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withdraw my concession. >> i mean, hell, his brother was the governor but, you know, he was like my brother and al was like hey. i will never forget his facial expression. >> he hung up the phone and everybody cheers, and then somebody says, wow, you called jeb bush his little brother. so al says, i didn't call him his little brother, he called him his little brother. >> as the bush team squirmed in austin, it fell to bill daley to deliver an unprecedented message, that gore had withdrawn his concession. it was 4:00 p.m. >> and gore said to me, you do it. i said i'm not going to do it. forget about it. i'm not going to go out there on tv -- he said, no, you do it. so i thought, oh, my god, i have to do this to a million people worldwide watching this to figure out who is the president of the united states. this race is too close to call and until the recount is concluded and the results in
notorious butterfly ballot. how would you describe what happened to al gore in florida? >> he got screwed by a bad ballot in palm beach that the democratic leadership in that county signed off on. >> the butterfly ballot had punch holes for al gore and ultra conservative pat buchanan located dangerously close to each other. just asking for mistakes. >> i can tell you that the people came out of the voting booth into the hundreds, knowing, realizing they had punched pat buchanan's number thinking it was al gore. >> had the butterfly ballot not happened, al gore would have been president of the united states. no doubt in my mind, period. >> a big glitch that after election day left gore scrambling to fix the unfixable. >> they had a real argument to make about that ballot but only
>> yes. >> yes? >> yes. >> why? >> because we had more votes. we just needed to get them counted. >> the vice president's residence on friday night was a party. everybody was thrilled about the victory in the florida supreme court because we felt that it was the preface to a victory overall because it would give us the recount we wanted. >> but there was no joy in bushville. >> excruciating, just excruciating. i just remember thinking it just seemed unfair and arbitrary. >> it was like being on a treadmill. i mean, we never knew from day to day whether we were going to win or whether we were going to lose. we'd lose a case one day, we'd win one the next day. >> as baker had predicted from day one, he would have to look to another court for the final outcome he wanted. >> we felt that we had sound constitutional arguments in our favor. >> i think it was probably the biggest disappointment that i
set him up as a sore loser? do you regret telling gore to concede in the first place? >> yeah, yeah. uh-huh. i do. at the point that we recommended that it was over, there was no other option as long as florida was with bush. >> should democrats have made more use of president bill clinton who was kept on the sidelines by the gore campaign? >> we did not utilize him to his full effectiveness. no question. >> everybody goes through, did you use bill clinton -- that's all -- >> al gore had won the national popular vote by more than half a million. he lost the two most important votes, the one in the electoral college, and the one at the supreme court. case closed. even now the dispute lives on because nobody can prove for sure how voters intended to vote. >> i think more people went to the polls intending to vote for al gore for president than
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it weren't big. florida goes for al gore. now, folks, the equation changes. it happens like that. in the air, florida for gore. boom. ladies and gentlemen, let's pause here because this could be decisive in the election. >> 25 decisive electoral votes that could deliver the presidency for al gore. at the governor's mansion in austin, there was pure anguish. >> there was this pall. it was quiet. when i asked president bush 41 how he was doing, he said, "not so good right now." >> what were you thinking about the network projections? >> the feeling from our people crunching the numbers was that the networks were wrong. >> karen hughes wasn't the only one unconvinced. >> i don't believe that some of these states that they've called like florida -- i don't believe -- i don't believe we've got enough evidence to call the state. >> that state's going to flip. i really feel that way.
would work for al gore. >> even democratic. >> even democratic oriented law firms because everyone was afraid of antagonizing the bush family, antagonizing the governor, and losing important state business. >> did you have any evidence that they had been called by the -- >> no evidence that anyone said anything to anybody. stuff didn't have to be said, right? it was all just obvious. it turned up that the name of the governor of the state of florida was the same name as the name of the person we were running against. you know, and so nothing had to be said, and i'm not saying that governor bush did anything wrong. i don't believe he did. i want to be clear about that. but it wasn't a fair process. it wasn't a neutral process. it was a process that was rigged against us. >> what was rigged? >> kind of everything. so we could start with the fact that the person who was in charge of making sure, of directing the counties to do
george bush in florida, yes. >> i thought george bush had won. >> even republican operative max steponovich agrees. >> i believe that people who went to the polls and voted elected george bush. i believe the people who went to the polls that day and intended to vote probably elected al gore. >> most elections are screwed up. the presidency of the united states is really at risk based upon that. >> i, george walker bush, do solemnly swear -- >> on january 20th, george w. bush was sworn in as the 43rd president of the united states. and the 2000 election entered the election books as the closest and most controversial race in modern political history. so to this day, you think you won. >> i think it was fundamentally a tie. i think if we had kept counting,
went to work immediately to keep the count frozen. >> i found literally a broom closet on the floor beneath where everybody was working where i could close the door and think and write. >> after just 36 hours to prep, olson and boyce climbed the marble steps. each ascending into a legal stratosphere no one could have scripted. >> the time pressure's here, the fact that the presidency of the united states was at stake. the fact that this was a political battle, a media battle, and a legal battle all taking place. so-called perfect storm, all taking place in a very short period of time. >> for 90 machines, the two men went -- 90 minutes, the two men went at it. >> we'll hear an argument in 00949 george w. bush and richard chainy versus -- richard cheney versus albert gore. >> for florida, they believed the rules had changed by allowing the statewide recount.
texas, will become the 43rd president of the united states. >> i actually get a chill when i say it right now. i said i've got to go to see al. >> what lieberman didn't know was that gore had already decided to concede. he placed the call. >> just said, governor, you know, i put up a fight or whatever he said, i forget the exact rights, conceded, it was a very short call. i think governor bush just thanked him. there was no love lost between either one of these guys. they didn't like each other, period, so it was probably a ten second call at most, and that was it. >> at the time he conceded, jeb bush was still over there on his computer and he's like i don't know what they're seeing. i don't know what numbers they're seeing. i think it's still too close. >> were you guys kind of surprised? it sounds like jeb was -- >> i think jeb was surprised -- when vice president gore called to concede. >> jeb bush was the governor of florida at the time trying to deliver the state for his big brother. he wasn't the only one scratching his head at gore's concession. >> our numbers were going back and forth. >> at headquarters michael