Travel  |  Business World  |  Women's World  |  Entertainment

Change Your Life!

US democracy: He who got 200000 less votes, wins

News
Sports
Chat
Travel
Dhaka Today
Yellow Pages
Higher Education
Ask a Doctor
Weather
Currency Rate
Horoscope
E-Cards
B2K Poll
Comment on the Site
B2K Club

December 14, 2000 

WASHINGTON-- (AP) - Vice President Al Gore faced a gathering consensus that it was over. Alone with his wife and children, he weighed the unhappy next step.

Advisers said the vice president could disclose that step during a conference call scheduled for Wednesday. Several aides said they expected him to concede, though they had no direct knowledge of his intentions. They said Gore would likely make a statement of some sort Wednesday.

The only official statement came late Tuesday when campaign chairman William Daley announced in a written statement after the U.S. Supreme Court's late-night "complex and lengthy" ruling that Gore and his Democratic running mate, Joseph Lieberman, would have nothing to say until later.

"It will take time to completely analyze this opinion," Daley said.

Even so, as the clocked ticked toward midnight (0500GMT), some top aides said privately that Gore would be forced to concede, at last and for real, to Republican George W. Bush.

"That's where every discussion is headed," said one.

"It has gotten to the end," said Sen. Robert Torricelli, a Democrat said.

At least one pro-Gore demonstrator felt the same way. On Wednesday morning, Robin Haar stood alone across the street from the vice president's residence, holding a sign that read "Gore 2004." Asked whether the sign represented a surrender after five weeks, she said it was. "His hope lay in the recount. He's been denied the presidency that was rightly his."

Gore conceded to Bush once before, in a telephone call in the wee hours of Nov. 8, but called back to retract it as the decisive Florida vote appeared more and more uncertain.

With those two phone calls, Gore, who won the national popular vote by more than 300,000, set this unprecedented - oftentimes unthinkable - election battle spinning.

Partial recounts in scattered Florida counties whittled Bush's unofficial lead to a mere 200 votes or less.

But a divided U.S. Supreme Court said Tuesday that the further recount ordered last weekend by the Florida Supreme Court could not be completed by a midnight deadline for selection of Florida's 25 presidential electors and still pass constitutional muster.

Civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson vowed to challenge the process no matter what Gore decided.

Jackson told The Associated Press that his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition on civil rights would obtain the ballots through Florida's open records law and count the votes themselves.

"No matter who the Supreme Court crowns, we will know before January the 20th that Gore got most of the votes," Jackson said. He pressed Gore to fight until any "sliver of an opening the court left is pursued."

But two senior members of Gore's team said the vice president was told by some advisers Tuesday night that he had little choice but to drop his challenge of the now 36-day-old election.