Recent commentary from National Journal:
Legal Affairs: The Supreme Court—and Others—Flub the Challenge, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (December 20, 2000)
If this cloud has a silver lining, it is as a reminder that judges are just as fallible as politicians.
Media: Image-Poor, by William Powers (December 20, 2000)
The strongest political story of modern times was perhaps the weakest visual story of modern times.
Political Pulse: An Election—and Much More—Lost, by William Schneider (December 20, 2000)
When the lawyerly fog cleared, Al Gore was a big loser. So was the Supreme Court.
Social Studies: Nice Process In Florida—Too Bad About the Candidates, by Jonathan Rauch (December 13, 2000)
The surprise has been how well most of the actors have behaved, and how many alarms have been false.
Legal Affairs: No Exit—How the Supreme Court Boxed Gore In, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (December 13, 2000)
The D.C. Nine have sent a subtle, but fairly unambiguous, signal that Al Gore's hopes are doomed.
Media: Beyond Argument, by William Powers (December 13, 2000)
Give them some credit. Cable TV news operations are getting a whole lot better.
Political Pulse: Time Is Running Out for Gore, by William Schneider (December 13, 2000)
While Gore is arguing the facts, Bush is arguing the law. But Bush has the clock on his side.
The Campaign: A Fond Look at the Nagging Riddle of Al Gore, by Carl M. Cannon (December 13, 2000)
The striking thing about Gore is that he has always been such an unnatural politician.
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The Campaign:After All the Acrimony, the Election Ends on Grace Notes
During the nerve-racking 36-day Election Recount 2000, rational-minded Americans sought comfort, as they did during President Clinton's polarizing impeachment saga, in the thought that this painful partisan drama had an upside: It turned the nation's attention away from television game shows and online shopping to something more noble, namely, the Constitution of the United States.
Granted, the lawyers, judges, and political spinners on both sides made it difficult to view the proceedings as anything resembling a high-minded, movable civics class. But there has already been enough hand-wringing about the process and the results; the last of The Campaign columns will keep its focus on some of the civics and political lessons learned since Labor Day.
The first lesson is that in the United States, the "concession" speech is more than a formality, and more than just good manners. It is the signal, in our litigious and competitive culture, that the partisan players who've worked for years for one candidate must cease their efforts and go home. This fact of political life was apparent on Wednesday night when Vice President Al Gore addressed the nation.
All day, various cable commentators claimed that Gore would "withdraw" but not actually "concede." When Gore subsequently conceded with grace and class, the pundits, particularly MSNBC's Chris Matthews, were left nearly speechless—and moved. Gore spoke of "President-elect Bush" in language that was nothing short of Lincolnesque.
"Neither he nor I anticipated this long and difficult road," Gore said of his rival. "Certainly, neither of us wanted it to happen. Yet it came. And now it has ended, resolved as it must be resolved—through the honored institutions of our democracy."
If anything, Gore was too good: Many Democrats wondered aloud where that good-humored and thoughtful Gore had been during the campaign.
By way of contrast, the Rev. Jesse Jackson spent the day lobbing one stink bomb after another at George W. Bush—and at the notion that it's time for some comity among the political professionals. Jackson blithely claimed that black voters and immigrants were "targeted" for exclusion from the election, and that Bush and his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, had directed a "systematic effort to disenfranchise people." Jackson peppered his remarks with tales of police officers stopping black people from voting, while tossing in rhetoric about the "crushed dreams of Holocaust survivors" for good measure. "The loser is the winner," Jackson declared, adding that Bush lacks the "moral authority" to be President, presumably because he stole the election.
The moral-authority line appeared to be some kind of talking point of the Far Left: Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the liberal magazine The Nation, used it as well. She also joined Jackson and other prominent liberals in attacking the high court. Vanden Heuvel called Tuesday night's 5-4 decision a "judicial theft of the presidency." Jackson invoked the Supreme Court's notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision upholding slavery and its opinion in the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson case establishing the "separate but equal" standard for segregating races.
Former Sen. Alan Simpson, a Wyoming Republican, called such talk "hysterical babble," while Roy Innis, a civil rights leader who has spoken highly of Bush all year, said angrily, "Plessy vs. Ferguson and Dred Scott should not be hustled and prostituted by Jesse Jackson and Al Gore." But despite such protestations, many blacks have deep misgivings about this process. Already, such feelings are energizing Democrats who are plotting the best tactics for taking back both houses of Congress in the 2002 midterm elections.
