As I watched that big debate last Wednesday I anticipated intense media coverage the next day of some of the key issues that were brought up, such as Hillary Clinton's insistence on a no-fly zone that would risk starting a war with Russia - or her insistence on "open borders," a proposal that would let half of Mexico and Central America come for an extended visit.

Instead the media obsessed on Donald Trump's statement that he wants to see if the election results are legit before making any decision on accepting them.

As Trump's rise to the top of the polls in the past few days shows, this backfired on the media. One reason it backfired on them, I suspect, is that the Democrats, including of course Clinton, supported Al Gore when he did just that in 2000 and plunged the country into a constitutional crisis.

Al Gore: After the stunts his fellow Democrats pulled in 2000, he had a lot of nerve talking about clean elections.

A lot of conservatives spent the week pointing out that obvious bit of hypocrisy.

But imagine the current poll results are borne out on Election Day and this is a close race in which one or two states are key.

How can Trump be sure on election night that the Democrats didn't "rig" the election?

They certainly did in 2000 - and I witnessed evidence of it.

The Star-Ledger had assigned me to go on the Nation Magazine cruise that year. As fate would have it, we happened to be rounding Cuba just as these old lefties got the news that Gore had finally conceded.

Just before that I had listened to a speech by the late columnist Molly Ivins in which she described the "brilliant ground war" of the Massachusetts Democrats. Here's what I wrote at the time:

"She described how at noon on Election Day in Massachusetts, the Democrats realized that neighboring New Hampshire was still up for grabs. So Teddy Kennedy and the mayor of Boston quickly decided to let government workers in Massachusetts off at noon because many live in New Hampshire and would presumably vote the Democratic ticket there, Ivins said."

That's corruption, boys and girls. That's how you rig an election.

And if Trump's not worried about it, then he's too naive to be president.

The Dems have lots of other tricks up their sleeves as well, including the "knock and drag" tactics they employ in Philadelphia (see video below) as well as Clinton crony John Podesta's efforts to get illegal aliens to vote.

You can't blame the Donald for wanting to take a wait-and-see attitude about that.

Here's that column on The Nation cruise. Thinking back on it I find it hard to imagine that the same lefties who were so antiwar back then are now united behind a warmonger like Hillary. But that's another story. Here goes:

Is there a better place to hear the news of Al Gore's demise than in the midst of a huge gathering of left-wingers just off the coast of Cuba? I doubt it.

And as the lone Republican on the annual Caribbean cruise of the Nation magazine, I had plenty of time to bask in my good fortune.

We had just sailed past the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay when CNN broadcast live the court decision in which Judge N. Sanders Sauls sealed Gore's fate. As it happened, the Nation had scheduled a discussion of the Florida election to begin just minutes after the judge went off the air Monday afternoon.

So as soon as I finished digesting the good news I headed off to the Half Moon Lounge of the M.S. Ryndam to listen to the assembled Nation readers grumble about it.

"The Republicans are Nazis in disguise," said one Nation reader.

"They've stolen the election," said another.

The Nation, in case you have never read it, is the magazine of the Old Left. But until I got on the ship in Fort Lauderdale I had no idea how old. Most of the Nation readers seemed to be a good 30 years older than I am. And I'm 50.

The body has to get old, but not the mind.

Unfortunately, the Nation crowd seemed stuck in the past. Earlier in the afternoon, we'd attended a seminar on Russia.

The prevailing theme of the three speakers was nostalgia for the old Soviet Union, which had enacted most of the programs espoused by the Nation crowd, such as wage and price controls and national health care.

The debate might have been interesting if there had been someone on the panel who believed in capitalism. Instead it was so dull that the audience members next to me were conferring on a crossword puzzle.

The topic at a session the day before had been the burning question that divided the American left during the recent election: Gore or Nader? The panelists fought bitterly. At one point a pro-Nader panelist called a pro-Gore speaker a thug. That was amusing.

But the discussion itself showed just how far the American left has sunk now that the idea of scientific socialism has been consigned to the ash heap of history. There were two things on which these self-described "progressives" could agree:

1. The Christian Right is bad, and

2. The United States should have a multiparty democracy with proportional representation.

I didn't have the heart to stick my hand up and point out that if the United States had a multiparty democracy with proportional representation, the Rev. Pat Robertson would be prime minister.

The crowd might have disagreed on Gore and Nader, but there was no disagreement on George W. Bush: They despised him. The prime topic of conversation all week had been the manner in which those corrupt Republicans were blatantly defying the law to steal the Florida vote.

Of course, anyone who knows anything about politics knows that it's the Democrats who have historically been most adept at that sort of thing. That was proven by an anecdote that panelist Molly Ivins offered during a discussion on the get-out-the-vote campaign. She described how at noon on Election Day in Massachusetts, the Democrats realized that neighboring New Hampshire was still up for grabs. So Teddy Kennedy and the mayor of Boston quickly decided to let government workers in Massachusetts off at noon because many live in New Hampshire and would presumably vote the Democratic ticket there, Ivins said.

If the Republicans had done this sort of thing in Florida, the readers of the Nation would have been yelling "Fix!" But when Ivins finished the story about what she termed "the brilliant ground war" of the labor unions, they applauded.

In defense of the Nation people, I must note that when I later pointed out their hypocrisy on this point, they all laughed and agreed I was right. And as for Ivins herself, I may not like her politics, but she sure is fun to have a few beers with.

