Krugman Forced to Waste A ColumnExplaining
what he meant in the last column.
This reaction seems to confuse three questions. One is what would have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court hadn't intervened; the answer is that unless the judge overseeing the recount had revised his order (which is a possibility), George W. Bush would still have been declared the winner.Can you imagine how angry our side would have been if the recount had gone President Bush's way, and then the judge revised his order and the result was a Gore victory?
The third is what would have happened if the intentions of the voters hadn't been frustrated by butterfly ballots, felon purges and more; the answer is that Mr. Gore would have won by a much larger margin.And the fourth is what would have happened if the media had not declared Gore the winner in Florida before the polls closed in the panhandle of the state; some analysts estimate that the announcement cost Bush 10,000 net votes. Tons of ink have been spilled on why the media declared Bush the winner in Florida early in the morning; very little investigation went on as to why the earlier call was made.
More broadly, the story of the 2000 election remains deeply disturbing - not just the fact that a man the voters tried to reject ended up as president, but the ugliness of the fight itself. There was an understandable urge to put the story behind us.One suspects that had Kerry eked out a victory over Bush in Ohio, Paul Krugman would never have written a word about how a man the voters tried to reject ended up as president.
Moron Krugman at
Ankle-Biting Pundits, the
Chief Brief and
Donald Luskin.
Also Marathon Pundit.
