They Held Their Noses
See what happens when they say, "Hold your nose and vote for Al Gore"? Those elderly Jewish ladies in Palm Beach County tried to do just that. It's tough to read a ballot properly when you're trying to squint around the side of your hand. Try it yourself. There used to be federal guidelines put out by the Justice Dept. on precisely the right way to grip your nose and still see straight, but
ironically Al Gore did away with the regs as part of his Reinventing Government drive back in '94.
"Public happiness," Hannah Arendt once wrote, "is not isolating, but shared. It is the happiness of being free among other free people, of having one's public faith redeemed and returned." Never have I known such intense public happiness as at what's happening in Florida. You walk down the street and you hear "Gore" or "Bush" or "Florida" on every gleeful lip. Now that the supposedly democratic "mandate" is being reduced to absolute farce, Americans are having their instinctive lack of faith in the political process rousingly vindicated. Everyone knows that what's true of Palm Beach County?incompetent technology, human frailty, willful obstruction of inconvenient voters?is true of probably half the counties across the United States.
The theoretical purpose of the ballot box is to register the choice of the voters. The actual purpose, unless the count is sufficiently lopsided to banish all uncertainty, is to jimmy the count to match the exit polls being called by CNN and the networks, or to consort with the wishes of whatever political machine happens to be in charge. When asked some years ago why his country has so many statutes, Ireland's Minister of Justice replied, "Our laws are mainly for guidance." It's the same with American electoral procedures. In the courtroom of Federal Judge Middlebrooks in Florida, it was acknowledged by a Bush lawyer that voting can have a built-in error rate of anywhere from 2 to 5 percent.
Since the polls regularly concede an error margin in their estimates of anywhere from 4 to 6 percent, this means that the better polls are more reliable registers of the people's choice than the machines that supposedly record the people's conclusive judgment. Presumably absentee ballots, filled in by hand, are more reliable, but as we await the final count of those filled in by technical Florida residents on Israel's West Bank or in a military base somewhere in the Empire, we should note that their destination can be uncertain, too. CNN reported Monday that two absentee ballots sent by a couple of overseas voters back home to the state of Washington turned up in the mailbox of a family on the Danish island of Fyn.
Gazing at the assorted spokespeople for Gore and Bush we can exult in the tradition of vote fraud that ennobles America's political history. Here is William Daley, chairman of Al Gore's campaign, son of Mayor Richard Daley who helped fix the Cook County vote in Illinois in 1960, an important ingredient in the drive to put Jack Kennedy over the top, even as Richard Nixon's men in southern Illinois toiled to fix the vote the other way. Here too is James Baker, scion of the Texas oil industry that benefited so hugely from Lyndon Johnson's first stolen election when his crucial margin was achieved with the help of Texas citizens voting in alphabetical order.
Many an American success story stems from vote fraud. The treasurer of the Cook County Democratic Party in 1960, when JFK needed votes in Chicago to put him over, was a (Kentucky) colonel called Henry Crown who was also the head of Chicago Sand and Gravel, regarded by some as a mob operation. Crown, the money behind Daley, helped deliver the votes of dead Democrats in the county. The following year Crown bought roughly $300 million of General Dynamics' debentures, only to experience the mortification of seeing General Dynamics rack up a huge loss, due to the collapse of its Convair 770 and 880 airliner program. GD had been hot to get deeper into the civil aviation market, but its Convair flopped.
Just about that fraught time, the U.S. Air Force was completing source selection for a tri-service fighter project. The selection panel opted for Boeing's proposal as the best, and this recommendation was sent up to the Secretary of the Air Force and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. At this point Crown decided to call in his chips. He phoned Kennedy, who muscled McNamara into selecting General Dynamic's swing-wing F-lll design. McNamara toed the line, and GD duly produced a famous design and engineering catastrophe, which eventually had to be recalled but which nonetheless retrieved the value of Crown's debentures and set General Dynamics firmly on the road to commercial success. So America's leading defense conglomerate today found its decisive turn of fortune in vote fraud in Chicago in 1960.
Until Florida's voting procedures began to monopolize public attention, the villain of the hour was Ralph Nader, whose Green vote seems at time of writing to have been a decisive factor in Florida, New Hampshire and Oregon. But for the votes for Nader in these states, Gore would have won. Depending on what the Republicans do, Nader could also turn out to have played a crucial role in Wisconsin and Iowa.
This was not lost on Democrats, some of whom left such finely crafted messages on the Vote Nader 2000 website as: "Instead of spitting on yourself, why not kill yourself. Save us the trouble of having to hunt you down." "I hope to god that one of the trees that Nader saves falls on him and kills him." "I hope someone kills you!" "May Nader die slowly in horrible agony from some loathsome disease!" "Go to hell and die!! If I see a car with a faggot Nader bumper sticker I'm gonna smash it with a crowbar!!!" "An Arab can never be trusted. They will wait as long as it takes to do you in and this is exactly what Nader has done to the country." "Kids across the country will die because they're too frightened to tell someone they are gay. Their blood is on your hands." "I don't ever want to see your faggot face. You assholes handed the country to Bush. Bunch of environmental faggots."
Such sentiments weren't confined to Democratic yahoos on the Web. Lloyd Grove, in his Washington Post gossip column, writes that Tina Brown's husband Harry Evans exclaimed, "I want to kill Nader!" and Hillary Clinton replied, "That's not a bad idea!"
