Sloppy But Sound
I have said earlier in these pages that I hope that Bush wins because I think that Gore and the Democrats would, ultimately, be less iniquitous losers. I say that believing that a recount of the machine-rejected Miami-Dade ballots would give Gore a victory, with or without the Palm Beach County butterfly ballots. A Bush victory would quiet the myriad hysterics who claim that Gore is trying to "steal" the election. How? by having all of the votes counted? The Bush supporters insist that all of the counting should have been completed on election night, but that argument values the process of balloting over the voting itself, and folks, that’s not what elections should be about.
The issue boils down to this: if all of the ballots are properly counted — that is, if the intentions of the voters of the machine-rejected ballots are fairly assessed — then we should wind up with accurate results. Where the local election officials are in dispute over a particular ballot, they can hand it along to a judge. There are not that many in dispute to make the task impossible, but there are more than enough to raise vital questions about a process that functionally excludes tens of thousands of ballots cast on site.
So it was with mixed emotions that I greeted the intervention by the U.S. Supremes. This time divided 5-to-4, they ordered the Florida recount to stop, and set a hearing for Monday morning. Big mistake; they should have counted the ballots and then decided whether or not they should be part of the final tally. Further, I don’t see that they have jurisdiction -- the first time or now -- at this point at any rate, though they might have intervened if there was a state-level deadlock, e.g., between the Florida courts and legislature. But this certainly seemed to help Bush, and I had been growing concerned that as Linda put it, I’d have to get used to four years of saying "President Gore."
We had a lousy pair from which to select our president. Two light-weights swimming in their daddies’ shoes. They have done little in the past month to change anyone’s minds, though the Bush people certainly seem to have gotten angrier, and until the Florida Supreme Court decision ordering the hand recount of the machine-rejected ballots, the Democrats were getting wussier. The donkey leadership — and I use that term advisedly — was ready to dump The Wooden One and get back to their bipartisan colluding and corruption.
There is something curiously inexorable about this process. As a Bush spokesman commented after the Florida Supremes narrowly ordered the recount, "We’ve run out of reaction." An end may be in sight, and for all the sturm und drang, we are discovering that our system of laws is, for the most part working. There is an orderly procedure that is being followed, and showing itself to be remarkably resilient. There are people involved who have their own predilections, and plenty of talk about the political affiliation of judges making decisions, but it seems that most are rising to the occasion, and doing the best for who they are.
Ultimately, the decision of the voters will be ratified through the inauguration of the next president. Whichever man it will be, he will not have much support. There will always be those who think he shouldn’t be in office. But that happens even when he has won by a large margin. There will likely be times over the next four years that we will have to remind ourselves that the president — for all his power and glory — is not the nation, and that is why we restrict his term to four years.
More important will be our remembering that we are one nation, and that to divide on the basis of political parties serves no purpose at all. Maybe we’ll come to our collective senses and realize that both parties have degenerated into self-serving machines that hold the interest of the country second to their own self-aggrandizement; that it is time to hold our candidates to higher standards of intellect and decency; and that we probably need a new or two party to field a quality candidate.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.