The Washington Times

For opportunities to embarrass yourself, there is nothing quite like writing a political column in an election year. One must make predictions, right? And boy, do some of them look bad when the time comes, as it does today for this column, to look back over the year.

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All those lawyers on Team Gore ended up litigating their way to defeat.

View this article at The Weekly Standard

AN ENDLESSLY FASCINATING topic of conversation about the 2000 presidential election has been why Al Gore wasn’t winning big as the nominee of the incumbent party in times of unprecedented peace and prosperity. He had four aces, and he still couldn’t rake in the pot. An equally fascinating question, it turns out, is how he lost the postelection legal maneuvering. Although the thought will be an awful one for Bush supporters to contemplate, there, too, Gore might have had a winning hand — and certainly had a better hand than he played.

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The Washington Times

Republicans have long been rubbing lamps, seeking the magic one containing the genie who would grant them the three wishes they have wished the most: control of the White House, the House and the Senate. The new millennium, fittingly enough, looks like the year the genie has made his appearance at last.

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The Washington Times

To paraphrase the U.S. Supreme Court, addressing the Florida Supreme Court: “Would you mind telling us how the heck you reached that conclusion? We can’t figure it out from your decision.” The surface uncertainty actually masks a great moment of clarity in the post-election wrangling: In the end, there are constitutional and statutory requirements that do govern the process. You can’t make the whole thing up as you go.

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View this article at Policy Review, December 2000/January 2001

The American political system has thrown off some truly anomalous results in the past decade. We have gone from the historic 1994 election (a 50-seat swing in the House of Representatives bringing to power a Republican leadership promising “Revolution”), to an historic presidential impeachment and acquittal, to an historic 2000 election in which voters divided as evenly as imaginable in their preference for Democrats or Republicans. We are practically awash in the historic these days.

Commentary in the weeks after the 2000 presidential election told us to watch events closely, since we would never see their like again in our lifetime. This may be true, but it may also miss the larger point. For those who found themselves disturbed one way or another by the outcome and aftermath of the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore — or as the Clinton impeachment drama unfolded, or as the Republican Congress tried to enact its Revolution — the uniqueness of each event and the unlikelihood of a recurrence may be a false consolation. We may not run into these particular oddities again, but it may be that we are in the midst of something bigger — a pattern of oddity.

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