Bren you wrote about the "bitterness from having lost the last two elections"
BUT...

Gore received the most votes, IMO Bush didn't really win (Cheat Mon - Jeb Bush Mon - Flordia Mon)

The United States presidential election of 2000 was a contest between Democratic candidate Al Gore, then Vice President, and Republican candidate George W. Bush, then governor of Texas and son of former president George H. W. Bush (1989-1993). Bill Clinton, the incumbent President, was vacating the position after serving the maximum two terms allowed by the Twenty-second Amendment. Bush narrowly won the November 7 election, with 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266 (with one faithless elector abstaining in the official tally). The election featured a controversy over who won Florida's 25 electoral votes (and thus the presidency), the recount process in that state, and the unusual event that the losing candidate had received 543,816 more popular votes than the winner.

In the American system of presidential elections, the electoral vote determines the winner, and Bush won this count, although Gore received the most votes (called the "popular vote"). This was the third time in American history that a candidate won the presidency without receiving at least a plurality of the popular vote; it also happened in the elections of 1876 and 1888.