Patience of The People
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By Richard Cohen
Thursday, November 16, 2000; Page A43
It is with total confidence that I predict the winner of the presidential race: the American people. They have been fair. They have been patient. They have expressed an almost touching confidence in the system, and they have--foreign observers please take note--not once resorted to violence. All they lack is a political leadership that's as good as they are.
Pride of place when it comes to disappointing performance has to go to the two presidential candidates themselves. George W. Bush, acting as if the presidency were his by divine right, simply disregarded the fact that no winner could be discerned--and moved with alacrity into a transition mode. He established a faux White House in Austin, posing for a presidential-like picture with the vice president non-elect, Dick Cheney, and other members of his fantasy White House staff. You could almost hear Slobodan Milosevic slapping his forehead: Oh, so that's how it's done.
For a while, Al Gore hardly did any better. His operatives--particularly Bill Daley and Chris Lehane--initially moved into the proverbial spin cycle, and then, last night, Gore pledged to abandon all legal suits if the manual recounts are allowed to proceed--either in the counties currently attempting them or statewide. A full or partial recount would probably benefit him, but Gore coupled his pledge with an invitation for Bush to meet with him in an attempt to unify the nation. In doing so, Gore showed that he had his ear to the ground. He could hear the disgust of his fellow citizens.
Next on the list comes James A. Baker, the former secretary of state and a White House official under Ronald Reagan. For the second time in his career, he is carrying water for a man clearly his intellectual inferior and doing it, as always, with all the wide-eyed sincerity of a door-to-door Bible salesman. One moment he was against lawsuits, the next minute his team filed one. As Republicans, they favor states and localities, but--hey, any port in a storm--they moved into federal court. He says everything he does is to expedite matters--even if it means that some of the ballots won't be counted.
Were it not for Katherine Harris, Florida's secretary of state (more on her later), Baker would be in a class of his own. He has cited imaginary foreign repercussions if the vote tally were prolonged--an argument weakened by both the lack of any proof and its assault on common sense. My own worldwide survey finds no governments under siege on account of the American election and no mobs outside our embassies yelling, "Who stole Volusia County?"
No list of rogues would be complete without the aforementioned Harris, a woman with an edict for every contingency and, in the last week, probably the sorriest court record of any state official in the country. Her machinations appear intended to secure a Bush victory--nothing else. Who cares if there are plenty of reasons for a recount, a hand count, an eyeball examination of those butterfly ballots? Who cares if some 19,000 voters in Palm Beach County were effectively disenfranchised? Her job, as she apparently sees it, is just to get this thing over as quickly as possible. Maybe she's booked a cruise that leaves soon.
In contrast, the American people seem content to let matters take their course. In poll after poll, most of them expressed a willingness to wait until the end of the month to have the election resolved. Most pertinently, six out of 10 Americans think that not having a clear winner is not, for the time being, a crisis. For some reason, they seem to think the country has a president. They are, of course, precisely right.
My e-mails are heartening on this score. I am told of young people who, for the first time in their lives, are captivated by politics. They now know of the electoral college, state-by-state voting, squeakers of the past and, importantly, they feel part of history. Vietnam, the civil rights era, the Kennedys--all of that is so distant to them. Now, they can savor a momentous event of their own. Welcome. Welcome to history.
We are a strong and robust democracy with an abiding belief in fair play--and we may face some rough days ahead. With any luck, our procedures and institutions will see us through. As for the candidates, they can serve us best by moderating their rhetoric and simply getting out of the way.
We the people have work to do. |