For that reason, among others, Bush's Wednesday night speech from the Texas Statehouse was magnified in importance. In emphasizing the need for bipartisanship, Bush intended to pick up where Gore left off. And he did so, at least when it came to Gore personally. But as Bush rattled off his agenda for the coming days—in much the same language he used in the campaign—he seemed to be picking up where he had left off 36 days before.
In the end, Newt Gingrich, of all people, put this election in perspective. Noting that in 1994 he felt the Republicans had a mandate because they had made huge gains at the polls, Gingrich told NBC's Tom Brokaw that he thought the American people had issued a mandate this time, too: "It's a mandate to slow down, and listen to each other," Gingrich said.
Lost in the shuffle of the past five weeks has been the traditional assessment of what went wrong—and right—for the respective candidates during the regular campaign. Looking back, some conclusions are inescapable. First among them: Gore was an underwhelming campaigner who never quite convinced a majority of Americans that the Clinton-Gore Administration was responsible for the current prosperity or that he was the man who could sustain it.
Gore inherited a robust economy, a united Democratic Party, and a set of liberal interest group constituencies, including blacks, union leaders, and abortion-rights women, who were highly motivated to help him succeed Clinton. African-Americans, for one, turned out in higher proportion than whites in several key states, including Florida.
"This was Gore's to lose," Edward J. Rollins, the manager of Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign, said succinctly. "And he lost it."
Well, not really—and that was the other big-picture point of the 2000 campaign.
In the final vote tally, Gore garnered 50,158,094 votes to Bush's 49,820,518. This means that the loser outpolled the winner in the popular tally by a margin of roughly 337,500. Without the Electoral College, an arcane institution that a majority of Americans neither understand nor favor retaining, Gore would now be the President-elect. Moreover, the 2000 election returns show that the presence of Ralph Nader on the ballot almost certainly cost Gore not only Florida, where Nader tallied nearly 100,000 votes, but also New Hampshire, whose four electoral votes would have been enough to edge out Bush.
On the other hand, it's also true that:
• If Gore had managed to carry his home state of Tennessee, with its 11 electoral votes, he wouldn't have needed a recount in Florida. As Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell pointed out, Tennessee was where Gore grew up, where he won statewide election and, where, presumably, "the people knew him best." True, Tennessee has become more conservative in the 10 years since Gore last stood for election there, but even Walter Mondale, who lost 49 states to Ronald Reagan in 1984, carried his home state.
• Gore could also have won the presidency by carrying Clinton's home state of Arkansas. For the past month, presidential aides have been seething in private that Gore didn't ask Clinton to go camp out in Arkansas until it was safe for Gore. "The President could have delivered Arkansas to Gore on a silver platter," one former White House official said.
• The Maine Democrats' dirty little "November surprise" about a 24-year-old drunken-driving incident almost certainly cost Bush the popular vote—and a clear win. He was ahead in all the polls when the revelation hit the Thursday before the election, and a whopping one-in-four voters told exit pollsters his arrest was "very" or "somewhat" important to their choice.
These kinds of considerations normally intrigue political scientists for years. Instead, all eyes were on Florida and then the Supreme Court, which decided this election and came in for much criticism in the process. But history may prove that the five Justices in the majority did the nation a favor. Not by picking Bush, but by officially launching the cause of election voting reform.
The 5-4 majority not only rejected Florida's haphazard recount methods, but also wrote: "After the current counting, it is likely legislative bodies nationwide will examine ways to improve the mechanisms and machinery for voting." This is more than a throwaway line. It virtually orders the states to clean up their acts. That would be a blessing to us all, because if a dead heat happened in 2000, it can happen again—and soon. The contested election between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes that spawned much of the legislation debated in the Court this week occurred in 1876. The next time a presidential candidate won the popular vote, but was not elected, came just 12 years later.
Perhaps the beneficiary of better voting machines and the streamlined recount procedures virtually mandated by this Court will be a Democrat. Maybe even a still-vigorous man of 52, whose father once proclaimed, 30 years ago, on another losing night, "The truth shall rise again in Tennessee."
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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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