Rove repeatedly misstates Obama's vote increase over Gore in 2000 to downplay victory
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SUMMARY: Again downplaying President-elect Barack Obama's victory, Karl Rove claimed on Today that the "call for change gave Barack Obama the presidency of the United States with 2.1 percent more than Al Gore got." In fact, in 2000, Gore received 48.38 percent of the popular vote, and according to unofficial election results posted on National Public Radio's website, Obama has received 52.7 percent of the popular vote, which is a difference of 4.32 percentage points.
During the December 2 edition of NBC's Today, when asked about the effect of President Bush's approval ratings on Barack Obama's election as president, Fox News contributor Karl Rove claimed that the "call for change gave Barack Obama the presidency of the United States with 2.1 percent more than Al Gore got." In fact, in 2000, Gore received 48.38 percent of the popular vote, and according to unofficial election results posted on National Public Radio's website, Obama has received 52.7 percent of the popular vote, which is a difference of 4.32 percentage points.
Rove has previously made similar claims to downplay the extent of Obama's victory. During the November 5 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, when asked how responsible Bush was for Obama's victory, Rove responded, "[L]et me put this in a little bit of a frame for you. ... [Obama] got two and a half points better than Al Gore did." Rove added: "So, if this was all about George W. Bush, and -- and you looked at George W. Bush's standing in the polls, and this was all a reaction to him, you'd expect this thing to be a blowout." Rove similarly claimed in his November 6 Wall Street Journal column that Obama did "2.5 points better than Al Gore did in 2000. These small changes on the margin meant all the difference between winning and losing."
From the December 2 edition of NBC's Today:
MATT LAUER (co-host): President Bush said in an interview recently that he is sure some of the votes for Barack Obama recently were a repudiation of Republicans, and he said, "I'm sure some people voted for Barack Obama because of me." He's leaving office with -- with dismal approval ratings. What went wrong? This was, this -- you were the architect in many ways --
ROVE: Yeah --
LAUER: -- of this administration. What went wrong?
ROVE: Well, first of all, let's take what went right. What went right is that we were struck on Novemb -- on September 11, and for seven years he has kept our country safe. He has liberated 25 million people in Afghanistan, and 25 million people in Iraq --
LAUER: So you'd think they'd carry him out on their -- on their shoulders.
ROVE: No, well, look -- look, that's not -- that's not the way the system works. At the end of eight years, Republicans or Democrats have had -- when they've had the White House, people tire of it. And he's asked the country to do a lot of tough things. And he's asked -- he's asked -- we've gone through big and bold changes, and the country doesn't like that. And we have some economic difficulties. I would remind you of economic difficulties.
LAUER: But the call for change became -- came long before the meltdown.
ROVE: Well, and I would rememb-- remind you this: The call for change gave Barack Obama the presidency of the United States with 2.1 percent more than Al Gore got in 19 -- in 2000.
From Rove's November 6 Wall Street Journal column:
But we do know President-elect Obama ran better among frequent churchgoers (perhaps getting 10 points more than John Kerry did), independents (perhaps five points more than Kerry and eight points more than Al Gore), Hispanics and white men. He even made special appeals to gun owners and sent his wife to cultivate military families. This allowed him to carry previously red states like Florida, New Mexico and Iowa.
This combination helped Senator Obama run four points better nationally than John Kerry did in 2004 and 2.5 points better than Al Gore did in 2000. These small changes on the margin meant all the difference between winning and losing.
From the November 5 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes:
ALAN COLMES (co-host): How responsible is George W. Bush and what his administration has left us for what happened?
ROVE: Well, look, if you want to look at it that way, let -- and let me put this in a little bit of a frame for you.
Barack Obama got 1.5 percent more of the vote than did George W. Bush. He got four points better than John Kerry. He got two and a half points better than Al Gore did.
So, if this was all about George W. Bush, and -- and you looked at George W. Bush's standing in the polls, and this was all a reaction to him, you'd expect this thing to be a blowout, not something that was essentially a mild improvement over what John Kerry got. I mean look at that. That's four points better.
COLMES: [inaudible] But you add in the House, the Senate, and the number of gains for Democrats there -- does that not also speak to --
ROVE: Well, look, the Republicans have a challenge, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
Maybe Karl knows how many votes Gore *really* got.
LOL! Yeah - if the FL vote WAS recounted, maybe PE Obama WOULD only get a 2% bump. Great point! I love it!
saw it this morning. the traitor rove said bush "kept our country safe" after 9-11. of course, that ignores the fact that we might have avoided the attack had bush paid half the amount of attention to counterterrorism that clinton did. clinton held weekly meetings devoted just to that subject, and bush held none. bush ignored all the warnings that an attack was coming. as the 9-11 commission said of the summer of 2001, "the system was blinking red". and bush did nothing. white house terrorism chief richard clarke all but begged condi for a meeting with bush, which he never got. matt gushed all over the traitor rove. come back more often, he invited.
