A Campaign Gore Can't Lose

A Campaign Gore Can't Lose - Washington Post

Gore Says He's Focusing on Global Warming, Not '08 Presidential Run - AP

A chill just went up through me the other day as I saw Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen say, “We simply cannot afford for Al Gore to lose again.”

Two things come to mind - the ‘race card’, and my dad and 'hanging-chads'.

The race card appears because in 2000 Black people forgot, too easily I’d say, how Mr. Gore, a Tennessee democrat, used a Black face to scare the ‘votes’ out of Whites, in his challenge of fellow democrat Michael Dukakis, in the 1988 democratic presidential primary. Gore’s creation, later used most effectively by the senior Bush, was Willie Horton, furloughed Massachusetts’s prisoner turned rapist.

Gore also reminds me of the days of my father, via the democratic handling of ‘hanging-chad’ voting machines in Florida, which allegedly had hand in placing junior Bush into office. My Dad, a life-long democrat, always complained about the broken-down voting machines in our own Black neighborhood, until he found out who was responsible.

Dad’s short answer was that the democrats owned the ‘Negro’ vote, so unless they predicted a close race, it did not matter if those votes were poorly counted, or not counted at all. The good machines went to White democratic precincts where every vote always ‘counted’, as he said.

In 2004, the Florida democratic team was ‘hoisted by its own pitard’. It was not the republicans who stole the election, but rather the democrats who gave it away, due to their own marginalization of Black votes, whose importance they failed to predict, and capture, for accurate inclusion.

Before Gore attempts to run again, I hope voters regain their memories, including a better understanding of why both he and Senator Kerry earned their losses.

James C. Collier

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