Karen, here is the Paul Begala article, in its entirety, as originally published by MSNBC:
Banana Republicans
To GOP, winning’s more important than being fair
By Paul Begala
WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — The Bushies are desperate — desperate to stop a manual recount of disputed Florida votes. And as so often happens when one is desperate, they’re saying some really stupid things. Former Secretary of State and Bush fixer James A. Baker III even went on national television to say that manual recounts are not as reliable as machine counts.
WHILE BAKER has a right to his opinion, his opinion does not trump Florida election law, which calls for a manual recount if there are anomalies in the machine count.
And apparently George W. Bush does not share his lawyer’s suspicion of manual recounts, since in 1997 he signed a law saying a manual recount was preferable if a machine count yielded a result that was too close to call. Having voted in Texas — as recently as the last presidential election — I know firsthand that many Texans vote on the same controversial punch-card machines as were used in Palm Beach County.
The Bushies are so desperate to stop the manual recount they’ve devised a two-tiered strategy: First, they’ve gone into federal court to ask that the Florida election law, which clearly allows a manual recount, is unconstitutional. This is legal lunacy and political hypocrisy. Legally, Florida’s recount law is like most states,’ in that it allows recounts in close races or where some discrepancy is shown. Before any county can grant a Gore campaign request for a recount, the county must first demonstrate — by examining 1 percent of the ballots by hand — that there is some cause for concern that the machine might have missed some ballots. Such a regime is common and fair, hardly the abridgement of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and the First Amendment’s free speech clause, as the Bushies’ stunning legal brief argues.
DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN
Politically, this is the most blatant hypocrisy since another Bush got elected by asking us to read his lips and then raised our taxes. Bush Jr. campaigned on a commitment to return more power to states and localities. Now, where a state (run by his own brother) is exercising control of its own electoral process, Bush wants the feds to come in and take it over. The man whose slogan was “I trust the people,” now says he trusts machines more. The man who campaigned for tort reform and against lawyers, is now trying to use lawyers to stop a legal and valid recount — apparently because he fears that if the real will of the people is known, he’d lose.
Fortunately, a federal judge has denied the request for an injunction. Score one for democracy.
But the Bushies aren’t through yet. The other prong of the Bush anti-recount strategy is even more chilling: The Florida secretary of state — a partisan Republican who campaigned for Bush in New Hampshire and who the Tampa Tribune says spent $100,000 of taxpayers’ money on a world tour to boost her credentials for a Bush ambassadorial appointment — has ruled that the deadline for all certified county results is 5 p.m. ET Tuesday. Such a deadline would make many of the hand recounts impossible to complete. What’s the rush? The overseas absentee ballots will be coming in until Friday, so there’s no need to rush the process to a close. Besides, Florida law clearly allows for a manual recount. It seems unfair — and unconstitutional — for a state official to set such a tight time limit that the recount becomes a practical impossibility.
HEAVY-HANDED STRATEGIES
Such heavy-handed, anti-democratic strategies qualify them to be Banana Republicans. They seem to care more about their preferred outcome than an honest and fair process. Al Gore has already demonstrated his willingness to accept an unfavorable result by conceding the election when he thought Bush had won Florida by a fairly wide margin of 50,000 votes. Gore’s campaign spokesman made it clear that if a fair and accurate count yields a Bush victory, the Democrats will recognize it. Have we ever heard a single Bush spokesman make such a comment? No. In fact, thanks to the reporting of Michael Kramer of the New York Daily News and Andy Miga of the Boston Herald, we know the Banana Republicans had a secret strategy for undermining a Gore victory if Bush had won the popular vote. Now that the result is the other way, we’ve seen no Democratic strategy for de-legitimizing Bush. In fact, Gore has made it clear that although he won the popular vote nationwide, he will respect the result of the electoral vote as determinative. I have yet to hear a single Banana Republican say the same thing. They crave power more than they respect democracy. “Trusting the people” is just a slogan to them.