And President-elect Obama is keeping our country safe even before he took office.
If Limbaugh wants to blame Obama for the recession he should praise Obama for keeping us safe.
Any why is Rove not in jail? Even his die-hard backers know he belongs there.
the only reason the traitor rove avoided the same perjury charges as libby is because his lawyer got a tip from a reporter who told the lawyer what kind of questions fitzgerald was asking. good old karl suddenly remembered some things he had forgotten about in a couple previous trips before the grand jury.
in any case, bush should have fired the traitor immediately because rove broke the security oath he had signed that said he had to know that classified information, such as plame's identity, was already declassified before discussing it with anyone. her identity was still classified information. and she met all the qualifications for it to be classified under the law, because the cia verified that she had been on overseas trips in the previous five years, using an undercover status.
and lauer was his usual gushing self this morning. talking about the chambliss win in georgia, matt claimed he got a "boost" from sarah palin after she spent monday criss-crossing the state on his behalf. or...there's the more likely scenario. which is, he won because it's a reliably red state.
Simple Sarah is a shameless camera hound. We'll be quite sick of her harpy screeching by 2012.
Chambliss won because the voters who turned out for Obama were less interested in this particular runoff. The Troglodytes, however, were motivated by their fear of the Godless Socialist Gun-hating Secular Libruls having total control of the Senate.
"Simple Sarah is a shameless camera hound. We'll be quite sick of her harpy screeching by 2012. "
Kind makes you wonder just who it is exactly that she's trying to impress? If its the base... she has already lost the next election... and the one after that... and the one after that!
I seriously doubt that any politician that sucks up only to the rightwing base will ever be elected to the presidency ever again!
Yes... we Americans can be rather lazy when it comes to the news... but the next eight years will see a serious increase in internet accessibility... which will mean an increased knowledge base over time... it would be very hard in this country for that to be taken away... and yes... I know... there will always be a certain percentage of our fellow citizens that will forever be lead by their noses... but this group is tiny...
And ever shrinking if we're lucky. Obama did pretty well among younger voters, so maybe we're on the verge of a move back to the center.... we'll see. Obama may totally blow it, but maybe it won't be due to the Republican slime machine selling lies to the gullible, like they did in the 90s.
Frozen yogurt would win, if it ran as a Republican from GA.
On his radio show, Hannity was profusely thanking every caller from GA for saving America from liberal tyranny. Needless to say, the pre-screended callers were too eager to inflate his ego.
"You may end up with a different math, but you're entitled to your math, I'm entitled to THE math."
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(Karl Rove) "...is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in."
what you lie-bruhls are forgetting, is that you have your math and Karl Rove has THE math.
damn you, 1st Republic!
And didn't Truman do a great job describing Nixon in that quote I borrowed?
Of course, Gore received more of the popular vote than Bush did - what do you have to say about that Karl. Idiot. Lauler too.
the fact bush got any votes still astounds me. bush did get 100% of the black vote though. thomas
So where is this 2.1% coming from then? Other than his very large bottom, I mean ... Is he saying that the total number of actual votes for Obama was 2.1% higher than for Gore?
Rove just made the percentage up, knowing that he would not be questioned about its veracity. 50.5 million Americans voted for Gore in 2000 and 67 million voted for Obama this year.
Frankly the whole arument is made up. Rove and others claim it was "blowout" because of Bush ratings, not because of Obama. Do they now claim that Hillary would have also had a blowout, had she been the nominee?
Well, I thought at first Rove might have caught you in error by playing games with the difference between "percent more" and "percentage point difference".
But in fact, Gore got about 51,000,000 votes (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0876793.html) to Obama's ~67,000,000 (http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/president/), which is 31% more than Gore for Obama (((67M - 51M)/51M)*100%).
Leaving [euphemism for dubya's pet nickname for Rove] a lying sack of [euphemism for what he actually is] any way you slice it.
Your CNN link was last updated on Nov 17. Wikipedia gives 68,623,151 for Obama -- 34.5% of Gore's total. Not that this is an interesting number in itself, since populations have increased. But McCain only got 17% more than Bush.
Karl Rove is known for the Rove math, but the rest of the world operates on reality-based math. Rove math is, at its core, based on fabrications, so it should be no surprise that he fabricates (makes s*** up) for his TV viewers.
