I was just thinking that in the closing days of the campaign, Obama has wildly beloved former President Bill Clinton, and former VP, Presidential Candidate and Nobel Laureate Al Gore actively campaigning on his behalf...

John McCain has Joe The Plumber.

it's an interesting contrast n'est-ce pas?

The recount battle didn't determine anything, except how corrupt the Florida Secretary of State and Governor (Jed Bush, brother of soon-to-be worst President ever, George W. Bush) were.

The presidency was appointed to Bush by a Republican dominated Supreme Court. In making the appointment, the Supreme Court stood on no precedent, abandoned its support for state's right in hypocritical fashion, and demonstrated that the next four years would feature complete dominance of all branches of government by the Republican party -- which showed no compunction about using that dominance for purely political gain, as demonstrated by and sanctioned by the Supreme Court's decision in Gore vs. Bush.

What strikes me about all this today, is that I'll be money Jeb Bush kicks himself every day for engineering his brother's victory in Florida. Jeb was the brother who was always viewed as a future President, but his perpetual fuck-up brother George has made it impossible for him to get elected.

Heh.

I hope Gore uses the occasion to talk about the need to appoint Supreme Court judges - but without focusing on abortion. The SCOTUS has become big business's best friend, and the people's worst nightmare.

i am shocked at how much attention they are paying to florida. i wonder if they are seeing that it's closer than they'd like? i think they missed an opportunity to make the first time that clinton & obama campaigned together a bigger deal by doing it the same day as 30-minute ad buy. i trust the obama camp's strategy no matter what so they must have seen/be seeing something to invest so heavily (i.e, money, time and attention-grabbing firsts) here in the last couple of weeks before election day. at this point, it seems more of a symbolic victory (turning fl blue) because they don't seem to need the ev's, no?

Al Gore -- Nobel laureate, Academy-Award winner, former vice president and president elect -- returns to Florida on Friday to campaign for fellow Democrat and current presidential candidate Barack Obama.

There. Fix it for them.

Strictly speaking, Gore was never president elect; he never had a majority in the electoral college. But his popular vote victory should have been noted.

Also strictly speaking, he did not win the Academy Award; the producers of the movie did.

at this point, it seems more of a symbolic victory (turning fl blue) because they don't seem to need the ev's, no?

Obama's campaign doesn't believe in the 50+1% strategy that has dominated presidential politics since Clinton in '92. They seem to be going for a more inclusive sort of campaign - one that seems strange because the last two decades have been dominated by a particular election strategy that has been useful to some folks, but kept the country divided in some really non-healthy ways.

More power to 'em. The closer the election is to a popular referendum on our next President than to a game of Bingo, the healthier our political system can become.

Grumpy wrote: "Strictly speaking, Gore was never president elect; he never had a majority in the electoral college. But his popular vote victory should have been noted."

Strictly speaking, Al Gore was the legitimately elected President of the United States in 2000. Strictly speaking, Cheney and Bush seized power in a bloodless coup, and were not, and have never been, legitimately elected officials.

The post-recount analysis of the Florida results by a nonpartisan media consortium found that if every legally cast ballot -- including both undervotes and overvotes -- had been counted in accordance with long-established Florida election law, then Gore was the clear winner. That's why the Republicans -- including partisan Republican hacks on the Supreme Court who blatantly violated their oaths of office -- fought, successfully, to prevent all the votes from being counted.

And of course that was all after the Florida election had already been stolen, with Jeb Bush's and Katharine Harris's criminal conspiracy which disenfranchised tens of thousands of eligible Democratic voters by deliberately falsely identifying them as "felons" and purging them from the voter rolls.

@FLDem - I'm more shocked at McCain's lack of attention.

McCain can not win without Florida. Period. I can think of no realistic electoral outcome that gets McCain over 270 without holding Florida. And yet his ground game has been two steps behind Obama's from the start.

Florida's been close two election cycles in a row. A smarter more strategically oriented canidate would have made certain it was secure. McCain has not.

Obama has the resources to stretch the map and he's using them.

Florida will always be an electoral prize because of its electoral votes (27 -- if I remember correctly). Those votes easily offest three or four other states' totals, making it more cost-effective to campaign there.

What's lost in all the talk about 2000 and 2004 is that in 2000 there's no real dispute any more that a majority of Floridians woke up intending to cast their ballots for Gore. In effect, the Democrats won Florida in 2000.

