OT Court rulings and anger that is met with anger. I hope this is settled today. I picked this up a bit ago humorous? I hope so.
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 11 2000
Methuselah and the Money Man are waiting
BEN MACINTYRE
America’s election shambles could be leading to a bizarre conclusion
There is only one certainty emerging from the miasma of the presidential election and it is this: we will never know, for absolute certainty, who really won it. The margin in the Florida election is so infinitesimal, 327 votes out of six million cast by the current count, that it will always be open to doubt. Additional overseas ballots may shift the margin a little, but the numbers are in danger of becoming irrelevant as the democratic process becomes a raw struggle for power, fought through the media, public sentiment and the courts. The outcome of this no longer depends on the voters but on the character of the two combatants. Both Al Gore and George Bush are facing their first real test of statesmanship, and neither has emerged well. There is no simple solution, but much depends on how far these two are prepared to push America into constitutional crisis, before they pull back. There is no sign of that yet. The aggrieved Gore camp feels that the election was stolen, in error if not by fraud; the Bush team considers the Florida race to have been fair, and the Democrats’ claims a bald attempt to rerun an election that did not go their way. The conflict is escalating swiftly: Gore has enlisted a battalion of lawyers, Jesse Jackson is firing up the claims of racial discrimination in voting, Bush is spreading the conflict to demand recounts and investigations in other states where the result was close. Assuming the presidency before it is his, Bush began appointing members of his Cabinet; Gore cranked up the rhetoric, his surrogates talking, quite inaccurately, of “an injustice unparalleled in our history”. The public mood has swiftly shifted from excitement, to amusement, to bafflement. Resentment comes next. America is heading rapidly into uncharted and exceedingly turbulent waters, but we have been here before, of course. In 1876 the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, won the popular vote against the Republican Rutherford Hayes but fell one vote short of victory in the Electoral College. Both sides claimed to have won Florida, and two other Southern states. Accusations of vote-tampering and intimidation swirled, the lawyers were brought in and the entire election dissolved into a political brawl. It was settled, finally, by a backroom bargain: the Democrats agreed to accept Hayes’s election, in return for a promise to end the hated post-Civil War reconstruction policies in the South. There is no suggestion that any such deal might be made in the 2000 election, but to achieve some form of resolution will require a compromise. At some point, depending on the final vote count, one or other of these ferociously ambitious individuals will have to step back and concede, even if he does not believe he has lost and whatever the urgings of the partisans on his own side, to avoid inflicting further damage. America detests a presidential loser. (Asked what it felt like recently, Michael Dukakais was succinct: “It stinks.”) But American voters have often sympathised with, and subsequently elected, a loser they perceive to have lost unfairly. It can no longer be assumed that the defeated candidate this year is finished politically. To concede graciously, while leaving the victor with the most minuscule mandate and the suspicion of illegitimacy, might be the canniest possible groundwork for a presidential bid in 2004. Even without the impasse, this was a powerfully strange election. The Senate prepares to welcome a dead man, a tycoon who spent some $61 million of his fortune to get there, and Senator-elect Hillary Clinton, who donned a new mantle, shrugged off her husband’s congratulatory embrace and opened a new chapter in the strangest saga of family politics ever written. The Cuban government was in stitches. But if the immediate electoral past has its surreal aspects, that is nothing to what may be rumbling down the turnpike should the deadlock persist. If Bush does win Florida, and Gore takes Oregon, then the Republican would emerge with 271 Electoral College votes to 268 for the Democrat. It would take only three “faithless electors” to swap allegiance, as most are free to do, to swing the result back to Gore. The Democrat’s probable victory in the popular vote, combined with the evidence of voting irregularities, could produce enough defector-electors to make the difference. Ordinary people do strange things when they feel the eyes of America on them. Look at the O.J. Simpson jury. But say just two electors swap sides, that would split the Electoral College 269-269 and toss the decision to the House of Representatives. The members, in this instance, vote as states, not individuals, and a majority of at least 26 out of 50 is needed to select the President. The opportunities for fresh stalemate are considerable. If no President has been chosen by Inauguration Day, then the most bizarre scenario unfolds: the Senate’s President pro tempore, the longest-serving member of the majority, would become President. Totter up to the throne Strom Thurmond, the Senator for South Carolina, who turns 98 next month. The election was always firmly focused on old age pensioners, so there is perfect symmetry here. The next in line after that should be the Secretary of State, but Madeleine Albright was born outside the US and is therefore ineligible, so Larry Summers, Treasury Secretary, would become Vice-President. So there is it: the Thurmond-Summers Administration, Methuselah and the Money Man, a wrinkly, twinkly nonagenarian and a plump economist. In the strange twilight zone that is the presidential election, I can no longer tell whether this is a looming nightmare, or the dream ticket. |
