It would also be nice to see some of the partisans on both sides admitting that a Gore victory is not going to transform the nation into a socialist state and a Bush victory is not going to mean a one-way ticket to corporate fascism, environmental destruction, etc. For some reason political discourse seems to have been largely surrendered to the extremists on both sides, which is not a fortunate thing. The stakes are simply not as high as they are widely believed to be. Whatever they have said during the campaign, both of these men and those around them are 100% creatures of the system; neither is going to rock the boat in any major way.
A meeting between the two men is an attractive idea, but if it remains at the level of the wooden recitation of prepared scripts that characterized the debates, it's hard to see much good coming out of it.
It is interesting, though, especially to me, observing from a foreign country. It is pretty clear to me that we don't know who actually "won" and may never know: an election, like any other polling mechanism, has a margin of error, and in this case the result either way is going to be well within that margin. It will be interesting to see how the nation chooses to deal with such an ambiguous situation; certainly whatever choice is made will have to be what is perceived as the least of many evils, and certainly many will disagree with it. I expect that whoever loses will lose with little grace.
I am relieved that the pivotal state happened to be one not governed by the administration party: the strong Republican (and Bush) presence in Fla. balances out the Democratic influence at the national level, and that makes outright cheating a lot less likely, except in the minds of those whose partisan sentiments would have to conjure it up in any event. |
