withdraw my concession. i mean, hell, his brother was the governor but, you know, he was like my brother and al was like hey. i will never forget his facial expression. he hung up the phone and everybody cheers, and then somebody says, wow, you called jeb bush his little brother. so al says, i didn t call him his little brother, he called him his little brother. as the bush team squirmed in austin, it fell to bill daley to deliver an unprecedented message, that gore had withdrawn his concession. it was 4:00 p.m. and gore said to me, you do it. i said i m not going to do it. forget about it. i m not going to go out there on tv he said, no, you do it. so i thought, oh, my god, i have to do this to a million people worldwide watching this to figure out who is the president of the united states. this race is too close to call and until the recount is concluded and the results in
notorious butterfly ballot. how would you describe what happened to al gore in florida? he got screwed by a bad ballot in palm beach that the democratic leadership in that county signed off on. the butterfly ballot had punch holes for al gore and ultra conservative pat buchanan located dangerously close to each other. just asking for mistakes. i can tell you that the people came out of the voting booth into the hundreds, knowing, realizing they had punched pat buchanan s number thinking it was al gore. had the butterfly ballot not happened, al gore would have been president of the united states. no doubt in my mind, period. a big glitch that after election day left gore scrambling to fix the unfixable. they had a real argument to make about that ballot but only
yes. yes? yes. why? because we had more votes. we just needed to get them counted. the vice president s residence on friday night was a party. everybody was thrilled about the victory in the florida supreme court because we felt that it was the preface to a victory overall because it would give us the recount we wanted. but there was no joy in bushville. excruciating, just excruciating. i just remember thinking it just seemed unfair and arbitrary. it was like being on a treadmill. i mean, we never knew from day to day whether we were going to win or whether we were going to lose. we d lose a case one day, we d win one the next day. as baker had predicted from day one, he would have to look to another court for the final outcome he wanted. we felt that we had sound constitutional arguments in our favor. i think it was probably the biggest disappointment that i
set him up as a sore loser? do you regret telling gore to concede in the first place? yeah, yeah. uh-huh. i do. at the point that we recommended that it was over, there was no other option as long as florida was with bush. should democrats have made more use of president bill clinton who was kept on the sidelines by the gore campaign? we did not utilize him to his full effectiveness. no question. everybody goes through, did you use bill clinton that s all al gore had won the national popular vote by more than half a million. he lost the two most important votes, the one in the electoral college, and the one at the supreme court. case closed. even now the dispute lives on because nobody can prove for sure how voters intended to vote. i think more people went to the polls intending to vote for al gore for president than
the war memorial in nashville, tennessee. vice president al gore is inside getting ready to publicly concede the presidential election to george w. bush. it was total chaos as we were trying to get into the war memorial, pouring rain. the vice president and lieberman s family and that whole group had gone in. the secret service, the police, everybody was on edge. they re on the phone with bill daly, and he said, what s up, mike? i said, billy, we haven t lost, this is going to be an automatic recanvas. this is too close to call. i was seeing my life flashing before me, breaking out in a sweat. what do we do here? that s when he contacted david morehouse. everything was ringing and vibrating. told him, grab the vice president, get him into a holding room with joe lieberman. everybody freeze. michael feldman was trying to get hold of me.