Abraham Lincoln Quotes

Taft had a very good sense of humor even when he was self-depricating.

Al Gore had substantially won the popular vote but needed Florida to win the electoral vote. There had been a series of vote counting irregularities with many people being denied the right to vote to the point that no one was sure who had won Florida. The election moved from the ballot box to the courts and the Florida Supreme Court ruled that there should be some recounts in areas where Bush had supposedly won. The Bush forces and the Republicans appealed to the Supreme Court where the judges all reversed their traditional positions to support the party who had nominated them. Liberals who usually voted to have the Federal government override the states, voted for Florida to be upheld. Conservatives who usually supported the right of the States to decide such things without Federal Interference, voted to overturn the State Supreme Court. There were 5 Republicans and 6 Democrats and George W. Bush won the election by one judge’s vote.

That is not terribly different from other democracies including the United States.

On that date, a few days before the election the FBI Director publicly announced that he was reopening the Investigation into possible wrongdoing of Ms. Clinon's use of provate emails. He had earlier cleared her of all criminal wrongdoing and and he claimed that they had found a new computer that had some e-mails that they had not not yet examined for possible criminal activity. In addition WikiLeaks published on the Internet thousands of private e-mails that the Russians had hacked from her campaign chairman and her comittee. The two things started moving her trend down so that she only one the popular vote by almsot 3 million votes and she needed more to overcome the electoral collage gave to rural and small states. Ironically, the FBI went throught the contents of the computer and after the election announced that there was nothing there that incriminated Ms. Clinton, and there was no criminal activity found in all the hacked e-mails. And the FBI Director was chastized by the Republican Justice Department after Donald Trump took office for improperly making pubic investigation details before there were any findings. The FBI Director was subsequently fired but this and otehr reasons were given as the reason.

This appears to be the first time in American history where the losing opposition did not at least claim that they wanted to work with the elected president to better the country. In this case, the partisanship was so bad that the major goal of the Republicans was to do what they could to have the president fail in his first term. To achieve their objective, the Republicans opposed almost every presidential legislative initiative of Obama’s including those that they had supported in previous ones. In several cases, the President proposed to accept previous Republican programs and ideas, and must Republicans then voted against the proposal so that they could deny the president any legislative success even if it moved the Republican programmatic agenda ahead. The Strategy worked in the sense that that Congress passed fewer bills that any in history, but failed to keep Obama from a second term. While the voters were not happy that the President was not able to persuade the Republicans to compromise and pass needed legislation, enough of them realized that the Republicans were more responsible, and reelected the President. The constant opposition to anything Obama advocated and the drumbeat of accusations against him drove his public approval numbers way down. In the process the Republicans drove their own approval percentage under 10 percent. The Republicans followed McConnell’s leadership, hurt the President badly, hurt themselves worse, and hurt the country.