No allusion to defeat snatched by lawyers from the jaws of victory. But for now, Gore, while resigned to defeat, appears ready to step back and let the Bush administration get under way. He may surely believe it should be a Gore administration. But it's over. That's what his speech should help the American people believe and accept.
Liberalism is in a sorry state for social, historical and moral reasons.
Most of those who might once have protested are now wealthy, part of the establishment, more concerned about the health of the stock market than the state of democratic rights. Intellectual and spiritual decay have accompanied financial success. More generally, the demands of the capitalist market have proven incompatible, in the long run, with the program of social reformism, particularly as the latter has been diluted and its proponents drained of energy and determination both by the growth of social antagonisms in the US and the obligations imposed on the American ruling elite by its role as the pre-eminent imperialist power. In income, lifestyle and outlook they are much closer to Bush, Trent Lott and Tom Delay than they are to the working class and middle class voters of Florida who were deprived of their rights and who fear for their jobs, their pensions, their civil rights and their health. It fears this more than anything, including police-state dictatorship.