Cleaning up the disinformation from PJ:
1. The reasons Al Gore lost are many, including the outrageous voter disenfranchisement by Jeb Bush that prevented tens of thousands of disproportionately black voters from voting, which prevented voters who had the legal right to vote, who had been felons from other states that restored voting rights and moved to Florida from voting, in violation of repeated court orders against Jeb Bush, the poorly designed 'butterfly ballots' in one county, and other issues - which PJ wrongly excludes in his statement.
It can be argued that Gore's team made legal mistakes as one of these many issues, but again, PJ gets it wrong. He claims it was Gore not being 'high minded' that was the cause of their not pursuing a statewide recount. In fact, while there was arguably a partisan benefit likely by going after selected counties, the issues are different than PJ said - for a start, Florida law had *no mechanism* for requesting a statewide recount. Their system was set up only for requesting recounts for counties.
With only so many lawyers and so much time, the lawyers made the requests as the law required county by county, and they did not think they had the resources to file in every county, nor that the time allowed for every country to get an appeal. The 'equal protection' argument requiring the recount be statewide was created later in the court battles.
The idea that you could not have recounts in certain counties where problems could be proven in court, without having a recount in all counties including those without any problems, was not at all clear early on. As for Gore being high minded (and PJ is silent on Bush, implying he was high minded), Gore did publicly ask Bush to agree to a statewide recount, in spite of the challenges and lack of a legal process - so much for PJ's high minded argument - and Bush refused to agree. So who wasn't 'high minded' to count votes?
The Florida Supreme Court had already addressed the 'cherry picking' issue by requiring that all counties in which there was evidence of a problem be recounted, not only the four picked by Gore - but it was still a partial recount. Note, however, that Bush was free to ask fo recounts in any 'cherry picked' counties he wanted too, as well, making the process fair - or even to agree to Gore's statewide recount request.
It's interesting the Supreme Court not only had 5 members pick the 'equal protection' argument to justify stopping the partial recount, but that they also, while saying a statewide recount was needed for fairness, did not allow a statewide recount to be done - a recount which we learned would have given the election to Gore. Note, too, that 4 of the 9 justices voted *against* the decision to stop the recount - it was hardly a unanimous view, but rather one with a one-vote margin.
Here's a summary of the later recount from the Washington Post, which showed Gore's limited recount would not have changed the election, but a statewide recount would have.