That was the question that kept popping into my mind as I read through this piece in the Seattle Times.  Much in the article is unobjectionable, but I kept running into odd chunks like this first paragraph:

There likely would be no trial opening today on the November governor's election if the legal fight and political fortunes of Christine Gregoire and Dino Rossi didn't fit into the larger interests of the national political parties.

The election was extraordinarily close, and there were, as nearly everyone admits, serious problems in the King County elections office.  There would have been a lawsuit even if the national parties had completely ignored the dispute.

And the second paragraph is equally strange:

The trial — and its all but certain appeal — will either confirm that Gregoire was legitimately elected or that errors, fraud and illegal votes robbed Rossi of his rightful relocation to the Governor's Mansion.

Given the enormous mess in King County, the trial will not do either.  What we already know is that, thanks to blunders in King County (and elsewhere), it may never be possible to know who was legitimately elected.  That is — as Postman would know if he had ever listened to Dino Rossi — the official position of the Rossi campaign.  Which is why Rossi did not ask for Gregoire to be thrown out, but for a new election to be held.  Does Postman not know that?

And then in the fourth paragraph, Postman returns to his national party thesis:

In a nation with a near-deadlocked electorate and little interest in compromise or concession, Democrats and Republicans have turned the once-rare postelection legal fight into a standard piece of political campaigns.

Court fights over elections have increased, at least according to law professor Richard Hasen.   But have they become "standard"?  Not according to the numbers Postman gives; there were, says Hasen, 61 court fights over elections in 1996 and 250 in 2002.  Does Postman realize how many elections we have in this country each year?

In the ninth paragraph, Postman describes Democratic feelings, accurately, as far as I can tell.

National Democrats want to exorcise demons left by the too-quick-to-quit Gore and show they can brawl with the best of Republicans.  That's been the tone of fund-raising pitches, which gave state Democrats the second recount they needed to make Gregoire governor.

But he does not seem to understand just how bizarre those feelings are.  Gore quit only when, after a 7-2 vote by the Supreme Court, he and his allies on the Florida Supreme Court ran out of plausible options.  And his strategy of seeking recounts only in selected Florida counties inevitably created the belief, at least among Republicans, that he was trying to steal the election.   And for those who may been confused by the often made claim that Gore wanted to count every vote, let me note, as I have before, that his lawyers explicitly rejected a recount for the entire state of Florida.

Finally, the article has two strange omissions.  First, Postman never says who began the court fight in the 2000 election.  In case he has forgotten, the man who began that fight, with all its nasty consequences, was Al Gore, who is a Democrat.  The court fight wasn't an accident, it was something Gore and his party chose.  And they made that fight in a way that could never lead to an outcome that Republicans would accept.  (I thought, and said at the time, that Gore would have been justified in asking for a recount of the entire state of Florida.   Instead he chose instead to concentrate on a few heavily Democratic counties, all with recent histories of vote fraud.)

Second, Postman does not seem to realize that many Republicans would start this discussion not in 2000, but in 1993, when the "Motor Voter" Act was passed.  Let me remind him of the nickname many Republicans gave it then: the "Motor Cheater" Act.  Republicans believed that the law would make vote fraud easier and that the fraud would usually benefit Democrats.   There has been enough evidence since then so that we can not dismiss or ignore those concerns.   I believe, along with many other Republicans, that vote fraud is becoming more common and that it nearly always benefits Democrats (often against other Democrats).  Does Postman realize how common this belief is among Republicans?  Nothing in the article suggests that he does.

(It occurs to me that Postman may not be the only Democratic journalist who does not understand Republican thinking on the issue of vote fraud, so I have prepared this brief remedial reading list for them:

• John Fund's Stealing Elections: How Vote Fraud Threatens Our Democracy
• Hugh Hewitt's If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It
• Bill Sammon's At Any Cost : How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election

The journalists need not agree with the views in those books, of course, but they should at least understand that many Republicans believe that vote fraud by Democrats is a serious and growing problem.  And, if they look at my site, they will find, from time to time, evidence supporting that belief.)