Talking to Nader last Thursday, I asked him what he thought of Grove's story. "I called up Evans," Nader answered, "and he was chagrined. He said everyone was drunk, and he apologized. But look at what Hillary Clinton said right after. Can you imagine what would happen if the Secret Service monitored a private citizen making a remark like that about a public political figure?" Nader called up New York's freshly elected junior senator, but as of Thursday she was too busy with her proposed constitutional amendment discarding the Electoral College to get back to him.
I asked Nader if he was disappointed at the Greens' 3 percent national showing. "I always knew the projected Green vote would drop when people got into the voting booth," Nader answered. "You should see some of the scare tactics of the Gore crowd. Telling people that if they voted for me they'd be sponsoring backstreet abortions. In part we have been the victim of inflated expectations?with people predicting that we were heading for 8 percent. On election day I said I reckoned we'd get about 3.5 percent."
In my own view, the fact that they didn't get 5 percent should be cause for rejoicing by all sensible Greens. A 5 (or more) percent showing would have brought the prospect of millions in federal public money for the Greens in the next election cycle and, like the Reform Party, they would spend the next few years fighting over the money and getting nothing done.
I asked Nader whether he would prefer Bush or Gore in the White House and he hemmed and hawed a bit. One can make arguments both ways, and we chewed over the alternatives in our chat. On the one hand, a Bush victory deriving in part from Nader taking votes away from Gore would remind Democrats that they had better listen more carefully to Green demands in the years to come. On the other hand, Democrats in opposition can call for unity and a setting aside of differences in recapturing power. If Gore wins the White House it will be far easier for Greens to organize amid ongoing Democratic misbehavior and betrayal. You can make the case both ways, which I duly did, with Nader agreeing with both. I don't think he's made up his mind on the matter, which is understandable.
I bid Nader to be of good cheer and not to be oppressed by vilification by the Democrats. "I've been writing that you're our Robespierre, Ralph! With class-action suits instead of the guillotine!"
"Oh my God," he said, laughing. "I hope no one you say that to knows any history. At least you didn't say, 'You're our Marat.'"
Nader voters didn't vote holding their noses, so they didn't screw up their ballots.
And for that dwindling and beleaguered minority of the populace which read books, I bring this information: George Bush and Al Gore both asserted in the campaign that their favorite book is the Bible. Bush also confessed to having read a biography of Dean Acheson. Absent evidence that he's read anything else, we can put that down as W's number-two pick. Gore put Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir as his second favorite volume. Early in October I asked Nader for his two top books and back came the answer through his campaign manager Theresa Amato, Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education, and Harmony Ideology by Laura Nader. I must confess I've never read Whitehead's book, but I do know the one by Ralph's sister Laura. It's an attack on the notion of "coercive harmony," which Laura Nader, a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley, once defined as "basically a movement against the contentious in anything, and it has very strange bedfellows, from people with various psychiatric therapy movements, Christian fundamentalists, corporations sick of paying lawyers, activists who believe we should love each other... We're talking about coercive harmony?an ideology that says if you disagree, you should really keep your mouth shut."
So if you want to understand what makes Nader run and why the shrieks of the Democrats don't faze him, read his sister's (the real Dr. Laura) book.
It's pleasing to see that Palm Beach County held the country's future in the palm of its election officers' hands. Back in 1979, down in that part of Florida, I interviewed former President George Bush's mother Dorothy, a charming lady living in Hobe Sound. Like many in Bush's family, she referred to Poppy indulgently as a slightly eccentric and not particularly promising scion who had made the truly odd decision to go and seek his fortune in Texas. Not long thereafter I interviewed Dorothy's daughter-in-law, Barbara Bush, one of the nastier women I have ever encountered in the course of journalistic business. The way I read it, W as a kid was ranged solidly with Mom, marooned in the oil patch as Poppy galloped around the globe. You doubt Mom was angry? Please explain why she decided to look like her husband's mother. W is a mommy's boy.
Anyway, the Bush family member I spent some time with in those months when Poppy was trying to get the Republican nomination was John Ellis, a George W. cousin then working for NBC, more recently a columnist for New York Press. On election night 2000, it was Ellis, if you believe The Washington Post of Nov. 13, who in his capacity as a member of the Fox election team looked at the Florida numbers and instructed the Fox network to call the state for Bush, which it duly did at 2:16 a.m., copied by the other networks almost immediately. VNS, which gives voting data to the networks, contrary to endless stories, never did issue a prediction.
Now we're at the point when to deny Al Gore the victory in Florida is to deny the Holocaust. Here's what Michael Moore posted on his site over the weekend: "Sixty-two years ago tonight, the Holocaust began in full force on what was called Kristallnacht. The German government sent goon squads throughout the country to trash and burn the homes, stores and temples of its Jewish citizens. Seven years and 6 million slaughtered lives later, the Jewish people of Europe were virtually extinct. A few survived. I will not allow those who survived to come here to this 'land of the free' to be abused again. They are our fellow citizens in our great democracy, and their voice, if I have anything to say about it, will never be snuffed out."
Are the stakes really that high? Of course they're not. That's why everyone is having such a wonderful time. The Lewinksy scandal was good, dirty fun. Vote Screwup 2000 is good, clean fun. It makes no difference whether Gore or Bush is "elected," or appointed by America's tiny reserve of "wise men." We have glorious gridlock, and the prospect of glorious gridlock for the next four years. If Bush makes it, we'll probably get Al in four years after Bush is retired, just as his dad was, by a recession. If Gore makes it, we'll get W in 2004 for the same reasons, then in 2008 it will be Hillary's turn.
And our greatest president? Ford of course, a man who never received any popular mandate in the voting booth to enter the White House. New evidence, just in from a report by the House Budget Committee, Democratic minority staff: