an important win for vice president al gore, nbc news projects that he wins the 25 electoral votes in the state of florida. a very, very important state for al gore, and now the pressure is on. florida has called for vice president al gore and gore s march to the white house picks up momentum. that sent a little bit of a shock wave of panic through the headquarters. carl rowe to his credit recognized that there was something wrong with the results. and i would also suggest that florida has been prematurely called, i thought it was a little irresponsible of the networks to call before the votes were counted in the western part of florida. florida, pennsylvania and michigan, in his column, vice president al gore begins to build the foundation that could get him to 270 electoral votes. we had set up a speech room prep room for al gore to practice his victory speech. i told eli addy who was the
up his phone conversation with george w. bush where he was withdrawing his concession. are you going to go out there like a man and say we re waiting for the recount? but there was a great moment where bush says, my brother says i won. i don t think your brother gets to decide if you re president of the united states. the secretary of state has al gore trailing the president elect in the state proved to be pivotal by 565 votes. and there are some votes that s not even a wide spot in the road. and there are still some votes that have not been counted. just a couple hours ago, the tv networks called this race for governor bush. it now appears that their call was premature. so when the networks called florida for george bush, the margin as we left the headquarters was about 50,000 votes. by the next morning, the margin was 1200 votes with 6 million votes being cast. that was certainly within the range of an automatic recount in florida. i remember telling my wife that ba
got a call from a network correspondent saying don t concede. the florida numbers are wrong. apparently, al gore is still planning to be here and give this speech which we certainly expect will be a concession speech. i called carter in the motorcade and said, we can t concede. he said to me, by the way, where are you? i m in the hotel. i missed the motorcade. you have to get here. my assistant drove me. when i got to the perimeter, i pointed to my secret service badge and jumped over parameters. the vice president wasn t answering his phone. i ve just been given a two-minute warning for the appearance of al gore.
according to our projections. that was an incredible moment for us. a lot of hugging, a lot of high-fives, a lot of tears. rushed out of the headquarters building on to congress street to go back up to the state capitol, which was beautifully back-lit. it was 40 degrees and raining and a miserable night. nobody cared. just won the presidency of the united states. al gore stood up and said let s get this thing over with. i m going to go down, put my suit on, we re going to the war memorial, and i m conceding. that began a bit of a comedy of errors. brian, we are expecting the vice president to show up any moment. the vice president called bush and conceded before he left for the war memorial. we did see some dejected types walk away, but the vast majority of people stayed here. i missed the motorcade and i
gore voters insist they were confused by what they call an illegal ballot. as a result, 19,000 ballots were tossed out because they contained a double punch or double votes for presidential candidates. several weeks later, we got to saying we want every ballot recounted. in the meantime, as this process is going on, we have the phenomenon of the hanging chad. which led to these extraordinary television pictures of people looking like this. you could certainly have another situation where the election was very close. it was in a state where the election processes are defective, and you had a huge controversy about which ballots to count and which ballots not to count. do i think it s likely? no. what happened in 2000 with the presidency of the united states coming down to the state of florida was something nobody could see. totally unanticipated and probably will be unique in our history.