Newscoma

It’s a don’t miss post by Sharon Cobb about the night in 2000 when America began to learn what a chad really was. And she has a first-eye account.

I made my way downtown…only a mile from Vanderbilt Plaza, and was telling the crowd what had just happened. The mood went from celebratory to disbelief. Surely our nation didn’t elect a buffoon like George W. Bush.

However, somewhere between my trip downtown from Vanderbilt Plaza, and a few minutes later Al Gore’s trip to downtown Nashville from Vanderbilt Plaza, he decided not to concede.

I was in the middle of an historic moment, though I certainly didn’t realize it at the time.

And that was the beginning of the recount.

I didn’t watch Recount mainly because I don’t have HBO. But even sitting on the sidelines of this historic event, I shared the sinking feeling that Sharon did knowing that something in our country was happening. It’s was more than partisan politics, it went deeper than that.

It was just as much, for me at least, about that are government had changed right before my eyes and I couldn’t grasp the enormity of it. And the knowledge that my vote might not count. It was the first time, even when I backed a losing candidate, that I felt that way. For me at least, it felt horribly and irreparably broken.