Word: recounting
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...after the Florida recount was brought to an abrupt end in 2000 by the Supreme Court, Connecticut Senator and former vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman was back at work in the Senate. "It was very important to me to come right back to work, I think it was my nature, but I think it was a lot of people's nature," Lieberman said, standing just off the Senate floor last week as his Republican colleague Bob Bennett happened to pass...
...Obama may now have the Democratic nomination all but sewn up, and even reinstating the delegates from Florida and Michigan (the other state sanctioned by the DNC for holding an early primary) almost certainly wouldn't change that. But memories of the 2000 presidential election recount crisis should be enough to dissuade a candidate from dissing Florida, the burgeoning, bellwether swing state with a mother lode of independent voters (almost a fifth of the electorate). And of all the large states Obama has had trouble winning in the primaries, Florida presents one of his biggest challenges in the general election...
...Still, Recount portrays Republicans as not so much stealing the election as getting lucky (with the Palm Beach "butterfly" ballot that led seniors to accidentally pick Pat Buchanan over Gore), then aggressively going after the jump ball in the media, the courts and the streets. In Recount, the enemy is often Democrats. Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher (John Hurt), elder statesman of Gore's recount effort, is portrayed as a wet noodle, fretting about honorable compromise while Baker goes to the mattresses. Gore's running mate, Joe Lieberman, hands the Bush team a gift by declaring that challenged military...
Seen this way, Recount is more important for what it says about intra-Democratic politics than about the interparty battle. (Bush and Gore appear only in clips, in shots from behind or as off-camera voices.) As Gore's brass-knuckled campaign staff (Spacey as recount captain Ron Klain and Leary as field director Michael Whouley) urge the likes of Christopher to fight GOP fire with fire, you can see the seeds of the schism between netroots activists and Establishment Dems. The activists regard their colleagues as sellouts or wusses, too refined to throw a punch and too concerned about...
Through Gore's defeat, Recount hints at the emergence of the Democrats of 2008. Clinton and Obama have each argued that they know the post-Florida way to win: Obama by embracing the grass roots, Clinton by promising to whale on the Republicans. But with those lessons came a zeitgeist that views elections as dirty unless proved otherwise. How to marshal the spirit of '00 rather than be destroyed by it will be the challenge for whichever candidate wins. And I apologize in advance for using that verb...