THE PARTY THAT SORE LOSERMAN MADE:

Too Tired to Fight: Voters in Washington State are as tired of electioneering as the ballot counters are of counting votes. (SCOTT ELLIOTT, 12/15/04, NY Times)

You would have thought Mr. Rossi's wobbly, 42-vote lead in the machine recount would have prolonged the partisan wrangling of the presidential election; or that the hand recount under way would have further inflamed things, given that the contest now seems likely to tilt in Ms. Gregoire's favor. Certainly, the post-election drama has received the requisite attention from the news media here. Front pages and TV news broadcasts carry the scenes that have been familiar to us all since Florida: tired-looking teams of Republican and Democratic vote counters sitting on folding chairs, flipping through sheaves of ballots under bad florescent lights. But around here, we seem to be as tired of electioneering as those ballot counters are of counting votes.

After I pay for my omelet and coffee, I ask the woman working the register what, if anything, she's heard from her customers about the recount.

"They think it's ridiculous," she says. "They've recounted and recounted. How many times are they going to recount? I count up tips every day and put it in a bigger bill. The number doesn't change if I count it again. Is this going to occur every election time, in every election?"

If anyone were leading the Democratic Party they might have sense enough to tell them that "party of sore losers" isn't the brand to take to the public every two years.

MORE:
In the Northwest: Democrats acquire backbone since days of Gore (JOEL CONNELLY, December 15, 2004, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER)

In his lucid book on the 2000 Florida election debacle, "Too Close to Call," author Jeffrey Toobin depicts Vice President Al Gore as a guy who fiddled with his Palm Pilot while Democrats got burned.

The vice president was preoccupied with how his actions would be viewed by the Washington, D.C., political/media elite. The Republicans' obsession was winning the White House, even if it meant deploying a window-pounding mob to browbeat a county elections board.

In this Washington, however, Democrats are made of sterner stuff.

They raised more than $700,000 to pay for a full statewide hand recount in the gubernatorial contest between Dino Rossi and Christine Gregoire. They've resisted every Republican ploy to force a premature concession, including quasi-coronations of Rossi.

Of course, the Democrats suffered a setback yesterday. The Washington State Supreme Court -- obviously wary of judicial intervention -- rejected a bid to order that county election officials count previously rejected ballots.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 15, 2004 9:31 AM