Transparency.
The Daily Howler on what Brit Hume said on Monday (and repeated here in this Tuesday Grapevine column):
A top strategist for Al Gore’s 2000 president campaign says the Gore camp deliberately caused a traffic jam on a major artery in southern New Hampshire on primary day that year to keep Bill Bradley voters away from the polls. The disclosure came from Gore strategist Michael Whouley, who said the Gore team had seen exit polls indicating a large number of independents, many who live in the up scale suburbs, were turning out to vote for Bradley.
So, they organized a caravan to clog traffic on Interstate 23 late in the day to keep potential Bradley voters away from voting places. The disclosure was made at a Harvard symposium and picked up first by the Boston Phoenix.
A little rubber is meeting the road on this one in the blogosphere, despite Whouley’s adamant denial of the Phoenix’s account. What you should really stop and think about, for a moment, is why, exactly, the éminence grise of Fox News would go about hyping an easily discredited story that links Al Gore with three-year-old political dirty tricks in New Hampshire.
How very… interesting.
(The new question becomes: why on earth would l’éminence grise strive so mightily to discredit Colin “For this I blew my creditability” Powell? Anyone see anything interesting in those tea leaves?)
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If this is true (which I doubt) than it's an idiotic strategy.
Look at map--I 93 is a road you take to get out of the state, not to get to your polling place. Look at those towns, too--Concord, Manchester, Nashaua, sure those will have sevaral polling places, but most of the communities are tiny, with the polling place in the town hall, or maybe, since the town halls are often unheated, the local church annex or community center.
You don't need I 93 to get to those places, and everyone knows at least five alternate routes for when the tourists arrive--for the primary and then in the Fall for the foilage.
Ah, but Lisa: Brit Hume is paid 8 large. (Or is that 8,000 large? What is a million in that parlance? They've got to have a word for a million, right? Guys like that?) Point being: he doesn't have time for such petty tasks as looking at a map.
And Whouley's pretty awe-strickenly adamant that it's patently untrue; his "statement" that's the only hard evidence is clearly a joking dismissal of a rumor. --But these are the people who control our discourse these days, to quote the Daily Howler. It's going to get worse before it gets better.