Here are some reality-based election numbers.
Instead of comparing Obama to Gore in 2000, or Bush in 2004, we should be comparing him to Bush of 2000. Bush won just over 50 million votes. Obama is just shy of 69 million votes, and not all are counted yet. That's in increase of 19 million votes, or 37% more votes than Bush got in 2000. In fact Obama, with the media firmly in the McCain camp, beat Bush's 62 million 2004 vote by 7 million or 11%.
Isn't it just so Rovian for Rove to come up with a new "Rove" metric for deciding victory? The winning score, not the spread is Rove's new metric for determining the success of the winner.
Virtually every other winning metric is determined by the spread. It can be by a nose, or by a mile, but rarely is only the winning number what matters.
As an incumbent, Bush beat Kerry by 2.4%. Obama beat McCain by 7%. In other words, Obama's spread is nearly 3 times (2.83) the Bush/Kerry spread.
But as long as Rove wants to discuss the 2000 election, let's consider that if Bush had Bush had actually gotten 543,896 votes more than he did, and actually won the race by a vote (instead of losing by half a million), then Obama would have gotten 9.2 million TIMES the vote that Bush got. How's that for a spread.
After the 2004 victory, with everyone praising Rove for Bush's crushing defeat of Kerry by 3 million votes, Bush, with Rove's clear guidance, got up in front of the press, with his whopping, butt-kicking 2.4% victory, and claimed he had won some political capital and now he was going to spend it.
Fast forward 4 years and Rove's team has been taken to the woodshed, losing by nearly three times the 2004 Bush mandate spread, in large part because of the very politics Rove put this country through. So of course Rove is going to try to minimize the damage and spew out the non-reality-based Rove math.
Too bad others on his programs don't counter with reality-based math.
Patrick
Patrick...Here's the scorecard for the 'spread'...which puts Obama in the middle of the pack:
-- 1972 Nixon +23%
-- 1964 LBJ +22%
-- 1984 Reagan +18%
-- 1980 Reagan +10%
-- 1996 Clinton +8%
-- 1988 Bush +7%
-- 2008 Obama +6%
-- 1992 Clinton +5%
-- 2004 Bush +4%
-- 1976 Carter +2%
-- 2000 Bush 0%
-- 1968 Nixon 0%
-- 1960 JFK 0%
PATRICK.BRADISH,Well done analasys of that worthless jerk ROVE. All he is ,is a GOP PROPAGANDA MACHINE. No reasonable person should take what he says seriously. All he is doing is crunching numbers to make the REPUBLICAN disasster in 08 not look as bad as it really is.
Rove said Bush kept the country safe after 9/11,sure he did,and the guy standing on the street corner snapping his fingers kept the pink elephants away
Well, I think you've identified the fallacy in the claim that Bush has "kept us safe". It's the classic logical fallacy "After the fact, therefore because of the fact". Truth is, there's no evidence that any of Puddinhead George's policies have kept us safe. Certainly, stepped up security at airports, etc. has probably helped, but any low-level bureaucrat would have thought of that... especially after 9-11.
Your comment about pink elephants is a perfect analogy. My father used to refer to his various dogs as "elephant dogs". If you took the bait and asked him what he meant, he would say, "You don't see any elephants around here do you?"
Puddinhead George is our Elephant Dog.
Nice try by the two of you...but there's one small technicality.
Neither the finger snapper or your ole dad ever actually saw an elephant...pink or otherwise.
Pres.Bush actually faced the elephant called al-qaeda in our own yard...and it has never returned.
Bush may faced a pet goat, but never an elephant. A bit later in his first term, he got beat up real bad by 3 cans of Michelob and a salted pretzel. Face it, Wesley, the man hated his job and he was really really really really bad at it.
Suit yourself...but comparing the catastrophe of 9-11 to the nuisance of a pet goat is pretty shallow...but also par for the course when blinded by partisan hatred.
Where's Osama Bin Laden? And why aren't we actively pursuing him? That's the pet goat in the room that cannot be ignored.
It's simply false to assert that Bush faced Al-Qaeda in the US. He ignored Al-Qaeda and his ignorance played a part in the attacks of 9/11.
VICTORCOLORADO, Your last post about BUSH and 9/11 is 100% correct
comparing the catastrophe of 9-11 to the nuisance of a pet goat is pretty shallow
Well, saying that Bush "faced al-qaeda in our own yard" when, in truth, he was trying to read "My Pet Goat" to school children (http://www.threetwoone.org/uggabugga/2007/my_pet_goat-book.jpg) is perhaps the biggest load of BS even conveyed on the internet. Congrats!