As they did during the right-wing lynch mob’s attempt to impeach our president, the American people are showing their usual good judgment. According to a Newsweek poll released Monday, 72 percent of Americans feel that making certain the count is fair and accurate is more important than getting matters resolved as quickly as possible. Almost 70 percent say that the recount and the delay are proof that the U.S. electoral system is working, not a sign of weakness. And two-thirds (66 percent) of all Americans, and a majority (54 percent) of Bush voters think Gore did the right thing in withdrawing his concession to Bush. So pay no attention to the hot-air boys who are trying to railroad this election for their man Bush. Let’s settle down, slow down and get the most accurate count possible. It’s more important to get this right than to get it right away.
PERPLEXED, BUT NOT DIVIDED
Finally, I feel compelled to respond to something that was said on MSNBC cable last week. Mike Barnicle is one of the great voices of American commentary, and last week he held up the USA Today map of how every county in America voted. There was a sea of Bush red across the South, Midwest and Rocky Mountains with Gore blue hugging the coasts. Barnicle said this was proof of a cultural divide in America: “Wal-Mart versus Martha Stewart,” he said. “Family values versus a sense of entitlement.” I’ve been thinking about that ever since. And while I appreciate a guy from the Northeast opining about the cultural superiority of the Deep South, let me offer my own perspective: I was raised in that ocean of red. I grew up in Sugar Land, Texas — a place so conservative our Congressman is Tom “the Hammer” DeLay, the leader of the right-wing forces in the GOP Congress. There is no doubt that Barnicle’s observations have merit: There are different cultural mores on the coasts than there are in the middle of the country. But I don’t think that’s the only thing going on here
Why would my beloved South vote so heavily Republican when just a generation ago it was heavily (no, totally) Democratic? LBJ knew. When he signed the Civil Rights Act he put his head in his hands and told his press secretary, Bill Moyers, “I’ve just given the South to the Republicans for a generation.” LBJ’s pessimism was prescient. In the next presidential election, George Wallace stormed across the South with a message that cloaked racism in anti-government, anti-federal rhetoric. Richard Nixon’s infamous “Southern Strategy” was aimed at co-opting the votes of Southern Democratic racists who were disillusioned with their party’s support of civil rights. And by 1980, Ronald Reagan could stand in Neshoba County, Miss. — where Goodman and Chaney and Schwerner were murdered by racist thugs for registering black voters — and call for “states’ rights.”
The only two men from my party who won the White House since LBJ were moderate Southerners who knew the ins and outs of racial politics: Jimmy Carter of Georgia and Bill Clinton of Arkansas. If we were in a recession or a war, you could understand the unanimous verdict of my fellow Southerners. What is it about peace and prosperity that has them so angry? Could it be that the Clinton administration was the first in history to take on the extremists at the NRA, by pushing through the Brady Law and the assault weapon ban? Could it be that this administration saved affirmative action from a right-wing assault in the courts, the ballot box and the Congress? Could it be that this administration stood courageously for the simple proposition that no American should be fired from his job because of who he fall in love with?
NO EASY ANSWERS
Yes, Barnicle is right when he notes that tens of millions of good people in Middle America voted Republican. But if you look closely at that map you see a more complex picture. You see the state where James Byrd was lynch-dragged behind a pickup truck until his body came apart — it’s red. You see the state where Matthew Shepard was crucified on a split-rail fence for the crime of being gay — it’s red. You see the state where right-wing extremists blew up a federal office building and murdered scores of federal employees — it’s red. The state where an Army private who was thought to be gay was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, and the state where neo-Nazi skinheads murdered two African-Americans because of their skin color, and the state where Bob Jones University spews its anti-Catholic bigotry: they’re all red too.
But that’s not the whole story, either. Cultural warriors like House impeachment managers Bill McCollum and James Rogan and ultra-conservatives like Sen. John Ashcroft were defeated. A gun control measure passed in Colorado and Oregon, and school vouchers were rejected in Michigan and California. Democrats gained seats in the House, the Senate and state legislatures — and Gore carried the popular vote. My point is that Middle America is a far more complicated place than even a gifted commentator like Mike Barnicle gives us credit for. It’s not all just red and blue — or black and white.
Democratic strategist Paul Begala is the co-host, with Oliver North, of MSNBC’s “Equal Time.” Begala is also the author of “Is Our Children Learning? The Case Against George W. Bush.” |
