Camille Paglia is probably not too popular with any of the people arguing one side or the other here, but I think this part of her recent Salon.com column is worth reading. The entire column can be found at:
salon.com
The peevish porcupine beats the shrill rooster
The only thing worse than the candidates this year is the shockingly biased liberal press. Plus: A frankfurter geography of America.
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By Camille Paglia
Dec. 6, 2000 | As I file this, Al Gore has not yet conceded, but there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon that the rancorous stalemate in the 2000 presidential election might soon be over. While the frame of constitutional government remains unshaken, it has been distressing in the extreme to see what was already a confused, tedious, amateurish and claptrap-filled campaign degenerate into nitpicking legal wrangling, ruthless backbiting, brazen race-baiting and bitter recriminations among American citizens.
Any fair-minded person watching TV in the first two days after the abortive election should have frankly acknowledged that it was the Democrats who first took the low road of mob hysteria and backstage manipulation in Florida. The Republicans countered with an arrogant, presumptuous war mode of their own, but the initial destruction of civility and dignity was not of their making. As a registered Democrat and disillusioned former supporter of Bill Clinton, I voted for Ralph Nader as a protest against the corruption of my party -- which was abundantly on display among amoral Democratic operatives this past month.
A national election this close, with the presidency hanging in the balance, certainly demanded extraordinary postmortem measures. But Gore compromised his credibility from the start by demanding recounts only in heavily Democratic counties that he had already won in a landslide. Many citizens (like myself) would have strongly supported statewide manual recounts, however cumbersome, so that all Florida voters were treated equitably. Gore's divide-and-conquer strategy looked like vintage, ward-heeling dirty tricks.
Republicans correctly warned that manual recounts are not entirely reliable because they are subjective (is a "dimpled chad" really a vote?), introduce human error and open the door to "mischief" (i.e., tampering and fraud). Punch-card ballots were never designed for repeated handling or twisting (witness the snowfall of chad to the floor). Hence it's unlikely we can confidently trust future vote totals accumulated by sleuths of either party operating under the Freedom of Information Act.
The sanctimony and distortions of fact in Gore's Nov. 27 address to the nation were so flagrant that they seriously undercut any claim he might make to the next presidential nomination in 2004. On the other hand, the embarrassing, monthlong spectacle of George W. Bush dodging public view and choking on the simplest English sentences exposes yet again the astonishingly poor judgment of the Republican Party establishment that settled on him as the anointed nominee in the first place.
There are over a dozen competent, articulate, knowledgeable Republican governors and senators whose political talents leave Bush in the dust and who would probably have beaten Gore in a walk. But party elders, belatedly realizing that laconic, mummiform Bob Dole had been far too worn and jaded to send up against the loquacious, bouncily philandering Clinton in 1996, went for superficial glamour with Bush. Michigan's Gov. John Engler admitted as much on a talk show a year ago when he genially joked about why Bush was chosen rather than him: "I'm not as purty as he is."
So it looks likely that the U.S. will be stuck with a chief executive who will be scrambling to keep up with the job from Day 1. It's both dreary and unsettling that the nation's backup quarterback (the smart but shambling Dick Cheney) is so clearly past his prime and is playing Russian roulette with a heart condition to boot. But Bush is an unpretentious fellow with centrist instincts who may surprise people -- particularly if he gets his administration off to a terrific start by naming Colin Powell for secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice as national security advisor, who would be the most high-ranking African-Americans in history.
The behavior of the Northeastern major media during the Florida fiasco was shockingly biased. From my perspective as a professor of humanities and media studies, the covert power presently wielded by partisan liberal journalists has become positively alarming, partly because of other changes in communications. Over the past 30 years, daily newspapers have waned in number and variety; the weekly newsmagazines have declined in quality; primary education has weakened in history and geography; and higher education has been suffused with social-welfare ideology.
The Internet, via its numerous political news-link sites, is enormously liberating in providing points of view outside the received opinion of the Northeastern corridor. A good example is Georgie Anne Geyer's superb piece in the Nov. 17 Chicago Tribune, "Direct Democracy a Dangerously Primitive System," which demonstrates the risk in abolishing the electoral college.
But not everyone has access to the Internet. For economic as well as cultural reasons, working-class and lower-middle-class African-Americans, for example, are less likely to be equipped with a computer or to be obsessively focused on surfing national and international news sites. Is it relevant that African-Americans (by a voting pattern of 93 percent and up) remain so receptive to Jim Crow-era Democratic Party rhetoric? A near-monolithic voting bloc of that size (at a time when the majority of rank-and-file Republicans are hardly racist ogres) suggests insufficient internal debate, limited sources of outside information and peer pressure in families, neighborhoods and churches.
Though in the week following the election the major media publicized and magnified every inflammatory claim about voting problems in Southern Florida, not everyone was credulous. Salon reader T. Spanne sends this amusing satire about the storm of complaints and the demand for a revote whipped up by the national Democratic Party via telemarketers among elderly Jewish residents of Palm Beach County (where the long-used, Democrat-designed ballot form was published in advance and was accompanied at polling places with instructions for checking it afterward):
Due to the recent situation with our presidential elections, we feel that there are other things that should be "re"-done:
1. We need to contact the state lottery commission. To my horror while watching the lotto results, I realized that I had picked the wrong numbers and that the lottery's outcome was not to my advantage. Thus I am demanding a replay of the last lotto. I and eight others are exploring a possible lawsuit because the numbers were confusing! There are too many numbers to pick and they are too close together. There needs to be a local replay of the lotto!
2. We are contacting the local college board for a recall of last week's midterms. To my horror I chose the wrong answers to the test! We found that the multiple choice questions were too confusing, thus leading various students to receive unacceptable grades. We demand a local retest of this exam until we get satisfactory results.
3. I demand to be re-interviewed! After my interview with my prospective employer, I realized I answered some questions wrongly. The answers I meant to give were not given, and I need another opportunity to answer the questions properly as I had wished to. I am contacting the local labor board to challenge the decision of not hiring me. They need to re-interview!
4. I demand that my ticket be revoked! To my horror, I realized that I was looking at my tachometer instead of the speedometer! It's the manufacturers' fault since they placed the gauges too close together. I thought I was only going 5 mph! I am contacting the DMV to revoke my ticket and will be filing a lawsuit against all auto manufacturers who are responsible for putting the gauges too close together.
This whole West Palm Beach thing is a joke! How can 19,000 people (all in West Palm Beach) be that incompetent? What about the rest of Florida? Did all the morons migrate to West Palm Beach? They seem to be able to work 15 Bingo cards all at once!
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