"the nuisance of a pet goat"? It was a children's book that he was reading even as the U.S. was being attacked. "pretty shallow" indeed.
take bush's word for it, as he told bob woodward. he said he was "not on point" about bin ladin prior to 9-11.
"and it has never returned".
As far as we know, that's true. But, is it because of Bush? No way to prove it one way or another.
One thing we do know is that terrorism increased around the world after Puddinhead George lied us into Iraq. Using your logic, he also has to take credit for that.
Whoever sat in the White House would have probably been able to claim that they prevented AlQaeda from another attack after 9/11 due to the fact that whoever was president would have instituted policies that would have protected us.
I can't praise GW for doing what any president would have done.
I'm also trying not to place blame for his doing what no other president would have done and that was to ignore the PDB of August 6, 2001.
Pres.Bush actually faced the elephant called al-qaeda in our own yard...and it has never returned.
And why should it. We provide ample high profile targets in their back yard for their convenience at great expense to ourselves. Far more than the cost of any skyscraper or some jets. The only have pull a grenade launcher out of a hole and pop us one out their back door. We are attacked dozens of times every day.
Your "technicality" is a fallacious non-sequitur. Even if an elephant had gone trampling through his dad's yard, the dogs can't be credited with it not returning ... especially when they didn't keep it out of the yard in the first place. George W. Bush was President when Al Qaeda struck; George W. Bush ignored the NIE warning. George W. Bush ignored Richard Clarke. George W. Bush hired Condileeza Rice, a "Russia expert", who didn't understand non-state actors. George W. Bush bears responsibility for what did happen during his presidency.
as richard clarke said, when the bush people returned to power after eight years, it was if they were "frozen in amber" because they were still stuck on the same themes of iraq and missile defense, ignoring the terrorist threat that had grown in the meantime.
Discounting the obvious woodrow that mmfa has for Rove...and the endless crunching of numbers by political operatives like Rove...Nixon, LBJ, and Reagan are the only presidents to gather blowout percentages of the total votes over the last 50 years. Here's the scorecard:
-- 1972 Nixon 61%
-- 1964 LBJ 61%
-- 1984 Reagan 59%
-- 1988 Bush 53%
-- 2008 Obama 53%
-- 2004 Bush 51%
-- 1980 Reagan 51%
-- 1960 Kennedy 50%
-- 1976 Carter 50%
-- 1996 Clinton 50%
-- 2000 Bush 48%
-- 1968 Nixon 43%
-- 1992 Clinton 43%
I heard on one of the talking head shows that the percentage of the total population (not just voters) who voted for Obama was second only to those who voted for Reagan.
Um..... I seem to recall that Karl "T*rdBl*ss*m" Rove and Bush and Cheney that with their barely 1% victory over John Kerry in 2004 that they had received a mandate to do what they wanted and all this extra political capital that they somehow earned and were going to spend it... like a moron with too many credit cards... spending something that is not really his nor can afford (if at all) to be able to pay back (in a possitive way!)
But somehow... in the warped minds of this degenerate group of thieves and thugs, Barack Obama's victory by a margin nearly four times that of Junior (not to mention the landslide Electoral victory)... Obama somehow does not have a mandate or political capital?? Let not forget the wider majorities in the House and Senate...
Just who exactly are they trying to convince?
Are we so sure that they are not all on the 'sauce' more now than ever before?
Also... is it me... or does Karl look like he has put on a few pounds? (Is he preparing himself for the long stay in prison....? One can only hope!)
"which is a difference of 4.32 percentage points"
This is meaningless, as they aren't percentages of the same thing.
John Kerry received 59.0 million votes; Barack Obama received 68.6 votes. That's an increase of 9.6 million votes, a 16% increase.
Al Gore received 51 million votes. Barack Obama received 68.6 million votes, an increase of 17.6 million, or 34.5%.
OTOH, GWB received 50,5 million votes (in 2000), while McCain received 59.5 million, a measly increase of 9 million, or 17.8%, about half of Obama's gain.
As for the percentage spread, Obama got 7.02% more of the vote than McCain, while Gore got .5% more of the vote than Bush -- the difference is 6.52%, not 2.1% or 4.32%.
"President Bush kept our nation safe." Rove's logic: since we have not had a terrorist attack on our shores; Bush is responsible. No matter about Rove's logic or math you can't prove a negative.
Rove said "what went right is that we were struck on 9/11 and for seven years he has kept our country safe" Rove thinks 9/11 was a godsend for the Neocon machine. Also, if Rove answered his sepeona and showed up at a court to testify, does anyone think he would ever tell the truth under oath? As if a Bible can make him momentarily honest?