Just Another Dismissive Elitist

by Steve Soto

HBO's "Recount" premieres this Sunday, a Kevin Spacey-produced movie on the 2000 Florida recount battle that gave us the catastrophic Bush presidency. In her review of the movie in today's NYT, critic Alessandra Stanley opens with this:

"Every vote counts" is one of those platitudes, like "Watch your step," that doesn’t have much meaning until that first really bad fall.

It certainly had resonance in the 2000 presidential election, when the Florida voting ended in a hairline finish that took 36 days and a Supreme Court decision to resolve. It was historic and historically awful, until the Sept. 11 attacks wiped away much of the anguish and slapstick. For a while, at least, the Florida vote count seemed as trivial and irrelevant as the results of the Henley Regatta after August 1914.

Ms. Stanley, since when is a presidential election recount "trivial and irrelevant", unless you are a Republican who thinks elections are for stealing, or a smug NYT media reporter who can't be bothered with civics?