Commentary: Sleeze, Sleeze, Sleeze
Saturday, 18 November 2000 5:24 (ET)
By PETER ROFF, UPI National Political Analyst WASHINGTON, November 18 (UPI) - Desperate to win the White House, Democrats have used several strategies to set up a victory at the end of the day.
First, push for recounting ballots in four heavily Democrat areas of Florida and, once started, use all available legal means to keep the recounts going. So far, they have prevailed. There are potential problems with whichever recount method is used. There is nothing, per se, wrong with hand counting ballots. Machines sometimes overlook a very small number of votes cast improperly. Hand counts are vulnerable to the manipulation of the ballots by anyone who comes into contact with them. It also requires all the election judgments to be fair and objective. If each side in this dispute trusted the other, it could be possible to resolve the issue by counting the ballots by hand. But there is no trust and so each side suspects the other of cheating. In any event, no matter what the outcome of the hand recounts in Palm Beach and elsewhere, the ballots have been exposed to far too many people for an untrusting public to ever be sure that the announced final outcome was an accurate measure of events on Election Day.
Once enjoined, the strategy calls for insuring that there are, at least in some counties, two sets of numbers at the end. This is so lawyers more focused on torts than election law can argue in court once the counts are finished. Second, use the court of public opinion to put people who are otherwise believed to be fair, decent, and honest people on trial. Katherine Harris, the Florida Republican official who is responsible for the certification of the vote has been called, as the Wall Street Journal and others have documented, "a Soviet commissar," a "lackey", and, in the words of Alan Dershowitz, the world's most ubiquitous attorney, a "crook." Harris has had her objectivity questioned so thoroughly by Democrat operatives, as well as by television types, that her reputation has been smeared, possibly irrevocably. She is now in the unenviable position of having her every move questioned in front of 250 million people. More unfortunately, her only hope for redemption may lie, in the short run, in her doing something that may be against the law; a violation of her oath of office and of her personal conscience; pleasing to the angry mob of pundits and partisans who are attacking her.
Third is a potentially very serious development in the American political process, efforts to lobby the members of the Electoral College about how they will vote. The Colorado Rocky Mountain News reports two of that state's electors received calls from ABC News, asking questions about whether or not they would change their votes from George Bush, to whom they are pledged, to Al Gore. Mary Hergert, a Colorado elector who was Bush's campaign chairman in Weld County, told the News that the caller told her a Colorado state law binding her to Bush is unconstitutional. Hergert said she felt intimidated by the call. ABC later apologized through a spokesman for any confusion that the call may have created, but refused to release a list of the questions asked. In Arizona, well-known political personality Joe Arpaio, the Sheriff of Maricopa County and a Bush elector, was besieged with calls following media reports suggesting he was not firm in his support for the Texas Governor. Arpaio issued a public statement that he was, indeed, firmly on board in order to stop the calls. Elector is a position of public trust, so some level of scrutiny is fair. What is not fair, and is, in fact sinister, are revelations that Bob Beckel, Democrat solon, occasional host of Crossfire, and campaign manager for Walter Mondale's failed 1984 presidential bid, may be engaged in some of the most vile skullduggery since Watergate. It is an admittedly strong metaphor but frighteningly appropriate. Since the morning after the election, there have been rumors afoot that some in the Democrat party might make serious attempts to switch votes in the Electoral College.
If Bush wins Florida, he becomes president by one more electoral vote than the required 270. If three Republican electors switch to Gore, the Tennessean gains a majority and wins the White House. According to reports in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, Beckel, who has close ties to Gore recount team leader Warren Christopher, is engaged in an opposition research project targeting Republican electors. Calling his efforts "information gathering," he says he is working independently of the Gore campaign. Bill Daley, the vice president's campaign chairman, has publicly shied away from any talk of lobbying electors."I think there is a presumption that those members who are voting, vote based upon the election," he has said. "I believe the vast majority of them are legally bound. And I would assume if you're legally bound, you believe you're morally bound." Anyone in politics knows "opposition research" is a polite synonym for digging up dirt. The threat explicit in Beckel's project is that the lives of electors are going to be examined and given the same treatment Larry Flynt gave former Republican Congressman Bob Livingston. Beckel told the Journal his procedure is to "call on mostly Democrats, but some Republicans too, and ask 'Who are these electors, and what do you know about them?" That is what blackmailers do too. Democrats need to call, today, for Beckel to stop and use heavy hammers to insure that he does. The presidential election must not be decided based on late night phones calls to electors asking "Hey buddy, who was that woman you went with to Las Vegas last year?" Decency and liberty demand it.
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