Gore was elected president, Biden says; No he wasn’t, says . . . the New York Times?

We all know Joe Biden will say pretty much anything, and smart people know enough not to take his advice on everything from the use of firearms to whether you should stand up (especially if you're in a wheelchair). So it's not that big a surprise that he would peddle total fiction about something like the 2000 presidential election. But he is the vice president of the United States, and this is an important topic, so this is worth taking him to task on.

After being introduced by Al Gore on Tuesday night during a fundraiser for Massachusetts Senate candidate Edward Markey, Biden said the following: "This man was elected president of the United States of America. But for the good of the nation, when the bad decision, in my view, was made, he did the right thing for the nation." OK, false and false. He was not elected president. And at no point did he selflessly put his own interests aside and do "the right thing for the nation."

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Let's examine both claims. First, Democrats love to go around saying that Gore had the election stolen from him, and they base this claim on the notion that if only the Supreme Court hadn't stopped the recounts, Gore would have won. That is simply false. No less than the house organ of the Democratic Party, the New York Times, admitted as much a year after the election. From November 12, 2001:

A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward. Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have charged, the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore. A close examination of the ballots found that Mr. Bush would have retained a slender margin over Mr. Gore if the Florida court's order to recount more than 43,000 ballots had not been reversed by the United States Supreme Court. Even under the strategy that Mr. Gore pursued at the beginning of the Florida standoff -- filing suit to force hand recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties -- Mr. Bush would have kept his lead, according to the ballot review conducted for a consortium of news organizations.

The piece does go on to lay out one scenario in which the authors say Gore might have eked out a narrow victory - one in which a statewide review of all rejected ballots had been conducted - but the truth is that this is not what Gore asked for in demanding a recount. He only wanted recounts of heavily Democratic districts, and this was the very thing the Supreme Court said violated equal protection. Truth is rarely a consideration where Joe Biden's mouth is concerned, but the truth is that George W. Bush won Florida. Period. Now, as to this notion that Gore somehow chose this magnanimous path of putting aside his challenges for the good of the nation . . . Bolshevik. Gore pursued legal challenges of the election results for a full six weeks after Election Day. He only conceded after the Supreme Court ruling left him nowhere to go, and this coming a mere day before the members of the Electoral College were required under the Constitution to meet and certify the election results. The matter of who Florida's electors would be had to be decided. That is one of the reasons the Supreme Court took the case and ruled with such finality. It was time for the matter to be over, as it would have should have been six weeks earlier, but was not because Al Gore refused to accept the result until he had no choice. Al Gore was not elected president. And Al Gore thought of no one and nothing but himself in his actions following Election Day. Joe Biden can weave whatever fiction he wants, and Democratic partisans can repeat that fiction until Kingdom Come if they like, but the facts are what they are.