856 Chapter 32 Shocks and Responses: 1992–Present
when he claimed to have “invented” the Internet.
Bush’s principal offense was against the English lan-
guage. “Rarely is the question asked,” he once
declaimed, “Is our children learning?” His poetic
flights of fancy did not stay long aloft, as when he
evoked American aspirations for “wings to take
dream” and endorsed economic growth to “make the
pie higher.” However exaggerated or garbled their
messages, the candidates spent a record $1 billion get-
ting it to the voters.
Having been inundated with advertisements,
many on election night breathed a sigh of relief that
the election was finally over. They were wrong. By
midnight it appeared that Bush had 246 electoral
votes, and Gore, 267, with 270 necessary to win; but
Florida, with 25 electoral votes, had not been
decided. As returns trickled in, the television networks
reversed themselves and declared Florida—and the
election—“too close to call.” Bush’s lead there was
1,784 out of nearly 6 million cast.
After a machine recount, Bush’s margin in
Florida was reduced to several hundred votes, with
Democrats complaining that a punch-card ballot used
in some communities was confusing, depriving Gore
of thousands of votes; worse, the machines routinely
failed to count incompletely punched ballots. Gore’s
lawyers demanded that the ballots in several predomi-
nantly Democratic counties be counted by hand.
Republicans countered that Democrats had no right
to change voting procedures after the election. They
demanded that the hand recounts cease.
The entire election ended up in the courts. On
December 12, more than a month after the election,
the Supreme Court ruled by a five to four vote that the
selective hand recounts violated the Constitution’s
guarantee of equal protection. Bush’s victory stood.
Nationwide, Gore received 51 million votes,
Bush, 50.5 million. Nader, who did not win any elec-
toral votes, received nearly 3 million.The New Terrorism
After the fall of the Soviet Union, American military
might seemed unassailable. Military dictators who had
been kept afloat by the Soviets or the Americans—and
often from both simultaneously—now were obligedThe gaping hole in the destroyer USS Cole, in the port of Aden, Yemen, was caused by suicide bombers on October 12, 2000. The attack was
linked to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network, based in Afghanistan.