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Gore was watching the final returns in the staff room on the seventh floor of the Loews. Of his family, only Karenna was with him, her arm around him, rubbing his back, at other times sitting on the floor. When it was finally called for Bush, there was a moment of stunned silence. Then as Gore stood and thanked his aides, they began to cry and hug one another. The Vice President made it clear that he wanted to move with swift grace to say his goodbye to his waiting supporters and the country. He started working on his concession speech with what an aide described as a "let's get it over with" resolve. He returned to his private family suite on the ninth floor as a resolute Tipper stood with him. Gore comforted his sobbing daughters.
What happened next has Democrats still baffled. The man who was willing to fight so long and work so hard and campaign until he dropped seemed in a hurry to drop out. He had been up for 50 hours straight by this time. But Tipper was ready to hold on a while longer, and so were some other aides, including former chief of staff Jack Quinn, who was in the lobby on the phone. Lieberman too wanted to fight. Brazile got an e-mail from her assistant saying it had been called. She wrote back, "Never surrender. It's not over yet." As they headed to the motorcade, Brazile's gut told her they were moving too quickly. "It was like going to a funeral but without a corpse."
Nonetheless, Gore called Bush around 2:30 a.m. to concede. "You're a good man," Bush told him. He said he understood how hard this was, and gave his best wishes to Tipper and the children.
But the man who invented the Internet was suddenly saved by it. As Gore's motorcade splashed through the rainy streets to the war memorial for the concession speech, traveling chief of staff Michael Feldman's pager quivered. It was field director Michael Whouley, saying he needed to talk to Daley. "Changed situation here," Whouley said. He was in the boiler room, watching the Florida Board of Elections website, which, Daley says, "had the margin down to 900, and within minutes, it was 500, 200, slipping pretty quickly." By now the motorcade had arrived at the memorial. Daley told Feldman to grab the Veep and keep him from going onstage. "I said, 'Well, Michael, it probably would be good to go to a holding room,'" said Daley. Everyone's phone was ringing now. "We had no TV, everyone was on a cell phone," says adviser Greg Simon. "People were calling us from everywhere, saying you're only 500 votes, 600 votes behind, don't concede."
Daley called his counterpart in the Bush camp, Don Evans, and said, "We may have a situation here." Under Florida law, a margin that slim triggers an automatic recount. Then, around 3:45, Gore got on the phone himself with the Governor. "As you may have noticed, things have changed," he said. If indeed the vote went to Bush, he'd be happy to concede and give him his support, but for now, "the state of Florida is too close to call," Gore said.