Wasn't a cake walk
Campaign, nor voting counts, too
Not the first, you see
Fourth in history [1]
Bro held all the cards [2]
Something Dems have done, too
Blago'vitch's way
Won for JFK [3]

The slimmest race of all [4]
The "loser": in the Mall [5]
No "tide of victory":
Gore lost Tennessee! [6]

1824:
Andrew Jackson, strong there
The figures don't make sense
'Cept for Presidents
Winning biggest vote
'Lector'lly, belonged there
Congress was the tool
'Ccording to the rules [7]

And yet, it happened twice
Another one, not nice [8]
These things should be outlawed:
Violence and fraud [9]
The "loser" made a deal:
Control, Fed: South, repeal [10]
He won; the Dems: South, gain
Why should Gore complain?

In 1888
Did you lose home state, too?
Cleveland, Gore: the same [11]
Home state: rather lame
Some folks on your side
Surely must berate you
But what can you say?
Own state: disarrayed

The Judges did decide
By Flori-da, abide
Supreme Court told them, "No"
Gore just would not go
Recount is on again [12]
The deadline, they extend [13]
It mattered not at all
As Palm Beach dropped the ball [14]

Let's hear no more squawk
It's al-ways been real bad
Politics of land
They lie and shake your hand
Something in us cries
And it makes us feel sad
It all makes no sense
Choosing Presidents
But you see...
The winner takes it all
Or sometimes takes a fall
And loser grabs the ball....

[fade, as confidence in all Government and *both* major parties continues to fade, too.]





[1] Don't worry, there will be lines and footnotes about the other three. (You knew that, right?)

[2] See the song linked in the intro for the role played by the then-Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, the brother of George W. Bush.

[3]
We quoted JFK, who, when asked about the level of involvement and influence that his father had held in his razor-thin presidential victory, said that on the eve before the election, his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., had asked him the exact number of votes he would need to win - there was no way he was paying "for a landslide." (Footnote #11, should you not wish to read the entire parody.)

Kennedy won Illinois by less than 9,000 votes out of 4.75 million cast, or a margin of two-tenths of one percent. However, Nixon carried 92 of the state's 101 counties, and Kennedy's victory in Illinois came from the city of Chicago, where Mayor Richard J. Daley held back much of Chicago's vote until the late morning hours of November 9. The efforts of Daley and the powerful Chicago Democratic organization gave Kennedy an extraordinary Cook County victory margin of 450,000 votes—more than 10% of Chicago's 1960 population thus barely overcoming the heavy Republican vote in the rest of Illinois. Earl Mazo, a reporter for the pro-Nixon New York Herald Tribune, investigated the voting in Chicago and claimed to have discovered sufficient evidence of vote fraud to prove that the state was stolen for Kennedy.

The Chicago Tribune wrote that "the election of November 8 was characterized by such gross and palpable fraud as to justify the conclusion that [Nixon] was deprived of victory." Had Nixon won both states, he would have ended up with exactly 270 electoral votes and the presidency, with or without a victory in the popular vote.

Texas, home of Kennedy's running mate, Lyndon B. Johnson, also appears to have been stolen. For example, Fannin County had only 4,895 registered voters, yet 6,138 votes were cast in that county, three-quarters of them for Kennedy. Now, TT is not very good at math, as everyone knows, but there's something fishy there.
In an Angelina County (TX) precinct, Kennedy received a higher number of votes than the total number of registered voters in the precinct. (Wow! Won 110% of the votes!) When Republicans demanded a statewide recount, they learned that the state Board of Elections, whose members were all Democrats, had already certified Kennedy as the official winner in Texas.

So there, Al Gore. Your party did it first, and in more states. So why the whining when the shoe is on the other foot?

(Don't get us wrong -- We'd like to see *all* elections be honest. It's the *hypocrisy* of the Democrats' whining that's galling.)

[4] Only in Florida, where the winning margin was the smallest percentage of votes cast of any state in any POTUS election ever. Nationwide, it was the second-closest race, behind 1876.

[5] Same poetic license as in the linked parody: The White House is several miles north of the National Mall in Washington, D. C. (where the Congressional and other buildings are), but it's an easy rhyme. ;)
.
[6]
Gore failed to win his home state, Tennessee, which both he *and his father* had represented in the Senate. It wasn't nearly so close as the much-publicized Florida race: Bush won Tennessee by a comfortable 4% margin.
Gore was the first major-party presidential candidate to have lost his home state since George McGovern in 1972. Had Gore, the incumbent Vice President, been able to get the votes of the same people who elected him four times to the House of Representatives and twice to the Senate, by huge margins every time, the whole Florida thing would have been moot. Gore would have won easily had he carried his home state -- a point often overlooked.

So don't blame anyone in Florida, Mr. Crybaby. Blame yourself.

