Bush v. Gore's Lessons for 2008

2000 election mess colors Obama-Clinton contest
By Nick McMaster,  Newser Staff
Posted May 26, 2008 3:30 PM CDT
Bush v. Gore 's Lessons for 2008
In this image released by HBO, Laura Dern portrays Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris in a scene from the docudrama "Recount," a behind the scenes account of the 2000 presidential election scandal premiering Sunday, May 25 at 9 p.m. EDT.    (AP Photo/HBO, Gene Page)

Memorial Day dates from the Civil War, but this week, thanks to HBO’s Recount, a different internecine conflict will be in the air: the 2000 election. The generally factual portrayal of the Florida snafu gets Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker thinking about another hairsplitting debate over vote counting. Perhaps inevitably, he zeros in on Hillary Clinton and her claims that she's winning the popular vote over Barack Obama.

"These statements must be read with the sort of close grammatical and definitional care that used to inform her husband’s descriptions of his personal entanglements," Hertzberg cautions. "They are not quite true in the normal sense, but if made under oath they would not be prosecutable for perjury, either." (More power grab stories.)

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