Originally posted by: conjur
Bah....nothing to be done about it now...it's over. Sorta like Iraq. We can't pull out, we just have to carry on with another of Bush's mistakes.
Originally posted by: girlgeek
What gets me: if Al Gore had been able to win his own home state, no one would have given the voting problems in Florida a second thought. Florida would have been irrelevant, and voting issues there would have remained a local story. At least now we're taking a closer look at voting systems across the country.
Gore Jr. miscalculated badly and got beat in Tennessee mainly because of his own incompetence. From the Knoxville News Sentinel:Originally posted by: girlgeek
Tennessee has 11 electoral votes. If they had gone to Gore instead of Bush, Gore would have had an uncontested win. Even with Florida, Bush wouldn't have had enough votes to win. And then the voting problems in Florida would never have made national or worldwide press.
"Hanging Chad" would be a crime.![]()
Ned Ray McWherter, the former Governor and Speaker of the State House, is widely considered as one of the shrewdest politicians the Volunteer State has ever produced.A tale from Ned Ray McWherter's 2000 experience, told to a reporter last week, will illustrate.
He had made a 10-day trip through the state, mostly in East Tennessee, as a Gore surrogate campaigner and returned, as instructed, to give a report to the campaign's national headquarters in Nashville.
His travels, McWherter says, left him with a sense that things were going badly for Gore in his home state.
He had a plan, involving some personal campaigning by Gore, for turning things around.
"I sat there for about an hour in the headquarters, wanting to make a report to the people running the campaign. They sent somebody out and said they were busy.
"They put me off another hour or two and, well, my old butt got tired, and I got up and left. They were so busy they wouldn't even talk to me and I was going to tell them they were about to get the hell beat out of them in East Tennessee," he said.
"I left word with Johnny Hayes. He said he couldn't get in to see them, either," McWherter said. "They had other places to worry about, I guess."