beer-gate Alibi Unravels for Gore Dirty Trickster)
The question of who was behind the blast fax effort remains a mystery, but whoever it was succeeded in turning the 2000 election into a Constitutional crisis
Now that Chris Lehane has acknowledged that "Beer-gate" was key to Gore winning the popular vote, perhaps it's time for GOP to start crying, "We was robbed!"
I like to hit them with the analogy of the World Series. Best of seven. One team wins the first game by 10 runs but looses the next four games by one. Who wins?
The popular vote is like the total number of runs in the World Series. And just as relevant to the final outcome.
According to RNC polls over 4 million Evangelical Christians DID stay home on election day.
The third arrest was not a "serious " crime in 1968; people were almost routinely pulled over and given a warning and sent on their way in those days, especially for .12 alchohol blood level.
The other two "arrests" were college pranks. All the brouhahah that accompanied Bush and the relentless, hypocritical leftist attacks on him will have no potency this time around, will they? And the fact that Gore was an adult pot smoker, and his kids had all this "trouble" with the law, had little impact because some of it was old news and he was well known.... Lefties will have to come up with something else this time.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
The reason President Bush "lost" the popular vote is that the dead and illegal and prison vote and the multiple votes were counted while military votes and regular ordinary taxpayer votes were not counted at all or only once (the "old fashioned honest" way to do it).
MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD IS WHY THE ELECTION WAS EVEN CLOSE!
Your post #28 is brilliant. Bookmarked. Kept.
We should all be keeping a database full of "facts" as you have provided - and others do so well.
IF A DEMONCREEP IS TALKING, THEY ARE LYING!
And, by the way - Hillary now has billboards!
I WANT BILLBOARDS!!!! HOW CAN WE UNITE TO PUT SOME UP?
This issue could have been disposed of months before with candidate Bush getting in front of this issue, admitting all to some high school students at a school assembly.
This issue could have been disposed of months before with candidate Bush getting in front of this issue, admitting all to some high school students at a school assembly.
Hmmmmmm...the released 'DWI' story didn't help Gore win his home state of Tennessee and its electoral votes. The electoral votes that would have made the Florida 'taint' moot.Guess Tennesseans did know Al best.
Oh yea? And this is related to cost of coconauts in what way?.. Sounds like polemic revisionism to me.. The current hysteria and hyperbole about drunk driving did NOT exist in 1976; take it or leave it, I'm not defending it or deriding it, but it's a fact. Bringing it up and putting your subjective and biased spin on it (a .12 blood level and driving too slow) is dishonest.
And like I said, Bush is now "known", so this character assasination regarding his "drunkeness" and "arrest record" has no currency , even among the under-educated and amnesiac polity of the masses.
This wouldn't have even been an issue if Karl Rove and friends hadn't stupidly decided they could keep that story under wraps. Geez, it actually would have fit in perfectly with Dubya's bio. He had a drinking problem, as evidenced by a DWI in '76, and he quit drinking for good at age 40 and turned his life around.
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