Recent commentary from National Journal:
Media: The Great White Board, by William Powers (November 22, 2000)
Before memories of Election Night (and the nets' by and large miserable performance) fade to black, a last look at Tim Russert's low-tech white board and why it was such a hit.
Political Pulse: The Cost of Victory, by William Schneider (November 22, 2000)
Each candidate has to make a political calculation: how much is winning this election worth?
Legal Affairs: It's About More Than Which Judge Has the Last Word, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (November 22, 2000)
Neither literalism nor originalism nor postmodernism can substitute for the old-fashioned quality called wisdom.
The Campaign: Fight or Concede? What Would Martin Sheen Do?, by Carl M. Cannon (November 15, 2000)
The fighting spirit of Team Gore has taken on a life of its own. But at what cost?
Legal Affairs: How Lawyers And Pols Can Get Us Out of This Mess, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (November 15, 2000)
Our current predicament illustrates how our legal culture has degraded our political and moral cultures.
Media: Amending the Media Constitution, by William Powers (November 15, 2000)
The American media universe is supposed to be unjust, but in some ways it has the most ruthless justice of all.
Political Pulse: It Was All About Sex, by William Schneider (November 15, 2000)
Men voted for George W. Bush by a wide margin; Al Gore was the women's choice.
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The Campaign:Losing the Election Shouldn't Make You a Loser
As week two of the Re-Campaign of 2000 ground its way through the Florida courts, county canvassing boards, and the glare of mind-numbing 24-hour cable news coverage, the American people -- who, it must be said, tended throughout this ordeal to display better humor, more maturity, and a higher sense of patriotism than the contestants in this dishearteningly partisan fight -- learned several truths.
The first of these is that the popular notion that Washington is the source of all evil, not to mention petty partisanship, and that local and state governments are the source of all goodness and light has shown itself, at least in the Florida localities of Tallahassee and Palm Beach County, to be an obvious canard.
A second truth is that at least one campaign-trail claim made by Gov. George W. Bush of Texas and Dick Cheney can now probably be characterized as an established fact. Al Gore and the Democrats would say or do anything to win.
The most important truth, however, is that the winner-take-everything ethos of American presidential campaigns is a barrier to displays of statesmanship, and is one of the factors that brought the two sides to such brinkmanship this week. I am not referring to the winner-take-all tallies in the Electoral College, although there is much more on that subject elsewhere in this magazine. I am talking about the recent tradition, largely fueled by the media, that the winner of the presidency is a political genius who inherits all the power in the world, while the defeated general election candidate is a fool who gets, and deserves, nothing. A loser.
Once upon a time, the Democrats nominated an impassioned former Nebraska Congressman and newspaper editor named William Jennings Bryan as their standard-bearer for President -- three times. In each of his campaigns, the last of which was in 1908, Bryan suffered defeat by increasingly large margins. His reward today would be national derision. But the American political system was more tolerant at the turn of the century. In 1912, in fact, Woodrow Wilson made Bryan his Secretary of State.
Today, there is no consolation prize, no silver medal for the candidate who comes in second. It's more like a gladiatorial contest, in which one fighter wins and one dies, or at least suffers a political death. In modern politics, nominees who don't quite make it to the White House are abandoned by their allies, blamed by their party, and treated with disdain by the media. Almost always, such treatment is unjust. As if Walter Mondale or Bob Dole, to cite two examples, had any real chance at victory against Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton in the middle of robust economic times. Mondale was given the ambassadorship in Tokyo at precisely the moment in history that the Clinton Administration seemed to stop paying attention to Japan. Dole is best known now for promoting a drug that treats male impotence.
This is hardly the way to treat the major political parties' elder statesmen, but it is the way things are. That reality, in turn, is one of the reasons that for eight days, neither Gore nor Bush has reached out to each other, let alone seriously contemplated how to step aside for the good of the country -- although there are compelling reasons for both men to consider such a move. (Bush lost the popular vote. Gore is undermining faith in the electoral process by seemingly wanting to count votes over and over until he's ahead.) But never mind that: Winning is too important. The losing candidate has too far to fall. Pundits, and some party mavericks, have suggested that either candidate could actually be a winner by graciously accepting defeat, but nothing in America's recent history showed these two combatants that this was really true. Last time anybody checked, no Democrat had drawn on the Woodrow Wilson model by floating Michael Dukakis' name for Secretary of State -- or for dogcatcher.
