Word: weeks
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...rest of us, Americans had been patient, understanding that a close race may take time to sort out. But by last week the conduct had become so reckless that patience required some courage and faith; reasoned arguments about fairness were drowned out by angry mobs charging that Gore was "the Commander in Thief," a "chad molester," even as Democrats charged that Bush would burn down the White House before he'd let Gore live in it. The uniform code of conduct in a democracy - the assumption of good faith that allows politicians to quarrel one day and compromise the next...
...public comments did not even leave open the possibility that machines might have missed legitimate votes, only that Gore was determined to keep counting until he got a result he liked. Gore's Democrats were, for the first time in a long campaign, united behind their leader last week, if only out of shared disgust at his enemies. Democrats kept finding new fuel for their indignation: when Trent Lott denounced the Florida Supreme Court's "unelected judges" for usurping the rights of the people by letting the recounts continue; when Florida Republicans threatened to name their own set of electors...
...Sunday, the Bush camp for the first time felt some genuine dread. "I guess the rules aren't the rules anymore," said an ally bitterly. Didn't it mean anything that the votes had been counted and counted again; the state legislature had set a one-week deadline for the counties to certify their results; and the secretary of state had affirmed it? Now the state Supreme Court was throwing that deadline out and making a new one all its own. That wasn't interpreting the law, it was inventing it. "Make no mistake," Bush said the next morning...
...Gore, for his part, grew only more determined to fight as the week wore on. He believes, according to people who talked to him late last week, that if all the votes had been fairly counted, he would have won Florida by more than 30,000 votes. In his view, the fact that he won the national popular vote gives him license to prove he would have won Florida as well, were it not for badly designed ballots and faulty voting machines. The state court was reconciling conflicting statutes when it extended the deadline for completing the hand counts that...
...Supreme Court decision to take the case looked like a huge Bush win: no matter what the final hand counts revealed, there was now a chance they'd be tossed out. But some Democrats saw it as a lifeline: it was a chance to fight on at least another week and, if the Justices ruled their way, to gain the ultimate legitimization of the manual recounts. "I don't think Gore can walk away," said Louisiana senator John Breaux, widely considered the most agnostic about new legal challenges to the election. "As long as something is pending in court...