I am promising myself that before I leave, I will write at least 10 more entries....some kind of a final good bye to this country. So this is he first one in a series of 10 you will see in next couple of days before I fly off to Zurich.
Lets talk elections..this season has already had so much fun. For me, it is probably the first and the last one and I am sure I will be watching everything unfold from India. I was, and I am still, a strong Obama supporter. Despite whatever he might do after getting elected, and be assured: world is littered with stories of charismatic uld have crossed over the magic number of 270 electoral votes. It became all the more important because Al Gore could not even carry his home state of Tennessee. So it all came down to Florida....and as Tim Russert famously said at that time...it would be FLORIDA, FLORIDA, FLORIDA. Exit polls showed a comfortable win for Gore and all the channels, including Fox, declared Gore the next president. Then results started coming in from different places and it became plenty obvious that someone did not do a good statistics class. Sampling error was big and it messed up in a big way cascading into a number of as high as 10%. So as more and more results came in, Bush soon got a lead and Bush team led by Karl Rove were able to get Bush declared winner by first getting it out on Fox. Gore was on his way to a concession speech but soon decided against it when it became clear that the margin was much much less than 1% of the vote which would prompt an automatic recount and there were good chances that Gore might win especially if Palm Beach can contribute.
The biggest problems reported were in Palm Beach County. This county was home of a big Jewish elderly population and since Gore's running mate was Joe Lieberman, it was expected to go heavily democratic. It did not go that heavily for Gore and there were unusually high number of votes that were disqualified...and more surprisingly, Buchanan, who was a candidate of the independent party had a surprisingly good showing there. Now why is Buchanan's performance surprising? Because he came down hard on Jews during his campaign, even questioning the Holocaust. So two factors seem to have suppressed a very big win for Democrats: 1) Voters did not know how to punch the card(and important here is that chad had to come out at least from one corner and not just get "impregnated") and 2) too many people ended up voting for Buchanan whose name was next to Gore Lieberman thinking that they were voting for the latter.
It seems obvious that there was nothing Democrats could do about the latter situation but warring parties soon formed to squeeze out votes from the first situation. The whole story ended when Katherine Harris stopped accepting results after 5:00p.m. on Tuesday beyond which legal battles finally ended up in the Supreme Court where a conservative majority bench gave Bush his 1st term by 5-4.
What is the best lesson about that situation seems to be, and it is still true today,that America is so much divided between red and blue that such nonsense would still find partisan support. You would find very few people who would stand back from their loyalties and call the chaos of the situation by its proper name. There seems to be certain acceptance for "EVERYTHING GOES" during election time and it seems to have started from the 2000 elections with the way Bush went after McCain and how the verdict was finally given...when even the supreme court judges, each one of them, voted according to their political affiliations( I must note that independent research groups in a project after the election was long over concluded that Bush would have won in a recount).
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