And the winner was?

Significantly, the Gore lieutenants -- former DNC political director Jill Alper and Boston politico Charlie Baker -- who told Young to head to the Democratic stronghold instead of trying to enfranchise other voters, did so with the understanding that the Gore plan was to run up as many votes as possible. The thinking went: If Gore were ahead after Volusia, Broward, Palm Beach and Dade counties had finished their counts, then Bush would contest the election. If not, Gore would do so.

Whichever it was, sooner or later, Alper and Baker thought, someone would make the move in the "contest" phase to bring all the 175,000 unread ballots into a courtroom, like the climax of "Miracle on 34th Street."

Throughout the campaign, Gore lieutenants referred to the circle of higher-ups as "The Matrix," a reference to the 1999 sci-fi thriller about an evil artificial intelligence computer power that runs the world autocratically. This was not a compliment.

And when it came time to contest the election, the decision by the Matrix -- in this case, Gore, Sen. Joe Lieberman, Bill Daley, Warren Christopher, Ron Klain, Michael Whouley, Carter Eskew and Bob Shrum -- to not even remotely attempt to attempt a statewide hand recount severely disappointed the Gore lieutenants. It made many of them feel like frauds.

Instead, after the election was certified and the "contest" period began, the Gore team went after 51 votes here, 192 votes there. It was a desperate scramble. And as they entered the final phase of the post-election melee, they succeeded in this: They never, not once, made a serious attempt to have all 175,000 undervotes and overvotes examined.

Indeed, the Gore strategy mystified Bush staffers. One of the Bush attorneys, Michael Carvin, wondered how the Gore legal team thought it could secure the presidency based on just some of the 175,000 unread ballots being looked at, from four Democratic counties. It was a strategy so brazen, he was convinced that there had to be more there.

There wasn't. Gore, at that point, was mired in a pool of self-righteous indignation and hopelessness, and so were his staff members. And it caused some bizarre, not to mention disingenuous, behavior. They pushed the idea that, had Palm Beach County's late hand-recounted numbers been counted by the biased secretary of state, Katherine Harris, Gore would have picked up 215 votes. The actual official number, according to Palm Beach County's elections supervisor, Theresa LePore, was 174 net Gore votes.

According to LePore, a Democrat, the official number had always been 174, and she still has no idea where that 215 figure ever came from.

Either way, why would Gore choose such selective recounting? Because his team thought the law allowed it, thought that their friends on the Florida Supreme Court would permit it, and they weren't sure a statewide hand recount would lead to the inauguration of President Al Gore. Thus, the Gore effort truly never was about counting every vote.

At the same time, Gore loyalists and many journalists -- including the Washington Post -- maintained that the Gore team just couldn't try to count every vote, that it was simply too unrealistic.

But even Gore lieutenants recognize this to be a sham argument. The Gore team argued in court that there were unread ballots in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties -- while ignoring the same phenomenon in Republican-leaning counties all over the state. Why couldn't they have asked a judge to examine all of them? There is no answer to this. Practicality is not an argument; all of this was unprecedented, and the Gore team could have certainly asked for a statewide recount during the contest period. What they were asking for -- the inclusion of just enough selected votes from selected counties for Gore to win -- is certainly no more reasonable.

Next Page: A strategy that was morally bereft -- and dumb

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