Obama: "Al Gore won" (and that's the truth)

At that preposterous (and unconstitutional) "Compassion Forum" last night, Hillary Clinton took a FOX-style swipe at both Al Gore and John Kerry--asserting that they lost because they were "elitist" candidates (just like you-know-who).

Now, one might actually agree that Gore and Kerry are elitists, just like most other leading Democrats, including, of course, Hillary herself (and, one fears, Obama, too). There is, however, no excuse for Clinton's claim that those two candidates lost their elections: no excuse, even though the myth that Gore and Kerry "lost" has been repeated all but universally for years, by nearly everybody in the media, the Democratic Party and Bush/Cheney's GOP.

It was therefore a cause for raucous cheering when Obama said, "I have to say, I think Al Gore won." It was a statement to be wildly cheered, because no other candidate has dared to make that necessary claim (in public).

Not that there weren't problems with Obama's statement. One was that equivocal "I think," suggesting that Gore's victory is a matter of opinion--when it's a fact that Gore prevailed in Florida. The media consortium that finally went through all the ballots there determined that, if all the votes in that state had been counted, Gore would have been declared the winner, and, therefore, the President of the United States. (For the exact numbers, see the attached Table 1 from the media consortium's report, which is available on-line at

http://www.aei.org/docLib/20040526_KeatingPaper.pdf.)

This may come as news to you, since Gore's win was thickly obfuscated in the press reports, which cast it as a victory for Bush. That's the Big Lie that we got from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CBS News et al., which is especially weird, since those very institutions were all part of the consortium that carried out that vote-count. They lied about Gore's win because, by the time the vote-count was complete, it was two months since 9/11, and the nation was "at war," so that it would have been just too damn troublesome to tell the truth.

And, once having lied, it was impossible for those outlets to redeem themselves by coming clean; and so they keep on variously claiming, even now, that Bush beat Gore. A few weeks ago, for instance, the Times's Nicholas Kristof wrote a column likening Hillary's diehard drive against Obama to Ralph Nader's theft of Al Gore's victory in 2000. The column resonated strongly all throughout the media and cyberspace, with everybody and his brother parroting that line, and nobody (unless I missed it) pointing out that Nader could not possibly have made Gore lose, because Gore didn't lose; and if the Democrats were too damn cowardly to fight on his behalf, that's not Ralph Nader's fault.

In any case, the other problem with Obama's statement was that it referred to Gore alone; when there is mountainous (and ever-growing) evidence that Kerry won Ohio-- evidence that is no less persuasive for the many loud and groundless claims, by various would-be "debunkers" on the right and left, that no such evidence exists. (There's also copious hard evidence that Kerry won, or did far better than reported, in many other states from coast to coast.) That Obama wouldn't go so far as to point that out as well is disappointing--although no surprise, since he has always held (in public, anyway) that Kerry "lost" Ohio.

And so, while it is marvelous indeed that he proclaimed the truth about Gore's win, we can't stop pushing him, and everybody else, to face the facts about Bush/Cheney's second theft of power. We just can't stop: because the next election is quite likely to be stolen, too; and the only way to stop it--or, once it's happened, to get the people ready to resist it-- is to tell the truth, at last, about what Bush/Cheney and their men have done to this democracy, while Gore and Kerry, Clinton and Obama and a lot of other Democrats have let them get away with it.

MCM