In 2004, with Jeb Bush still in control of the state, and nationalism on the rampage at the behest of the Bush family and Rove's game plan, Florida was lost to the Democrats, but not overwhelmingly.

Now, in 2008, the pendulum has swung against nationalism, and the economy is front and center -- including the housing market, which was boom/bust for Florida over the past four years.

Democrats have every reason to fight for Florida, and not simply to lock down Republican assets that might be used in other battleground states. Winning Florida next Tuesday, or on any Election Day, deals an almost crippling blow to the Republican party.

Florida is in the lean blue catagory on Open Left's electoral map. I think that Nate Silver has it as lean blue, too.

There doesn't appear to be voter surpression going on there this year. in fact there is an article on Daily Kos about a revolt of county auditors who are refusing to throw out regisgtrations that have slight descrepancies on them. Instaed the auditors are allowing votgers to lcear up the discrencies when they vote.

So Obama may win there.

However, Obama doesn't need to win there. He can win even if he loses Florida. For that matter, he can win even if he loses Florida, Penn and Ohio. Or Florida Penn and Virginia. or keeps Penn but loses Ohio Florida and Colorado.

And so on.

My advice: go play with an electtoral map. It's a very reassuring acgtivity.

Speaking of motivated Sunshine State Democrats, I just early voted here in Gainesville, FL this morning! There were lines (good news!), and the flow was extremely fast paced and well organized. I was in the front door and out with my 'I voted' sticker in about 15 mins.

Vincent Bugliosi wrote a definitive account of the Activist Supremes. The right has screamed for years about "Activist" judges - Just read a comment on a David Horsey blog in the Seattle P-I from a right winger decrying the numbers of activist judges who will oppointed by President Obama. "Oh, my, they will legislate from the bench - they will take our guns".

The reason for the activist charge against Thomas, Scalia and Renquist was that they reached a conclusion first, then, frantically had their law clerks try to come up with any argument and rule of law to support that conclusion. This turning IRAC on it's head is the purest form of activism. Their argument was basically, "Because We want it that way". Might as well have had the Queen of Hearts declare "Guilty", pronounce sentence and then have jury selection.

i trust the obama camp's strategy no matter what so they must have seen/be seeing something to invest so heavily (i.e, money, time and attention-grabbing firsts) here in the last couple of weeks before election day. at this point, it seems more of a symbolic victory (turning fl blue) because they don't seem to need the ev's, no?

if FL is really winnable, Obama's making a great investment in getting the networks to call the race early.

Based on when the polls close, it'll be hard for the networks to call it before 9:00 pm EST. The earliest states likely to be called include several that will probably go McCain (GA, KY, SC, WV), and also among the earliest to close the polls are several that could be too close to call right away (IN, VA, OH, NC) - meaning when people tune in early (before 8:00 pm EST) there's a good chance they'll see Obama trailing.

The block of states where the polls close at 8:00, though, includes a boatload of Obama EVs (IL, NJ, PA, MD, most of New England) as well as FL. If FL and any combination of VA, NC, OH, IN and MO are called for Obama by 8:30 or 9:00, the table will be thoroughly set for when the polls close at 9:00 in NY, MI, MN, WI, etc. Obama would be over 193 EVs at that point, which is all he'll need based on the overwhelming likelihood that he picks up 77 EVs from CA, OR, WA and HI (not even factoring in CO, NM or NV). The networks could call it shortly after 9:00 pm, Obama could give his big speech well before anybody's thinking of going to bed, and it'll feel like a landslide. Nobody will have to find out in the morning who won.

On the other hand, if 9:00 rolls around & all of those eastern 'toss up' states (FL, OH, NC, VA, IN & MO) are still too close to call, it's a lot more likely that the networks will hold off making a call until closer to 11:00. For a lot of people that would make the election seem closer than it really was, and given the expectations could put sort of an asterisk on Obama's win.

So no, Obama doesn't need FL & OH the way Kerry did (or McCain does) - but getting those states & a few others in his pocket early WILL shape the way people think about what happens on Tuesday.

Getting high vote counts even in states that don't ultimately tip to Obama will lead to an ability to declare a mandate if he is elected.

I think it is highly telling that McCain is still trying to get PA. Regardless of whether or not his ads and memes are declared to be unequivically "racist" his strategy definitely is. He is focusing on PA because Murtha called his consitutents "rednecks" and "racists" and McCain is counting on that.

Interesting that Florida is also particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, between increased hurricane strength due to warming ocean waters and rising sea levels.