hi
this just posted on msnbc blog. apparently John Kerry will and will not take part in the recount. can I say it anymore clearly? good grief. an intersting piece though and claims the mainstream media is comming to terms with a recount. comming to terms? this is funny
art
November 22, 2004 | 11:15 p.m. ET
Hanging Chads and Hanging Participles (Keith Olbermann)
NEW YORK - You don't have to wait for the Ohio Presidential Recount to get confused. Just pay attention to the recasting of news releases from the Ohio Democratic Party.
Early Monday afternoon, Ohio Chairman Dennis White released a comparative bombshell inside the still tiny world of the Recount-Conscious. It bore the headline "Kerry/Edwards Campaign Joins Ohio Recount" and advised that "assuring Ohioans receive an accurate count of all votes cast for president has prompted the Democratic Party to join the initiative to recount the results of the November 2 presidential election."
But by 8 PM Eastern, a second press release was out, with two notable tweaks. Now the headline read "Kerry/Edwards Campaign Participates In Ohio Recount," and the lead sentence read "...has prompted the Democratic Party to participate in the initiative to recount the results..."
The switch from "join" to "participate" reduces the Democratic commitment from virtual co-sponsorship to nearly the level of acquiescence. In late afternoon, Ohio Dems' spokesmen Dan Trevas told us that the remains of the national Kerry/Edwards campaign had approved the original press release and "gave us the authority to proceed with this. Tomorrow we expect to have a letter from them to Kenneth Blackwell" which would ask Ohio's Secretary of State to proceed with a recount.
But the lead Kerry lawyer on the ground in Ohio, Daniel Hoffheimer, was more cautionary. "What they meant to say is that the Kerry/Edwards campaign will be putting witnesses in the Boards of Elections if a recount is asked for... We are not requesting a recount."
At this point, the words are being that carefully chosen and, evidently, debated. So don't think when John Kerry said in his web-exclusive statement and video Friday that "Regardless of the outcome of this election, once all the votes are counted..." he wasn't being deliberately vague. Similarly nuanced were the words of the Ohio Democratic chair, Mr. White: "As Senator Kerry stated in his concession speech in Boston, we do not necessarily expect the results of the election to change..."
Howard Fineman, chief political correspondent of Newsweek and since the days of our old The Big Show an MSNBC analyst, summed up the exact inexactitude of Kerry and the Democrats about Ohio, on the Monday Countdown. "They keep saying these little things designed to make clear, at least to their supporters and the whole blogosphere out there, that they take the possibility (of a Kerry victory) and the need for a recount seriously."
Fineman put it in terms that the mainstream can't ignore. He told me he'd talked to Ohio's Mr. Blackwell earlier in the evening. "There in fact will be a recount," Howard said with a sigh that encapsulated all of the Florida 2000 Experience. "We will be talking about chads once again."
As Kerry himself calculated early on November 3rd, the Provisional Ballots alone obviously could not provide anything close to enough bona fide Democratic votes to overcome President Bush's 135,000 vote plurality in the Ohio election night tally. But as Howard also pointed out - and my colleague David Shuster so thoroughly extrapolated in a previous post on Hardblogger - the Provisionals plus the "Undercount" could make things very close indeed. The punch-card ballots "where it looks like nobody marked anything" when read by an optical scanning machine, might produce thousands of legitimate votes if hand-counted and judged by Ohio's strict laws defining how many corners of the proverbial chads have to be detached to make a vote valid.
In Ohio, the reality of the recount is beginning to sink in, and local governments aren't happy about it. The Associated Press ran a story Monday afternoon in which its reporter quoted the incoming president of the Ohio Association of Election Officials, Keith Cunningham. "The inference is that Ohio election officials will not count every vote," said the man who is currently head of the Board of Elections in Allen County (that's the Lima area, northwest of Columbus). "That's just insulting; it's frivolous and simply harassment."
Advised of the recount push by the Green and Libertarian Parties, and their plan to sue to force a second tally even before Secretary of State Blackwell is scheduled to certify the first count, Cunningham said his statewide group might sue back to prevent a recount. "I need to see if this is merely my opinion or reflects the opinion of the association."
The issue may boil down to money. The Glibs had raised $235,000 as of Monday morning, an amount which covers the $113,600 bond they had to provide as demanded by Ohio election law, plus some of their own organizational expenses. But Cunningham said the actual expenses would "crush county governments," and a spokesman for Blackwell said the final cost could be $1.5 million.
So there it is. There will be a recount in Ohio. Unless there won't be. And the Kerry campaign staff will participate in it. Unless that's too strong a word for them.
Keep those email coming at KOlbermann@msnbc.com
