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Politics : Electoral College 2000 - Ahead of the Curve -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (6441)	12/18/2000 7:43:32 AM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 6710

>>Reagan essays reveal his intellect By Larry Witham THE WASHINGTON TIMES Hundreds of recently discovered policy essays by Ronald Reagan from the 1970s reveal a "one-man think tank," not the "amiable dunce" portrayed by his critics, editors of the documents say. The 670 handwritten radio commentaries are what's left of more than 1,000 composed between 1975 and 1979. They were lost in storage boxes, but now may be the best archive of the 40th president's original thinking. "We discovered that the guy has been writing all his life," said Martin Anderson, domestic-policy adviser to Mr. Reagan and co-editor of an anthology of more than 200 essays and other works. "We kept marveling at the clarity of his writing, but also the breadth of issues." Some of the cache will be serialized in the New York Times next year, and Simon and Schuster has embargoed quotes from the works until the book's February release. "We're just going to put out the original drafts and let people decide" the literary and intellectual merit, he said, arguing that Mr. Reagan comes across as a "one-man think tank." Besides this find, little remains of Mr. Reagan's lifelong paper trail of handwritten documents. The yellow notepad leafs were found by Kiron K. Skinner, a Harvard graduate and Democrat who was only the second person given access to Mr. Reagan's private papers, still in some disorder. "One day she walked in and said, 'Look at this. There are a lot of them,' " Mr. Anderson said. Miss Skinner, a specialist in Cold War foreign policy, now teaches at Carnegie Mellon University. Mr. Anderson also found unknown Reagan writings when, at Nancy Reagan's request, he cleaned out the president's Los Angeles desk after he went into seclusion because of Alzheimer's disease. The bulk of the newly discovered documents are first-draft, final-draft radio talks given for five minutes, five days a week. They were heard by tens of millions of listeners but never archived. "They were not written for posterity," Mr. Anderson said. But he said they prove that Mr. Reagan read widely, analyzed nearly every complex issue of the day, and stated his position with compelling literary quality. "It's extraordinary to see these written out in hand," Mr. Anderson said. "You see his corrections. You see his mind at work. I know a lot of intelligent people who can't write. But I don't know any person who writes this well who is not intelligent." The book also includes 20 other Reagan writings, from poems to fiction and letters, from 1925 to 1994. That year he penned a final letter to Americans about his "journey . . . into the sunset of my life" with Alzheimer's. Foreign-policy experts also have identified one five-page script, titled "Mr. Minister" — found in Mr. Reagan's desk — as what Mr. Anderson called the president's "talking points for the entire U.S. strategy" in opening U.S.-Soviet relations. Marvin Kranz, a historian at the Library of Congress, has not seen the essays, but agrees they might change opinions. "If they show a side of Reagan we didn't know, that would change our image to someone of greater intellectual wattage than he'd been known for," Mr. Kranz said. "His critics have been very harsh." Mr. Kranz said lost presidential materials rarely shatter scholarly opinion, but they can surprise. Two notable cases were Robert Lincoln's closure of his father's papers for decades and Millard Fillmore's letters being found in a New York barn long after his death. Hoover Institution fellow Arnold Beichman has read the material and calls it an "astounding revelation" about a man assumed by his staff and the news media to be a "great communicator" but a lightweight thinker. "He was called an 'amiable dunce,' and the media made him out to be a half-wit surrounded by a bunch of geniuses," he said. The essays will "force academics to revise their scholarship." Some have said that the assumption that Reagan was not intellectually gifted is so strong that even biographer Edmund Morris overlooked the implication of the essays, from which he cited a few lines as the first to gain access to the private papers. The Morris book, friends of the president say, perpetuated the so-called "mystery" of how such a simple mind could accomplish so much politically. Mr. Anderson said the answer may be that Mr. Reagan had a deep intelligence, seen when he read a newspaper at age five, but not flaunted during his political career. "He never argued with anyone," Mr. Anderson said. "He never gave orders to anyone. Yet he made every single key decision." With the discovery, the editors interviewed Mr. Reagan's secretary and drivers — former state troopers — who traveled and stayed with him between 1975 and 1979. "Very few people were around him when he was writing, except the state troopers," Mr. Anderson said. "They said, 'All the guy did was work. He read all the time. Wrote all the time.' " This may give credence to one theory that Mr. Reagan's incipient Alzheimer's at the end of his political career allowed pundits to label him weak-minded. Mr. Anderson said the truth about the Hollywood actor-turned-statesman may be what biographer Mr. Morris said of the Alzheimer's letter — that it had a touch of "genius."<<

