Recent commentary from National Journal:
Legal Affairs: Bush vs. Gore -- A First Draft for the Justices to Consider, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (December 6, 2000)
We're judges, not magicians, and so we are in no position to somehow anoint the legitimate President.
Media: Tidal Wave? Don't Bet on It, by William Powers (December 6, 2000)
Why the hot news of a liberal columnist declaring his independence from Al Gore cooled quickly.
Political Pulse: Why Al's Losing the Spin War, by William Schneider (December 6, 2000)
Many Americans regard the dispute over the presidential vote as a mere political spectacle.
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: Losing the Election Shouldn't Make You a Loser, by Carl M. Cannon (November 22, 2000)
The ethos that holds that the winner takes everything and the loser is a fool is a barrier to statesmanship.
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The Campaign:If Gore Loses, He Needs to Be More Than Magnanimous
It was wrong of Al Gore and his Democrats to unleash an army of lawyers on Florida to suppress the absentee ballots of military personnel, wrong of the Vice President to allow his supporters to play the race card, wrong of the party leadership to ship demonstrators to Palm Beach County, Fla., to clamor for the patently unconstitutional solution of a "revote." It was also wrong of Gore aides to traffic in the character assassination of Florida Republicans, even as Gore piously called for a more civil discourse. Finally, it was wrong of Gore to maintain, as he did on Monday night, not only that this election will be counterfeit unless more recounts take place, but that all future U.S. elections will be tainted as well.
Yet Al Gore is right about his most basic point: namely, that it is only human nature -- not to mention basic fairness -- for him and his staff to try to make sure that all the votes cast on Nov. 7 in Florida are, in fact, counted.
The rest of the nation should want that, too.
Even as public opinion hardened against him, Gore finally got this salient message down to a single sentence. "I believe this is the time to count every vote -- and not run out the clock," Gore said on Tuesday.
The Vice President came up with that formulation some 17 hours after he made the same point in an address to the nation on television, and just after a Gallup Poll showed that the percentage of Americans who believe Gore should concede had increased from 46 percent to 56 percent. Fearing that public support was slipping away, Gore's advisers were determined to have their man speak out every day this week. Then they brought in a proven heavyweight. "In all this interplay," President Clinton told reporters, "it is easy to lose what is really important, which is the integrity of the voter -- every single vote. On Election Day, every person who voted had a vote that counted just as much as mine."
That, in a nutshell, is the Democrats' argument, and it's a pretty good one. Leave aside Gore's pronouncements about how his principal consideration is not his own victory, but the health of democracy. (Nothing about Gore's conduct during the primaries, the general election, or the recount period suggests he cares about much of anything other than being elected.) But Gore's innermost motivations aren't the main issue here. The issue is the accuracy of the election returns and whether the man certified as the winner is actually the one who got the most votes. The uncontested facts are these:
On Election Night, the tally of Florida's 6 million popular votes showed that George W. Bush had carried the state -- and its 25 all-important electoral votes -- by 1,784 votes, a margin so narrow that under existing Florida law it automatically triggered a recount in every county in the state. That recount shrank Bush's cushion to a mere 327 votes, a number later amended to an even 300. If Gore had thrown in the towel at that point, the close Florida results, coupled with the historical oddity of Gore's narrowly winning the national popular vote, would have left people debating for years who really deserved to be inaugurated as the 43rd President of the United States.
Gore had a different, less passive, reaction. Not long after he had telephoned to concede the race to Bush, Gore came to the conclusion that he was the rightful victor and that further counting would reveal that a plurality of Floridians had voted for him, and not for Bush.
At one level, this childlike faith of Gore's seems odd. Any dispassionate observer could point to all kinds of factors that clouded the voting and made it unlikely that we'll ever know who really won Florida. Bush loyalists point to the television networks' calling Florida for Gore before the polls had closed in 10 counties of the Florida Panhandle, thus depressing voter turnout in Bush strongholds. Bush's attorneys from the start have also objected to the subjectivity and lack of standards in the hand recounts carried out by canvassing boards trying to determine voter "intent." And, of course, there were those highly controversial 1,500 discarded overseas absentee ballots, most of which apparently would have gone to Bush and given him a larger cushion.
