“I believe you can speak things into existence.”
— Jay-Z
Let me tell you when I knew George W. Bush had beaten Al Gore in the 2000 Presidential Election.
It wasn’t when The Supreme Court ruled in his favor demanding the recount in Florida to halt and the 61,000 or so votes that the vote tabulation machines had missed not be counted.
It was when, immediately following the election where the initial count gave Bush the win by 1,784 votes, Bush and his team started acting like winners. Bush and his team immediately formed a transition team, started floating the cabinet nominees, and – in general – despite the recounts and court challenges and uncertainty — acted with absolute certainty that they’d won.
Gore and his team did not do that. They wanted to take a wait-and-see approach — citing the sacred value of every citizen vote and the counting there of. They did not want to act in any way that would be perceived as presumptuous of the will of the people.
Bush and his team had no such grounding to stay them — like it or not, right or wrong. In the hardscrabble politics of the modern era, there is no time to wax and wane philosophically. They knew that. Gore did not. That’s when they won.
Today, there is one side that is acting as if their win is assured. They are speaking as if it’s already happened. They are figuring out who will fill the various vacant positions and how they will implement their plan.
The other side is having philosophical arguments over who their candidate should even be despite the primary voters having already decided that and delegates pledged to carry out their decision.
While we are still months away from election day, who do you think has won?