Jane Smiley says Gore was right to concede the 2000 election because if he had continued the fight, the Republican machine would have done everthing earthly possible (regardless of legality) to thwart a Gore presidency much in the same way (or worse) they did when Bill Clinton was on the job. Not an unrealistic speculation, to be sure, but her central argument fell flat for me.
Gore got more votes in Florida even with the illegal actions of Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris; if anything, he should have fought harder. Smiley's argument that Gore would have essentially failed as a president due to Republican meddling and subterfuge does not erase the fact that a crime was committed in 2000 and Gore allowed it to happen. I don't buy the notion that a constitutional crisis was avoided. Because of Gore's concession, a constitutional crisis greater than anything that could have been created by continuing to contest the Florida vote count was imposed on more than 300 million people. A crisis that continues to fester. I'm not going to drag out the list this time because we all know what I'm talking about.
I thought Gore should have run again in 2004, but since he didn't, we got stuck with four more years of George the jackass.
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