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (6441)	12/18/2000 7:52:51 AM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 6710

I just learned something I think is very interesting - no matter how much they threaten it, the Democrats are never going to conduct a real recount of the Florida votes. Even though the ballots are public records, under Florida law, only elections officials are allowed to touch them. And the entire costs are supposed to be paid by the organization that wants to see them. In Palm Beach County, that's $600 an hour. In Duval County, that's $120 an hour. Although a number of news organizations and lawyers have requested to view ballots in Palm Beach County, what they want to look at are the 3,300 "undercounts." Same with Miami-Dade, they want to see the "undercounts." But no one is trying for a statewide review of even the "undercounts." I think this is amusing - I mean, why bother? Their minds are already made up that Gore won, otherwise, they'd want to look at ALL the votes. >>One of those new recounts will take place in Palm Beach County, where local officials conducted an election-night count, a mandatory recount, a sample manual recount, and a full manual recount in the days leading up to the Florida supreme court's November 26 certification deadline. In the last manual recount, the all-Democratic canvassing board rejected about 3,300 contested votes because it was not possible to ascertain the voter's intent on any of the punch-card ballots. The Gore campaign strongly objected; in various court pleadings, the vice president insisted that the canvassing board used too strict a standard in rejecting the ballots. But Gore's position was, at best, exceptionally weak. Even the Florida supreme court, which gave the vice president much of what he wanted in a 4-3 ruling last Friday, rejected his argument on Palm Beach County. Gore, the justices wrote, "failed to introduce any evidence to refute the canvassing board's determination that the 3,300 ballots did not constitute 'legal votes.'" The court denied the Gore campaign's request to re-examine the ballots. Now, several news organizations, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, have requested to see the Palm Beach punch cards. But not all of the punch cards. According to Heidi Juhl, assistant Palm Beach County attorney, the Times's request specifically asks to examine the 3,300 ballots which, in the paper's words, "were set aside for a possible handcount." While it seems impossible to believe that a news organization of the Times's stature would not know that the ballots have already been handcounted — each one was personally scrutinized by each member of the county canvassing board ?!51; it appears the Times nevertheless wants to test Gore's contention that the ballots contain more votes. There's another reason for journalists to request what amounts to a partial recount. Simply put, viewing the ballots will cost a lot of money. Under Florida law, the ballots are public records, but the law also forbids anyone other than elections officials from handling them. That means that in any private viewing, an elections official will have to be present to hold the ballot in front of the reporter, who will not be able to touch it. Each county is now calculating potential costs, which will then be passed on to the news organizations. According to Juhl, when Palm Beach takes into account the cost of ballot-showing, security, and other services for the media recount, the price tag will come to about $600 per hour. And it would take hours and hours and hours — days and days and days — to count Palm Beach's 422,000 votes. Why spend all that money when there is a much smaller, more cost-effective, group of "contested" ballots? The situation is likely to be the same to the south in Miami-Dade County. There, the Gore campaign maintains that there are about 9,000 votes that were never counted — "not even once," in the vice president's words. According to Gisela Salas, deputy elections supervisor in Miami-Dade, 19 individuals and organizations have so far asked to see the ballots. They include the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, as well as ABC, NBC, and The Nation magazine, among others. Here again, journalists are likely to concentrate on the 9,000 so-called "undervotes" while avoiding a costly re-examination of all of the county's 653,000 ballots.<< nationalreview.com