Most of us can remember that night. The see saw quality of it. I was still in politics then and I had done work with the Bush 2000 campaign in Pennsylvania. My sons, me, and about one hundred pals and professional associates were liquored up in a hotel ballroom in the hinterlands of the Philadelphia ADI. Okay, my sons were too young to be toasted, the oldest was fourteen then, but they were into the frisson of the evening.

You remember what happened. Up, down, we win, Gore concedes, Gore takes it back, stalemate. We went to bed about 3am, thinking it would be dealt with by the time we got up. Nope, December.

But there was no call for an immediate decision then, because the Democrats thought they had a shot in the Florida recount. Well, I’m from Florida. I’m even from Broward County, where the Florida action took place. Worked my first Broward election in 1970, when I was nine. I knew people on both sides of the aisle and they told me, from the gitgo, Gore had no shot. If I knew it, the media must have known it. But they counseled patience until the Supreme Court got to it.

In case you’ve forgotten: “Bush v. Gore, case in which, on December 12, 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed a Florida Supreme Court request for a selective manual recount of that state’s U.S. presidential election ballots. The 5–4 decision effectively awarded Florida’s 25 votes in the electoral college—and thus the election itself—to Republican candidate George W. Bush,” trom the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The case escalated, “As court challenges were issued over the legality of hand recounts in select counties, news stories were filled with the arcane vocabulary of the election judge. County officials tried to discern voter intent through a cloud of “hanging chads” (incompletely punched paper ballots) and “pregnant chads” (paper ballots that were dimpled, but not pierced, during the voting process), as well as “overvotes” (ballots that recorded multiple votes for the same office) and “undervotes” (ballots that recorded no vote for a given office).”

Very much the same situation now. Lawsuits winding their way through courts. But now the Democrats and their media pals want a snap decision. I wonder why? Uh huh. Yeah.

The press and the Democrats must think the American people have become much thicker since 2000. We were supposed to wait then, but not now. Sure.

But then Gore, though mercenary and stiff, had some relationship to reality. When the court ruled against his campaign he threw in the towel and faded into the twilight. Today he cleans out bathroom stalls at Tennessee gas stations. If he continues to improve in his job performance, next year he will get a brush.