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©Associated Press
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 30, 2000
WASHINGTON -- On Day 22, Al Gore suggested for the first time that the presidential election may not be decided until the day the Electoral College meets, one week before Christmas.
Gore, in morning-and-night TV interviews Wednesday, offered a lingering glimpse of his thoughts on the unprecedented and protracted legal battle for the White House.
"I think this is going to be over with by the middle of December," Gore told ABC News' Peter Jennings. When the news anchor pressed for a specific end date, Gore replied:
"Well, you know, under the law Dec. 18 is the date when the Electoral College meets. And I'm just not going to get into the details. I'm going to leave that to the experts."
Many in the vice president's camp had previously pegged Dec. 12, the deadline for states to name electors, as the logical endpoint for his challenge of a certified tally giving Republican George W. Bush Florida's decisive 25 electors.
Accelerating a public relations campaign as the legal wheels on his election challenge ground slowly forward, Gore gave five network TV interviews from his vice presidential residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory. He reflected on how it feels to hang in election limbo and be called a sore loser:
"The only people I've heard that from is from partisans on the other side, who called me far worse than that before the election," he told NBC's Today.
While Bush continued building his potential administration, Gore battled any impression that Bush is definitely the next president by speaking of the weirdness of life suspended between victory and defeat.
"It is an unusual time because you prepare yourself to win. You prepare yourself for the possibility that you won't win. You don't really prepare yourself for the possibility that you flip the coin in the air and it lands on its edge," Gore said on CNN.
"To have neither outcome -- that takes some getting used to."
Explaining his motives, Gore told NBC: "I'm really in love with our democracy. That sounds corny, I know."