Of course, everything's fun on a luxury cruise. And it was even more fun for me when that news about George W.'s victory came over CNN.

And I must admit I was gloating a bit as I sat there in the Half Moon Lounge and listened to those Nation readers mourn the loss in Florida.

One guy even blamed the decision of the Miami-Dade canvassing board not to recount votes on pressure from the Cuban-Americans. According to this scenario, Gore lost the presidency because of Bill Clinton's decision to send little Elian Gonzalez back into Castro's clutches.

I have no idea whether this is true, but I certainly hope so.

As the Nation readers straggled out of the room, they were still voicing hope that through some miracle Al Gore could win the White House. Many were heading to the piano bar for a singalong of old protest songs. I poked my nose in for a minute and decided that my presence was required at the other bar, the one with no piano but a good supply of those giant cans of Foster's lager.

But before I left I noticed an omen. You know how the Gore people keep saying it ain't over till the fat lady sings? Well, as I headed out the door I noticed a rather chunky lady in a peasant blouse. She was reading the lyric sheet they handed out, which contained such songs as "Solidarity Forever" and "The Internationale."

And she was clearing her throat.

AND THEN THESE WAS THIS column I did a week after the Bush-Gore election, when the verdict was still up in the air. It was headlined "Democrats Want Clean Elections?" Here goes:

As the old saying goes, "Be careful what you wish for. You may get it."

And thanks to Al Gore, the Democrats may get their wish that future elections will be conducted with a tamper-proof voting system that eliminates the possibility of any funny business by local officials.

Oops. That'll take a lot of the fun out of Election Day. The Democrats may not be any better than the Republicans at governing, but they sure are better at voting. They find approaches that those boring Republicans would never think of.

This year, we had the amusing spectacle of Manhattan socialite Connie Milstein making the rounds of homeless shelters in Milwaukee handing out cigarettes to potential Gore voters.

Milstein made a big mistake, however. She let herself be videotaped.

Also in Wisconsin, the student newspaper at Marquette University reported that 174 of 1,000 students polled admitting to voting more than once. One kid even bragged about it on TV.

What is it with these cheeseheads? You won't see that kind of thing here in New Jersey. Our Democrats would never do anything like that - on TV.

Off camera, however, our boys are amazingly efficient. Tom Kean noticed that in 1981 when he was engaged in a gubernatorial race that was as close as the current presidential race.

Kean recalls that he was surprised to find that there were two districts in Newark in which he did not receive even a single vote. This was especially shocking because his campaign had hired a local Republican in each district to work as a poll watcher.

"I noticed we were giving out $40 to poll watchers and in the two districts we got no votes, so I knew something was wrong. I asked the county chairman what happened. He told me the Democrats either took away our votes or they outbid us."

Kean was laughing when he said that. Unlike a certain whiny vice president of the United States, he has a sense of humor about politics. He and other New Jersey Republicans have always recognized that a certain amount of creative accounting is inevitable in the machine-controlled cities of our fine state.

He didn't organize street demonstrations. Instead, he demanded that the voting machines be impounded so there could be no post-election mischief. Kean won by a mere 1,797 votes.

The current Republican chairman in Essex County, Kevin O'Toole, says the funny business has continued to this day. Even in the '90s, there were districts in which not a single Republican vote was recorded, O'Toole says.

How could this happen? A well-placed toothpick in the voting machine is the favored explanation.

My fellow columnist Larry Hall dealt with that issue in a 1995 column. He reported the case of an East Orange resident named Lois Dennis. Her daughter Barbara was running as a Republican for the state Assembly, so Lois dutifully went to the polls to vote Republican. But when she tried to push the lever, it wouldn't budge.

She eventually had to get a court order to get the local Democrats to unlock the machine. Even then they laughed at her, Hall reported.

And then there's the question of "street money," the cash that funds those get-out-the-vote campaigns. Again, New Jersey was in the lead in dealing with this thorny issue. In the 1993 gubernatorial election, Republican political consultant Ed Rollins made the mistake of bragging that he had used street money to suppress the black vote and help get Christie Whitman elected governor. This charge was never proven, but it led to the introduction of a number of bills to ban street money.

The Democrats at first supported those bills. But then they realized who benefits most from street money. The late Alan Karcher, a Democratic assemblyman who was no fool, predicted that the reform efforts would end up hurting the Democrats more than the GOP. "The irony is that the Republicans look like reformers and the Democrats have to buy into it," he said in a New Jersey Law Journal article.

Karcher noted that the Democrats rely far more heavily than Republicans on street money. A ban on it would be "virtually a death knell to an effective urban operation," he said.

The sole reform adopted was a requirement that street money be paid by check and not by cash. State Sen. Gerry Cardinale, a Republican from Bergen County, had pushed for a far more sweeping reform, a rule that paid political workers could contact voters only by phone on Election Day. That would rule out all those bus rides to the polls during which all sorts of interesting exchanges might happen.

That bill failed, but Cardinale said the other day he eagerly awaits the day when the electoral process will be cleaned up.

"Good government helps Republicans in general," he said. "If we really get all the fraud out of the election system, including giving people a pack of cigarettes, a drink or a meal, Republicans are going to win a lot more elections."

A good point and one that will surely be pursued by our next president - providing his name isn't Gore.