Ignore the hand-wringing. The confusion isn’t yet dangerous to the system; we’ve seen no tanks in the streets (or even demonstrators outside camera range). A new president will be selected in plenty of time for Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2001. In the meantime, this is a terrific civics lesson and a strong indication of the will of the people. Both of these guys lost, just as we secretly hoped they would. In a year when the First Lady and a dead man are elected to the Senate; when Jesse Jackson bonds with Jewish retirees in Palm Beach; when a few hundred votes separate the candidates out of more than 100 million votes cast, we should relish the absurdity.
So it’s only fitting that the key to the outcome may depend on something called “hanging chad.” Chad are the tiny bits of paper that don’t fall completely off when the ballots are punched through. If the chad are punched but are still attached to the cards, the votes cannot be read by the machine. A hand count would usually tally those ballots, as many as 26,000 votes in Florida. This is why the Bush forces desperately sought a federal injunction on Saturday. If, in a bipartisan hand count, Gore wins most of these votes (less well–educated Democrats traditionally have more ballot-completion problems), he could well win the election. And soon enough, Tipper would be playing drums in a White House rock band called the Hanging Chads.
The candidates last week confirmed why the country was so unhappy with the choice. Take the late-night exchange when Gore called Bush to retract his concession. Bush was predictably thickheaded (expecting Gore to believe Bush would win Florida on his brother’s say-so) and Gore was predictably condescending (referring to Bush’s younger brother and lecturing Bush not to be “so snippy”). Their squabbling in the days since foreshadows the partisan bitterness to come. Bush measures the drapes in the White House and puts forward spinners of dubious believability; Gore, candidate of the trial lawyers, also plays all the legal, political and PR angles.
Whichever party wins gives an immediate boost to the other side for 2002 and even 2004. If Bush wins, liberal constituency groups will scream disenfranchisement; if Gore wins, the same conservatives who spent years trying to delegitimize Clinton will start in on Gore. Whichever side loses will get to raise money with dark conspiracy theories. Some politicians may be secretly rooting for the other party’s candidate. The second most powerful man in Bush’s Washington would be Democratic Sen. John Breaux of Louisiana, whose Medicare reform Bush mentions in speeches. The second most powerful man in Gore’s Washington would be GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona, whose campaign-finance-reform bill is touted by Gore.
It’s funny when the shoe goes on the other foot. Shortly before the election, it looked as if Gore might win the Electoral College, while Bush carried the popular vote. “The one thing we don’t do is roll over,” a Bush aide told the New York Daily News. In that event, the aide said, the Bush forces planned a huge talk-radio and TV ad campaign to delegitimize Gore: “Even papers that supported Gore might turn against him because the will of the people will have been thwarted.” With the roles reversed, the Bush campaign is aghast at any mention of the popular vote. To win this war, Bush seems to have forgotten his deep philosophical objections to federal judges intervening in local matters.
The most significant development of late last week may have been when former secretary of State James A. Baker, sent to Florida by the Bush team, started talking trash. Afraid that a hand count of close Florida counties (routine in recounts) wouldn’t help his candidate, he claimed that hand counts are less reliable than machine counts. This is simply untrue, as election experts will attest. (Manual counts, supervised by both parties, are more reliable; machines were introduced for speed.) Like any candidate, Bush is entitled to seek his own hand counts where he thinks they might help him.
Baker went on to say that Richard Nixon didn’t contest his 1960 loss to JFK. Nixon did concede, but allowed the Republican Party that year to contest the results in 11 states; the recounts and challenges weren’t completed until mid-December 1960. Baker added that Gerald Ford did not contest his narrow loss in Ohio in 1976. But doing so would have been pointless; even had he carried Ohio, Ford would have still lost that year to Jimmy Carter. All in all, an angry Baker looked desperate, a bad omen for Bush.
Whichever way it goes, it’s appropriate that the precedents involve presidents with names like John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison. This is the right peer group for Bush and Gore–men with little impact on the office. The difference is that in today’s world, one fiber-glass boat in the port of Yemen can thrust the president back into a position of great importance. The election is still about something. The mystery still matters.