For their part, Gore and Joe Lieberman point to 19,000 "undervotes" in Palm Beach County and another 10,000 in Miami-Dade. Undervotes are ballots for which the counting machines didn't register any vote for President. Gore supporters also point to the various roadblocks that Secretary of State Katherine Harris put in their way, including her refusal to certify 215 more Gore votes found by the canvassing board in Palm Beach. Miami-Dade found an additional 157 Gore ballots, but then suspended its recount and didn't send Harris those additional votes. Nor did Gore get credit for 51 more votes that Nassau County inexplicably dropped from its recount totals.
Because the margin of victory as certified by Harris was a mere 537 votes, Gore is certain that if he could just get those hand counts completed, dimpled chads or no dimpled chads, he would prevail. But getting their precious recounts required judicial intervention, and so they went to court. That's where the country is this week, and whatever Americans think of trial lawyers or an overreaching judiciary, Republicans should stop excoriating Gore for seeking redress through the courts. After all, that's all Paula Corbin Jones was doing when she launched the litigation that produced Monica Lewinsky.
All of that notwithstanding, Gore's gambit, especially if it is unsuccessful, has the potential to leave lasting scars on this country. Numerous commentators, including some Democrats, have opined that Bush seems temperamentally better suited to the role of a conciliator than does Gore. This may be true, but it misses one key point. If Gore prevails, he will have done so because he convinced judges and vote counters that he really won. The Republicans might be livid at such a result, but in the end it will be difficult to make accusations of a "stolen" election stick to the guy who got the most votes. The more troubling scenario will be if Gore loses and Bush is never accepted as a legitimate leader among select groups -- the African-American community, for instance -- because of the kinds of passions unleashed, at least in part, by Gore's historic refusal to concede.
This is what Gore must address if he ends up losing. The nation is already polarized. One sad lesson gleaned from the virtual dead heat in the 2000 election is that America is divided regionally, racially, and religiously, and along lines of gender and class. This is not Al Gore's fault -- although it is one of the legacies of the Clinton-Gingrich era -- but Gore's decision to continue the campaign past Nov. 7 has undoubtedly exacerbated these tensions.
For that reason, a losing Gore would have real work to do when it is all over. A gracious concession speech, quite enough in normal circumstances, would be a nice start, but just that -- only a start. Yes, a President-elect Bush would have to reach out to Democratic officeholders, appoint Democrats to his Cabinet, and strike the right rhetorical tone. But a runner-up Gore would also have to reach out to Democratic politicians, many of whom are in the far-left wing of the party and are the hardest to control. How will Al Gore, the unsuccessful presidential nominee who couldn't carry his own home state, convince Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York that saying there was "the whiff of fascism in the air" was not the best choice of words? How will he convince the inflamed members of the Congressional Black Caucus that it's not in the long-term interests of this nation to keep talking about a "stolen" election?
None of that will be easy. It will be hard enough for Gore to call off the lawyers at all -- or to look gracious while doing so. But Gore will be obligated to do all that, and more. He could, for instance, recommend to the Bush camp conservative Democrats who could serve with Bush -- and he could jawbone Democrats such as Sam Nunn into seeing how important it is at this moment in American history to work in a bipartisan way for a man with bipartisan impulses. And, resisting the natural human reaction to losing, Gore should not disappear. Perhaps it wouldn't be practical to remain quite as visible as he has been this week, but after four weeks of postelectionp struggles, a single concession speech probably isn't going to get the job done.
In other words, Gore has the right to contest this election in the courts. Perhaps he even has a duty, to himself and to the 50 million Americans who voted for him. But when he exercises that right, he also assumes a huge responsibility. His obligation is nothing less than to help repair the breach this challenge has caused.
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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.
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All material copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
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