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A GenePoool Essay
Dysfunction Junction
It's official: I no longer care who won the 2000 Presidential election.
It has become increasingly obvious that the U.S. political system is a massive dysfunctional family, and would personally much rather watch Carroll O'Connor in reruns than bear witness to this. Who gets to keep the baby Florida? Who gets to stay in the White House? It's going to end up in divorce court eventually, but by then I'll have stopped watching.
The entire country has lost perspective here because we're all too busy reacting to every new revelation like a jury basing guilt on the opening statements. Rumor bonfires have been lit so quickly-- an uncounted ballot box??-- that the media barely has enough time to get the story out before they're correcting it. Okay, so it does look bad when "irregularities" are uncovered in a state whose governor is the younger brother of one of the candidates, and that same state has a history of voter fraud. It also didn't help that the networks kept trying to call the state for one candidate or another so they could get to bed. But just because it looks bad doesn't mean it IS bad.
The Democrats say the ballot in Palm Beach was misleading. Was it? Yes, provided you're not all that intelligent. Think about this for a minute. How do these people know they voted for the wrong candidate? The same brains that last week couldn't figure out what looks to be a pretty straightforward ballot are this week blessed with photographic recall. When, exactly, did their brains start working this well? Did they just need a running start?
Even giving them the benefit of the doubt-- because it is reasonably far-fetched that Buchanan has a lot of support in an elderly Jewish community-- is it really a good idea to establish "do-overs" in the American electoral process? I don't even let my kids get do-overs in checkers. They're expecting the courts to step in and allow them to re-vote, but I don't think the courts are there to protect people from their own stupidity. Sure, we all remember the McDonald's coffee spill lawsuit, but we seem to have forgotten it was overturned on appeal. (Or perhaps we never knew. It's a much better story that way.)
Sure there are voting irregularities. Why is this a surprise? When you count up the individual ballots of eighty million people across fifty states broken down into umpteen counties, cities, towns, and precincts in ONE NIGHT, what do you expect? There will be mistakes, and some big ones. Rain Man is unavailable. The problem is, we've never had such a close election before, so we never noticed. And now the Democrats are asking for a recount, by hand, of the entire state. This should take only about four years, which should work out well because it'll be time to have a re-vote of the entire country by then.
Of course, we can't have a hand count because the Republicans think it's unconstitutional. Evidently, two hundred years ago, votes were tallied by livestock. But that's okay, we don't need to recount anything, because Jeb has assured us already that his brother won the state. He looks like a trustworthy guy. These are the same Republicans-- the champions of states' rights no less-- who on one day cried foul when it looked like the Dems were headed to court, and then the next day went to federal court themselves. Evidently the cry for "no lawyers" applies only to the Democratic ones, and the rights of states only apply when the Republicans don't have to go to court themselves.
It's beginning to look like this will never end, and worse, that some people don't particularly want it to end, especially the ones who have pointed out that since Gore won the popular vote, he should by all rights be the President. This is frustrating, and it's why so many people are so interested in finding missing Democratic ballots in the first place. And when they aren't doing that they're blaming the Electoral College.
The Electoral College has been around since the Constitution was still drying but we all act like it bit us by surprise while we were on the toilet. Politicians complaining about this system should seriously consider shutting the hell up, because not only have they always known about it, it's been the key to every national campaign since there was such a thing as a national campaign. That's why Gore campaigned so heavily in Florida in the first place, and why he could afford to lose the entire mid-West and not break a sweat, since he owned California.
Without the Electoral College, Presidential candidates would spend all their time in the densely populated states, and those little, sparsely populated states might not be worth their time to visit. With the Electoral College, each state has at least two College votes, and so each state gets some attention. The Electoral College works like it's supposed to, and that's a good thing. Get rid of it if you want.
But don't blame it. Everybody knew it was there, knew how it worked, and used it to their advantage.
The other problem is that nobody can bear the thought of losing the closest election in history. Gore is probably kicking himself right now, and who can blame him? He was the Vice President for the most impressive eight years of economic growth the country has ever seen, and his opponent was a guy so erudite he makes Stuttering John sound like Cicero. He should have won convincingly, and would have, if he didn't have a Clinton in the closet. (Bush, on the other hand, is probably studying a map to find out where in Washington State he's supposed to be moving to.)
I keep hearing how this is a great civics lesson for kids. Whose kids? Alan Dershowitz's? I had to promise my daughter on Tuesday night that I would tell her in the morning who won. A week later I still can't answer the question. All she's learned about elections so far is that they never end, sometimes two plus two does not equal four, and people have to sue to become president. When she gets older I hope to cover some other issues, like the importance of hanging chad, and why it's a good idea to take your time and read the damn instructions before making a big decision about something.
And in the unlikely event that my daughter is still interested in politics once this is all over, I'm going to have to try to explain to her what the President does. But no matter which one of them ends up in the White House, how much are they going to be able to even do? The House and Senate are both split almost evenly down party lines, so any new initiatives our future president intends to pass is going to end up shaved down, slapped and castrated by the politics of compromise before it goes through. Really, nowaday all we expect from our President is that they make us feel good about ourselves, the sound reasonably confident, and they stay the hell off the interns.
Our inability to fairly judge what is going on in Florida is related, in part, to our own participation in this extended dysfunctional family. It colors our interpretation. A Democrat might look at it and see a Republican party desperately attempting to prevent a valid final count, while a Republican might see a Democratic party deliberately stalling and trying to twist the vote tally in their favor. Do either of them have a point?
I'm a Democrat. What I see right now is a state that is split almost perfectly down the middle. Statistically, if extra votes were found in a recount, they should have been roughly equal. But they weren't. They were four to one in favor of Gore. Does this make me want to see Florida do a state-wide hand count? Yes, it does. Sometimes it doesn't just look bad. Sometimes it really IS bad. Oddly enough, George W. Bush agrees with me: in Texas, a hand count is considered the most accurate measure, by law, and Dubya was the one who signed that law. But there is no way I'll ever be able to convince a Republican to see it the same way I do.
The people have spoken, and they have said "I dunno, why don't you guys flip a coin?" What we need now is someone to step in and sort out this dysfunctional family squabble, preferably someone who is non-partisan, who has stood up to major corporations before, has faced the body politic, and who is not afraid to make tough decisions and say things that not everybody wants to hear.
I mean Ralph Nader, of course. He's probably not busy.
© 2000, Gene Doucette
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