2000 Presidential Election

4 Key excerpts on "2000 Presidential Election"

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  Modern America: A Documentary History of the Nation Since 1945

  A Documentary History of the Nation Since 1945

  • Robert H Donaldson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Fahrenheit 911 , showed a Bush administration detached from the human consequences of the September 11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Conservative talk show hosts railed against liberals, whom they accused of being unpatriotic in their lack of fervor for the war. Seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, former Vermont governor Howard Dean received enthusiastic support for his strong stance against the war in Iraq. The Democratic nominee, John Kerry, took a more balanced stance, but in the process failed to offer a clearly defined alternative to the Bush administration’s policies. In November 2004, George W. Bush won a second close election to begin his second term in office.

  In the early spring of 2005 Iraq held its first national election and a year later formed its first elected government, but the insurgency continued, as did the threat of civil war.

  DOCUMENT 20.1 The 2000 Presidential Election: A Contested Outcome

  In the 2000 presidential race, Texas governor George W. Bush defeated Vice President Al Gore in a hotly contested election that was tainted—or at least questionable—in the minds of many participants. The first of two texts below is an excerpt from the U. S. Supreme Court decision

  Bush v. Gore

  (issued December 12, 2000). The court concluded, for a variety of reasons, that the decision by the Florida Supreme Court to continue the recounting of votes should be overturned and the recount should be ended. The second text is George W. Bush’s victory speech, delivered the next day at the Texas State House in Austin

  .

  SOURCE: 531 U.S. (2000) No. 00-949.

  Bush v. Gore (December 12, 2000)

  The right to vote is protected in more than the initial allocation of the franchise. Equal protection applies as well to the manner of its exercise. Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another. It must be remembered that “the right of suffrage can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen’s vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise.” Reynolds v. Sims

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  The politics of voter suppression

  defending and expanding Americans' right to vote

  • Tova Andrea Wang(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  6

  THE ELECTION OF 2000 AND ITS FALLOUT

  The presidential election of 2000 was a national drama the likes of which no one alive had ever seen. A race too close to call on election night was still not decided when voters woke up the next morning, as the narrow margin in Florida triggered a recount of that state’s votes. Al Gore’s lead in the national popular vote meant nothing if Florida’s electoral votes were given to George Bush. With the presidency hanging in the balance, the nation watched as the recount drama spun out for more than a month, including involvement of the U.S. Supreme Court.1 In the end, Bush was deemed to be the victor in Florida, and was thus declared the next president.

  During the recount of the votes in Florida, the whole country was given a view into what really went on behind the scenes in the voting system. While people in previous eras had been well aware of obvious disenfranchisement measures aimed at particular communities, the public of the twenty-first century had little idea of how dysfunctional and under–resourced our decentralized system of election administration was, and how easily the system could be manipulated to partisan advantage. As a nation we learned that the vote manipulation practices that originated over one hundred years ago were still with us in force, albeit sometimes cloaked in more subtle forms. Reporters, political scientists, and legal experts have since chronicled the efforts to manipulate that Florida vote, including, of course, the famous punch-card ballots, the felon purge, the butterfly ballot, and the multiple legal maneuverings of the two parties. These rampant irregularities, and their apparent effect on the outcome of the election, sparked national outrage.

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  Winning the Presidency 2008

  • William J. Crotty(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Bush Presidency and the 2008 Presidential Election Context and Imprint WILLIAM J. CROTTY

  We need to be able to read the page before we turn it.

  —SENATOR PATRICK J. LEAHY calling for a truth commission to investigate the Bush administration

  This chapter focuses on the factors leading up to the 2008 presidential election, those that combined to set the environment in which the presidential race would be fought. It serves as an introduction to the analyses to come in each of the following chapters and provides an overview and context for understanding the 2008 presidential race.

  The Bush-Cheney Presidency: Setting an Agenda for the 2008 Race

  The actions and policies of the Bush administration established, directly and indirectly, the agenda for the presidential campaign. The accomplishments, failures, and ambitions of the Bush administration were the baseline from which all else flowed. Given the controversial and historically pathbreaking actions of the administration in a number of areas, it constituted a level of significance that is difficult to summarize. The issues generated by the Bush-Cheney years raised questions about the nation’s constitutional design as well as the wars in progress, the relevance of established legal procedures, and, most markedly for the 2008 race, an economy in deep trouble. How such concerns were to be addressed and their impact on the presidential contest and its outcome are questions at the heart of the 2008 presidential contest.

  With this as prelude we turn to a discussion of governance—policy, administration, and law during the Bush-Cheney years. The canvas is exceptionally broad—academicians, legal analysts, foreign and domestic policy experts, and the courts will be debating and dealing with the issues raised as well as their budgetary and social consequences and America’s relations with the international community for decades and generations to come. The Bush presidency was in a very real sense a transitional presidency, one that set an agenda for the 2008 campaign and one the incoming Obama administration must address in its many multilayered facets.

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  Unstable Majorities

  Polarization, Party Sorting, and Political Stalemate

  • Morris P. Fiorina(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Hoover Institution Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 10 The 2016 Presidential Election—An Abundance of Controversies

  Even by the colorful standards of presidential primaries, the 2016 election cycle has been filled with jaw-dropping, head-scratching moments .

  —Eric Bradner

  While the world celebrates and commiserates a Donald Trump presidency, one thing is clear: this will go down as the most acrimonious presidential campaign of all .

  —Rachel Revesz

  Controversial presidential elections are nothing new in American electoral history, 2016 being the latest, but certainly not the first. Despite much apocalyptic commentary, however, the implications of the 2016 election seem less dire than those of some elections held in earlier eras. The four-candidate 1860 election started the country on the path to civil war and the disputed election of 1876 threatened to reignite that conflict. In more recent times, the strong showing of a racist third party in 1968 coupled with political assassinations and civil disorders on a scale not seen since the labor violence of the early twentieth century led some contemporary observers to believe that the country was “coming apart.”1 The 2000 Florida electoral vote contest raged for more than two months, threatening a constitutional crisis and deeply dividing partisan activists on both sides. Still, even allowing for the fact that secession and revolution are not seriously on the table, for the sheer number and breadth of the controversies that accompanied it, the 2016 election does seem out of the ordinary.

  Parties have nominated flawed candidates before—Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Democrat George McGovern in 1972, for example—but at least since the advent of scientific survey research, no major party has nominated a candidate so wanting in the eyes of the electorate, let alone both doing so simultaneously. Charges of ethnocentrism and racism are as American as apple pie, but in their prevalence and virulence in 2016 (with misogyny added to the toxic mix) they were reminiscent of 1928, if not the late nineteenth century.2 “Biased media” is a complaint common to all elections, but the retreat from objectivity by the mainstream media in 2016 struck many observers as a significant break with modern journalistic practices.3 The increasingly visible role of social media like Twitter threatened to further diminish the importance of the legacy media. Swing voters, largely missing in action in recent elections, suddenly reappeared in 2016.4 Possible foreign intervention in the election was a new development (at least insofar as the United States was the intervenee rather than the intervener), as was FBI involvement (but possibly only because earlier instances did not become public). Meanwhile journalists scrambled to read up on “populism,” which had not played such a significant role in American elections since the 1960s. “Class,” long ago displaced by discussions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation in college course syllabi, enjoyed an academic as well as political revival (so did “authoritarianism,” another oldie but goodie).5

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