Gloat all you want. If Bush wins thanks to a crony refusing to count votes he will be in and out of office under a four year cloud without accomplishing much of anything. For if they deny the recounts the victory will always be tainted. And Gore won the popular vote. The only way for Bush to overcome the taint will be to prove he is a vibrant innovative caring visionary dynamic leader and improve the condition of the country. Instead expect old ideas, old faces, racial tensions again, facades instead of substance, cronyism with the oil business, insider scandals, attacks on the environment, feverish renewed calls for campaign finance reform, pigs back to the troughs, women furious over supreme court appointments and Bush needing someone to hold his hand and tell him what's what on anything connected with foreign policy.
Cheney, Baker and his Dad will be running the country again. Men who ought to be retired. Powell and Rice will be exposed as ineffective symbolic tokens. Cultural conservatives will protest on the right because Bush will undercut them too. Everyone left of Bush will have him in their trigger sights withing six months. Gridlock will be the rule of the day. And Americans will realize that thanks to Nader and a disinformation campaign against Gore they elected a hollow and unqualified man to lead them even though he really lost the election.
This is nothing to celebrate for the GOP. They nominated a hollow man instead of McCain who actually meant something. Expect Gore to come back stronger in four years, Jesse Ventura and McCain to challenge and tear apart Bush's fragile 48% and the entire smirking good ole rich boy illusion to be shattered.
All that said, Gore has not lost yet. Palm Beach and Broward counties may still have a lot to say about this election. Between them they easily have enough more Gore votes to put him back on top. Then we'll see if the absentee ballots even make a difference considering so many jews abroad adding to the total this time around. And if this Florida SOS denies their votes expect a major firestorm and very real charges of a theft of the election.
By all acccounts, Gore should have won this race going away, but four things happened; Nader getting 3% but Buchanon only getting 1%, Bush's personality advantage, a long and very expensive stealth campaign by the GOP to assassinate Gore's character through a host of little fictional innuendos and the contented and therefore a bit lazy Democractic base getting energized just a day too late.
If Bush wins, it will be because in the end the GOP base was just a tad more motivated after 8 years of Clinton, and too many people had forgotten the malaise, lousy economy and general uninspired inaction of the Bush-Quayle years.
I pray for our country that Bush's "I'm a uniter not a divider" line isn't just cynically typical "every four years" rhetorical bullshit. But somehow I doubt it. There's nothing unifying about the man. He stands for bland uninspired favoritism of wealthy white men and heavy industry over the working people, women, minorities and the masses, and it won't be long before people figure that out. It may be four years before people are hungering for a visionary, a protector of the environment and civil rights and a real unifier again.
Until then, if Bush wins, we may have to live with the guy for awhile, but just like his father's administration, it won't last long and will go down in history as completely forgettable. |