[7]
There were four candidates. General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee (have we mentioned Tennessee before?), a charismatic hero of the War of 1812, won 41% of the popular vote and 99 Electoral College votes, the most of any candidate, but not the *majority* of the Electoral College vote required to win the Presidency.
John Quincy Adams, son of the second POTUS, John Adams, was second on both counts, with 31% of the popular vote and 84 EC votes. William H. Crawford, former Secretary of War and the then-current Secretary of the Treasury, and Henry Clay, the then-current Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, split the remaining votes, both popular and Electoral, fairly closely, about 11-15% each.

Since no candidate received a majority of EC votes, the race would be decided by the House of Representatives. Per the Twelfth Amendment, only the top three candidates in the electoral vote were candidates in the House: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and William Harris Crawford. Left out was Henry Clay, Speaker of said House. Clay detested Jackson and had said of him, “I cannot believe that killing 2,500 Englishmen at New Orleans qualifies for the various, difficult, and complicated duties of the Chief Magistracy." (Hey, it worked for Civil War Hero U. S. Grant, and for WWII hero Dwight Eisenhower....)

Clay threw his support to Adams, who therefore won, shocking Jackson, who clearly expected to win.
There were rumors that Clay did so in return for being promised the position of Secretary of State, to which Adams indeed appointed him. What? Politicians making bargains, swapping votes for office, pardoning Nixon -- Not in the U. S. of A. !!! ... at least, not until 1824, the sixth Presidency and only 35 years after the office was established.

[8]
The election of 1876 was one of the most disputed presidential elections in American history. (Is this phrase getting repetitive yet?)
Democrat Samuel J. Tilden outpolled Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the popular vote, and had 184 electoral votes to Hayes' 165, with 20 votes uncounted. These 20 electoral votes were in dispute in three states: Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. (Did someone say "Florida", or are we having flashbacks? As Yogi Berra said, "It's like deja vu all over again!")

[9]
In Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, reported returns favored Tilden (Democrat), but election results in each state were marked by fraud and threats of violence against Republican voters. (Sounds like 1960 Chicago to us...)

One of the points of contention revolved around "the design of ballots". Okay, this is getting weird. (Theme from "Outer Limits" plays -- "Doo, doo, doo, doo..... Doo, doo, doo, doo.....) No hanging chad, but... forget the details. History just repeats itself, that's all.

Back then, African-Americans voted heavily Republican, having been emancipated by the Republican President Abraham Lincoln barely a decade before, and seeing the Democratic Party as the source of the Southerners who fought to keep slavery. They were intimidated or otherwise disenfranchised in these Southern states. (My, how quickly people -- of all races and ethnicities -- forget!)

[10]
Many historians believe that an informal deal was struck: In return for Democrat acquiescence to Hayes' election, the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South and end Reconstruction. The compromise effectively ceded power in the Southern states to the Democrats, where it remained until 1972, when Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern in a landslide, carrying 49 states, including the entire South. and McGovern's home state of South Dakota (see [6]. McGovern won only Massachusetts and Washington, D. C., the latter being pretty much a "gimme" for Democrats for many years.

[11]
In 1888, Republican Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote to Democrat Grover Cleveland by 0.8 percentage points, but won in the Electoral College with a massive 233-168 lead. Most of that came from his victory in Cleveland's home state of New York, which at the time was the US's most populous state. Had Cleveland carried his home state (Is there an echo in here? Is there an echo in here?), he would have won, 204-197.
So Mr. Gore had a strong precedent in not becoming President. (Oh, Fg/TT.... ;)

[12]
So here we are, finally back to the 2000 election.
Gore requested hand recounts in four counties: Broward (Fort Lauderdale), Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia (Daytona Beach), as provided under Florida state law. The first three are the state's southeasternmost counties, excluding the Florida Keys; constitute the largest single megalopolis in the state, and have the highest percentage of immigrants or retirees from liberal Northeast states like New York. Hence, Gore's strongest part of the state.
Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris announced she would reject any revised totals from those counties if they were not turned in by November 14, the statutory deadline for amended returns. (OK, if that's the law, that's the law, right?)

[13]
The Florida Supreme Court extended the deadline to November 26. Why, and on what authority? Laws are supposed to be made by legislators, not by courts -- nor by Presidents [cough] ... a decision later vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court. (Makes sense.)

[14]
Palm Beach County, rich with rich elderly people, many of them retirees from New York, New Jersey, etc. (and also home of the Kennedy family compound), and therefore strongly leaning to Gore, failed to meet the extended deadline, anyway.

On November 26, the state canvassing board certified Bush the winner of Florida's electors by 537 votes. Gore formally contested the certified results, but a state court decision overruling Gore was reversed by the Florida Supreme Court (again, why?), which ordered a recount of over 70,000 ballots previously rejected by machine counters. The U.S. Supreme Court quickly halted the order. End of story.

We don't want to bring back the exclusionary "literacy tests" of the 1800s South, but if you can't fill out a little circle with a #2 pencil as you've been doing since third grade, or punch a hole in a card sufficiently for a machine to read it, should you be choosing the President of the United States? Or anything else, for that matter?

Any-way: History repeats itself; election fraud and controversy were not invented by George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, or the state of Florida, nor were popular-vote-losing Presidents. 186 years of all of that, and by *all* parties.


"Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" -- Winston Churchill