Door Daan de Wit
Wat pijnlijk was, wordt pijnlijker. Steeds groter wordt het getal dat aangeeft hoeveel méér stemmen Gore heeft behaald dan Bush. Het gaat voor de goede orde om stemmen van Het Volk. 'Gore's Lead in the Popular Vote Now Exceeds 500,000' kopt de New York Times vandaag. 'Vice President Al Gore's nationwide lead in the popular vote has grown by about 200,000, to more than half a million, since Dec. 18, when the Electoral College sealed his fate and made Gov. George W. Bush the 43rd president of the United States.'
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Waarom won Bush en niet Gore? De NY Times heeft het antwoord in een lang artikel, 'Resisting the Recount'. Enkele citaten.
'The Democrats also mobilized intensively and relentlessly, but they had fewer levers of power. At every street corner demonstration and counting hall, it seemed that they were outnumbered, outshouted and outorganized by Republicans.'
Local and state officials described in interviews a web of activity — from seminars on ballot challenges and election law to the distribution of cheap cameras to collect evidence — as new indicators of how sophisticated their efforts were.'
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'Now it's unofficial: Gore did win Florida' meldde The Guardian zondag.
'As George W. Bush handed further key government posts to hardline Republican right-wingers, an unofficial recount of votes in Florida appeared to confirm that Bush lost the US presidential election.
Despite the decision by the US Supreme Court to halt the Florida recount in the contested counties, American media organisations, includ ing Knight Ridder - owner of the Miami Herald - have commissioned their own counts, gaining access to the ballots under Freedom of Information legislation. The result so far, with the recounting of so-called 'undervotes' in only one county completed by Friday night, indicates that Al Gore is ahead by 140 votes.

[...]

Gore's lead is expected to soar [sterk stijgen] when counting resumes in the New Year and Miami votes are counted. In a separate exercise, the Miami Herald commissioned a team of political analysts and pollsters to make a statistical calculation based on projections of votes by county, concluding that Gore won the state by 23,000.
The media initiative is likely to bedevil Bush in the weeks to come, thickening the pall of illegitimacy that will hang over his inauguration on 20 January.
It has already led to a face-off between almost all the news media organisations in the state and Bush's presidential team. In the most extreme example of the Bush camp's desperation to avoid a recount, the new director of the Environment Protection Agency, Christine Todd Whitman, has proposed that the Florida ballots be sealed for 10 years.
Bush's spokesman Tucker Eskew dismissed the recount as 'mischief-making' and 'inflaming public passions' while his brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush, accused the papers of 'trying to rewrite history'. Het hele artikel.
 

'How would a Bush presidency affect the region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)?', vroeg Central Europe Review zich af op 13 november. 'For many analysts, his election would certainly be seen as a negative sign. Looking at his father's presidency and at his set of advisors, many close to ex-President George Herbert Walker Bush, this view is surely justified. Bush's rhetoric during the campaign only enhanced that negative sense.'
 

Neer'lands meest vermaarde journalist, Henk Hofland, schreef woensdag over de verkiezingen en kwam in zijn column nog op een inmiddels bekend, maar toch niet onbelangrijk feit: '"Het microscopisch onderzoek heeft misstanden aan het licht gebracht die anders niet ontdekt zouden zijn. Een hoger percentage zwarte kiezers was verplicht, ouderwetse, gebrekkige stemmachines met perforatiesysteem te gebruiken, terwijl in de welvarende districten overwegend blanke kiezers hun stem uitbrachten via de optisch scanning machines," stelt de New York Times vast. De NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, heeft rechtszaken aangespannen - nu, na de beslissing over het presidentschap. Het gaat niet tegen Bush, maar om de verwezenlijking van de gelijke rechten, zegt de NAACP.'
Verder wijst hij terecht op de gevolgen va de wisseling van de wacht: Star Wars, (het gebrek aan) buitenlands beleid, (ons) drugsbeleid, om maar wat te noemen.