It all came to a head when there was the whole Florida showdown. There were some people, many of whom were publicly standing on soapboxes heralding Gore, who were privately saying he was really mishandling this, not showing serious respect for this community in terms of expressing their concerns in Florida. It gave me a place to put a lot of things that I had been hearing that people weren't really ready to let go on the record until the end of the campaign. Little things like some advisors not wanting Bill Cosby onstage with Gore because they didn't want the picture in the paper to be Gore and this black man, even though it's Bill Cosby. It was just interesting--especially because Gore got like 90% of the black vote and his campaign really pushed that stereotype of Republicans as evil and not liking black people and Democrats just loving them, when in reality there were clearly internal campaign things going on that I think would have caused many an eyebrow to go up.

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