(This update courtesy of Agape Press.)
by Allie Martin
(AgapePress) – The author of a book detailing the crisis in the aftermath of the recent Presidential election says former Vice President Al Gore did not lie when he said he would do anything to capture the White House.
As senior White House correspondent for The Washington Times, Bill Sammon was assigned to cover Vice President Al Gore's campaign for the White House. Sammon covered not only the Gore campaign, but also the 36 days after the election as the nation waited through legal challenges and multiple recounts to see who would win Florida — and the White House. Sammon describes that period as “probably the most exhausting and also exhilarating” he has ever been through as a journalist.
The prize-winning reporter has chronicled the post-election drama in a new book titled At Any Cost. The book records the tactics Gore's team made in an attempt to claim victory. For example, Sammon writes that as the Vice President was telling the nation he wanted every vote counted, Gore's attorneys were able to disqualify thousands of military ballots. Among those ballots was that of serviceman John Russell, who volunteered to help clean up the damage left after terrorists bombed the USS Cole, killing 17 military personnel in Yemen.
“John climbed into a small … tugboat, which they were worried might have been booby-trapped, and pushed this crippled destroyer [the Cole] away from this very dangerous situation and out to safety,” Sammon says. “While this is happening, 8,000 miles away in Jacksonville, Florida, Gore lawyers are throwing his ballot out and then high-fiving each other in celebration.”
According to the veteran political reporter, the television networks gave Gore his most potent weapon in the post-election struggle: the popular vote. Sammon says thousands of voters in Florida's western panhandle had more than an hour to think about the futility of casting a vote for Bush after the networks all but called the election for Gore.
“[The networks] called the State of Florida for Gore before the polls had closed in the western panhandle, and there's up to half-a-million registered voters who still had time to vote,” Sammon says. “What that did was it cost Bush a net loss of 10,000 votes. Why is that important? Well … Florida was decided by only a few hundred votes — it was the very closeness of the outcome that was so tantalizing to Gore that encouraged him to hang in there for all these weeks.”
Sammon also points out that on election night, networks called many states for Gore as the polls closed, even as the margin of victory for Gore was narrow. He says those same networks held off calling some states for Bush for hours — even in states where he won by a wide margin.
And even as Gore was running out of legal options and the recounts were wrapping up, Sammon says one of Gore's operatives had one last-ditch effort to claim victory. One of the chapters in his book is devoted to Bob Beckel, the Democratic strategist who tried to get Florida electors to switch their vote from Bush to Gore. Sammon says Beckel's activities became a “something of a public-relations disaster” for the Democrats.
“[Americans] didn't want someone tampering with the Electoral College,” Sammon says. “As a result, Gore was sort of forced to come out publicly and distance himself from Beckel's quest.”
Sammon, who spent two years covering Gore's Presidential campaign, says he is not surprised at what he sees as a Gore's desperate and unprecedented effort to reverse the election's outcome. In his book, Sammon also recounts how Gore personally orchestrated a smear campaign against Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who oversaw the state's recount efforts.