In this context, Gore's Wednesday night gambit was about as good as either of these two guys can do. He offered to abide by a hand recount of all the counties in Florida, not just Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade, and to meet Bush in person in order to ratchet down the "inflammatory language." Gore received an immediate public relations boost for his proposal, and he at least sounded gracious, but there may have been less to this offer than met the eye.
First of all, neither Gore, nor his army of Florida-based lawyers, have the authority to waive Florida election law, which would seem to preclude opening up the rest of the state to a hand recount. Second, Gore's promise to abide by the results of a hand recount is hardly much of a concession. What Gore was referring to when he said he would abide by the results of the hand recount he has demanded is that he is willing to forgo any benefit he stood to gain from legal efforts in West Palm Beach to force a county-wide "revote." But the ploy of calling for a revote is so patently unfair, so extralegal on its face, that the very request for it can only be viewed cynically. Elections are snapshots in time and mandated by law to take place on a certain day. And on the day in question, Pat Buchanan wasn't the only third-party candidate on the ballot siphoning off votes. Ralph Nader was there, too, trying to reach the 5 percent threshold for the Green Party. Nader didn't make it, although he did tally some 5,565 votes in Palm Beach County, most of which would logically have gone to Gore in any rerun of the election -- precisely because Nader didn't get the 5 percent on Nov. 7. But the Democratic lawyers pushing this issue didn't exactly hide their agenda. Attorney Gary Farmer actually asked a Florida judge on Wednesday to consider reassigning 11,600 votes to Gore -- if he didn't want to order a revote in Palm Beach County -- based on a "scientific" formula Farmer plans to present in court. Farmer kept a straight face throughout the hearing.
In addition, Gore hardly needs a "one-on-one" meeting with Bush to instruct Democrats to ratchet down the rhetoric that is being used to manipulate public opinion into thinking Bush would be an illegitimate President if the Gore side doesn't prevail.
Gore didn't need Bush's blessing, for instance, to tell Paul Begala not to refer to former Secretary of State James A. Baker III as a "political hack," or to characterize the entire GOP as "banana Republicans." Likewise, Gore could have disavowed Democratic lawyer Alan Dershowitz' characterization of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris as "corrupt" and "a crook." Mark Fabiani is on Gore's payroll, so presumably the Vice President could have restrained him from saying, as Fabiani did on Tuesday, that "George Bush will have the most tarnished presidency in American history right off the bat," and that "this is an outrageous attempt by Bush to steal the election." These are hardly phrases calculated to instill public confidence in the process.
And it was a process that needed burnishing, not more criticism.
All week in Florida, beleaguered state and local officials seemed to be making only two kinds of decisions: unwise ones and partisan ones. As the rest of the nation prepared to absorb the tallies of hand recounts from Palm Beach County, it learned that the county canvassing board had asked Harris for an advisory opinion. Harris, the Bush campaign co-chairwoman in Florida, then issued an all-too-predictable legal opinion: Stop recounting, she said, and certify your tallies by 5 p.m. Tuesday or they won't count. A few hours later, Robert A. Butterworth, the state's Democratic attorney general (and Gore state co-chairman), weighed in with his opinion. He concluded -- surprise of surprises! -- that Palm Beach could proceed with its recount. After a (Democratic) Florida judge ruled Harris could refuse to accept the results of such late recounts, but not "arbitrarily," Harris took only a day to report to the press that her "duty" required her to deny such amended returns.
On Wednesday night, Bush rebuffed Gore's offer, saying that recounting votes manually and trying to divine voters' intentions was a "flawed" and "arbitrary" process. The 2000 presidential election, he said, won't be settled by "deals or efforts to mold public opinion." And he pointedly agreed to meet with Gore after it was over.
And so it went. In the end, after Gore and Bush had addressed the nation, the sad fact was that neither side had proposed anything that gave even a hint of advantage to their opponents. No one had acted against his party's interests.
Well, there was one man who behaved as a statesman, one person who announced at the beginning that he wasn't going to use his position for partisan advantage, one person who said that even the appearance of impropriety would not be good for democracy. That person, of course, was Gov. Bush.
Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida.
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Carl M. Cannon is a correspondent for National Journal. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.
For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com.
All material copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
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