Trailer: Bush v. Gore

Bush v. Gore recounts what happened during the contested 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, and the extraordinary legal battle that unfolded in Florida in the aftermath of Election Day. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin. Good morning. Hope everybody got sleep last night. Thank
you for coming. This morning brings news from Florida. The
morning after the two thousand election, millions of Americans woke

(00:37):
up to find out that the two thousand election was
still going on. We still do not know the outcome
of yesterday's vote. The presidential race was stuck in limbo.
After hurtling towards a conclusion for more than a year,
it had come to an uneasy and bewildering stop. And
for the thirty six days that followed, no one in

(00:57):
America knew whether the next president would be Al Gore
or George W. Bush, or how the winner would even
be determined. The vote count is not going to decide this.
We're going to go way beyond into the courtroom. Watched
the ensuing battle between the two candidates as if it
were a sword fight taking place on a tightrope, except
instead of swords, Gore and Bush were wielding obscure legal

(01:18):
theories and allegations of partisan bias, and instead of a tightrope,
they were navigating the idiosyncrasies of Florida politics. This was
bureaucracy weaponized. This is hand to hand political combat. Of
a sort that probably we've never seen before, not a
TV series. This is about the constitution, not about a campaign.
Where is this going to go? I'm Leon Napok, the

(01:44):
host of the new podcast in Fiasco. Nineteen thousand people
tried to participate in a democratic election and warrant allowed
to This like quiet municipal building turned into a loud,
violent protest. With the death threats and with the media surge,
we felt like we were in the trenches. The first
season of Fiasco will take you across Florida, from Palm

(02:06):
Beach County to the Everglades, to Miami, to Sarasota to Tallahassee.
Over the course of six episodes, we will lift up
the hood on a strange, dysfunctional machine that was assembled
on the fly in the fall of two thousand and
was used just this once to resolve a singular and
unprecedented stalemate. It's basically impossible to look back at this

(02:27):
story without turning into a Monday morning quarterback. It is
amazing the consequences of what seems at first like a
fairly small study. There was a sense that we were
faced with an attempted soft coupe. What was Fiasco esque
was the way the media handled it. Fiasco Bush v.

(02:53):
Gore