President Gore, President Kerry, and the Great Vacationer

Some guys have all the luck. Or they make their own luck, by hiring the right sort of thieves, knaves and evildoers.

The opinion stated here in this space that voting rights needs to be one of the top campaign issues in the next election cycles got some ammunition from Paul Krugman's new column in the New York Times on how the election of 2000 was definitely stolen, the election of 2004 may have been, and if people don't wake up, you can kiss 06 and 08 goodbye as well.

Krugman writes:

In his recent book "Steal This Vote" - a very judicious work, despite its title - Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I've seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: "Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election."

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore…But few Americans have heard these facts. Perhaps journalists have felt that it would be divisive to cast doubt on the Bush administration's legitimacy…Meanwhile, the whitewash of what happened in Florida in 2000 showed that election-tampering carries no penalty, and political operatives have acted accordingly. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired a company to jam Democratic and union phone banks on Election Day.”

Katharine Harris, who parlayed her service to the Bushcorps into a seat in Congress, is well known for her partisan decisions as Secretary of State in Florida, as well as overseeing the disqualification of thousands of legal voters through the misuse of a computerized felon list, unchecked and full of errors.

Although Gumbel’s book doesn’t question the 2004 outcome, Krugman cites two reports on it, one by the DNC and the other by Congressman John Conyers. Both describe the hours long lines in predominately Democratic districts, caused by too few voting machines, and people forced to cast provisional ballots which were never counted.

Conyers also cites case after case of partisanship by the Republican Secretary of State in Ohio who also ran the Bush campaign there (remember that Ohio was the only state that Bush visited on election day?) – “makes Ms. Harris's actions in 2000 seem mild by comparison.”

Krugman concludes:

And then there are the election night stories. Warren County locked down its administration building and barred public observers from the vote-counting, citing an F.B.I. warning of a terrorist threat. But the F.B.I. later denied issuing any such warning. Miami County reported that voter turnout was an improbable 98.55 percent of registered voters. And so on.

We aren't going to rerun the last three elections. But what about the future?

Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we've seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation. "

Meanwhile, the Daily Pick reveals that President Bush's latest accomplishment is breaking the all-time record for most vacation days by a president of the United States. Ronald Reagan held the old record of 335 days, though Reagan did it over eight years. President Bush surpassed it in nearly half the time!

And despite the presence of Cindy Sheehan and a growing number of Gold Star Mothers and other protestors, not to mention world press, a few miles away, Bush has two more weeks on his current vacation---and three years and change to set a standard in brush-clearing obliviousness that will challenge the next generation of figureheads for election thieves.