Dems’ Unfinished Business

The Democratic nomination battle may be over but the shouting. The rapid response to President Bush’s "false comfort of appeasement" shot suggests the shouting has just begun.

As Democrats pivot toward the general election, there is still the unfinished business of Michigan and Florida. A point that Bill Clinton recently made on the campaign trail:

All [Hillary] has ever asked for is that everybody vote, that we count the voters that show up, this is about the people not the mechanism. If you wanna punish them fine, but don't pretend they don't exist. And don't pretend it didn't happen. And don't pretend that she wasn't willing to let them vote again and help them raise the money to let them vote again.

It’s self-serving since Hillary desperately needs those votes and delegates. That said, it’s mindboggling that Democrats are having a hissy-fit over HBO’s dramatization of the 2000 Florida election debacle but are largely silent as voters in Michigan and Florida are disenfranchised and their voices silenced in this history-making primary season.

Democrats think Warren Christopher is unfairly portrayed as a wimp. Well, he was a wimp compared to James Baker, the Bush family consigliere who oversaw the Republicans' scorched earth strategy.

For more than a year, I lived and breathed the Florida election drama as the writer and producer of the documentary, "Counting on Democracy." One of Baker's Miami-Dade County street fighters, Roger Stone, told me:

I went there immediately after the election. Until I got there, it wasn’t clear what our strategy would be or what the Democrats’ strategy would be. It became clearer that once they chose not to challenge and ask for a recount in every county, that their strategy was simple. And that was to take that vast number of spoiled ballots which were not clearly and legally executed for Al Gore and convert them to Gore votes by divine intuition.

The whole world knows how well that strategy worked out. To arrange a screening of "Counting on Democracy," send an email here.