At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to
Steal the Election by Bill Sammon
The Aaron Burr Of The 21St Century
Washington Times reporter Bill Sammon makes it clear in the opening
pages of At Any Cost that hes not a big fan of Al Gore. In this fast-paced
account of what happened to Floridas controversial vote, he explains how
a defeated Gore desperately fought to turn things around. He starts by
suggesting that tens of thousands of voters in the Florida Panhandle--
Republican country--decided not to cast ballots when the media wrongly
called the state for Gore early in the evening on Election Day, before all
the polls had closed in the western part of the state. Without this blunder --
which hasnt received nearly the attention heaped on the media for
prematurely calling the election for George W. Bush se veral hours later--
Sammon believes Gore would have given up his post-election campaign
much sooner. Sammon also believes this had repercussions outside
Florida: If not for the networks early and erroneous projections, Bush might
have easily won the popular vote, and carried a few congressional seats
with him. The bulk of the book zeros in on Gore and his goal of seizing
the presidency. In one nifty bit of reporting, Sammon tracks down a navy
lieutenant whose military ballot Gores lawyers were determined to throw
out. Sammon describes the unseemly spectacle of their success:
When the [Duval County] canvassing board announced that the ballots of
149 soldiers, sailors, and airmen had been disqualified, a pair of jubilant
Gore lawyers exchanged high-fives. A Republican, visibly shaken by this
sight, 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 wins a win. Sammon also covers a ll that
business about the chads, Gores smear campaign against Secretary of
State Katherine Harris, and the Supreme Courts controversial Bush v.
Gore ruling. This is by no means the definitive story of what happened in
Florida, but its a useful piece of journalism--and one that Bushs supporters
will read with that heady mixture of outrage and excitement that politics
uniquely provides. --John J. Miller
Bill Sammon tells an amusing story about writing this book. When
Regnery first approached him about it, they already had the title picked
out, which Sammon objected to because he wasn't convinced that Al Gore
had in fact "tried to steal the election". Realizing that there could be no
book without an author, Regnery reluctantly agreed to a name change.
Several weeks later Bill Sammon sheepishly approached Regnery and
asked them if they would be willing to change back to the original title
because he had become convinced that Al Gore HAD in fact "tried to steal
the election", at least in the sense of "taking someone else's property,
especially by unjust means."
Openminded readers will be convinced as well.
Bill Sammon builds his case relentlessly, chapter by chapter. Chapters
One and Two detail how media bias and incompetence, though not
conspiracy, made the election close enough to steal in the first place by
depriving Bush of several thousand votes in Florida and probably costing
him the national popular vote victory. Chapter Three details the chaos of
the mandatory recount. In Chapter Four Gore crosses the Rubicon in
order to seize the presidency "at any cost", starting with trying to bully the
canvassing boards into granting his requests for selective recounts.
Chapter Five details the even greater chaos of the hand recounts. Chapter
Six details the (ordered by Gore himself) sexist, even misogynistic
smearing of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Chapter Seven
details Gore's effort to disenfranchise military voters (because their ballots
were running two to one for Bush). Chapters Eight, Nine, and Ten detail
the shifting standards and legal wrangles as the Florida Supreme Court
extended the deadline on completing recounts 7-0. Chapter Eleven details
Democrat Bob Beckel's independent scheme to "kidnap electors" that is to
convince Bush electors to vote for Gore or abstain, but to this day he
swears that no blackmail was intended. In Chapter Twelve the SCOTUS
spanks the Florida Supreme Court 9-0. In Chapter Thirteen an
increasingly desperate Gore tries to have tens of thousands of absentee
ballots disqualified on a technicality. In Chapter Fourteen the Florida
Supreme Court tries again 4-3 and gets spanked by the SCOTUS again 7-
2 (not 5-4 as Democrats often claim), and in Chapter Fifteen Gore
FINALLY concedes.
So after 36 days our long national nightmare was over, and except for the
mental damage done to himself, Al Gore caused no permanent damage,
right?
Wrong.
Al Gore caused the permanent partisan warfare we live with today by
encouraging Democrats to believe "We wuz robbed!" and causing
Republicans to fear all Democrats as practitioners of or at least tacit
supporters of election theft. By delaying the start of the transition for 36
days, Gore eliminated any possibility (however small) of the incoming Bush
Administration detecting in time the 9-11 plot that the Clinton
Administration had failed to detect.
Worst of all though the lingering partisan warfare undoubtedly made it
more likely that the Democrat Party would do what it in fact did: adopt a
policy of wartime treason more openly than at any time since the Sixties,...
and I DO mean the EIGHTEEN Sixties.
It is not for nothing that Al Gore has been called the Aaron Burr of the 21 st
Century, not because he killed anybody, but because like Aaron Burr in
1800, when he saw an opportunity to steal a presidential election and
possibly get away with it, he took it, and left it to better men than himself to
save the nation from his folly.
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