Iron Constitution: Gore Scales New Heights of Corruption

Gore takes the attitude that any system that does not allow him to accede to the presidency is ipso facto corrupt, so unworthy of citizens' respect that he's willing to incite half the country to destroy it. "If we ignore the votes of thousands in Florida in this election," Gore asked the nation, "how can you or any American have confidence that your vote will not be ignored in a future election?" Later in the address came the yelp of mock outrage that now appears on signs and t-shirts wherever Gore partisans rally: "This is America!" In other words: For as long as I'm not sitting in the Oval Office, this country's political system is about as legitimate as Bulgaria's, circa 1965.

In the service of this call to arms, Gore fell off the wagon and went back to his serial-lying ways, telling Adam Clymer of The New York Times that "prominent Republicans, whom he would not name, had encouraged him to fight on." (Unnamed, of course, because they don't exist.) He alluded to an incident in Dade County two weeks ago?when Republicans protested the Democratic canvassing board's attempt to do its recount behind closed doors with no Republicans and no press present?as if it were a latter-day Night of the Long Knives. In Gore's rendering, "election officials brought the count to a premature end in the face of organized intimidation." His surrogates were even less continent. Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey described the GOP's namby-pamby reaction as a "Republican riot," and Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings lamented, "There's something drastically wrong when bullies can override ballots."

Gore's biggest deliberate misrepresentation was that any ballot on which no presidential vote appeared was a ballot that "had never been counted." He made his point through one of those laborious metaphors that are Gore's stock in trade, and which he always delivers with a self-congratulatory smirk. He used it on Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Inside Politics and anyone else who cared to listen. "Let me ask you this," he said. "Have you ever gone through the supermarket checkout line and they run the computer scanner over your items? What happens when it misses one? Do they give it to you for free? No. They do a hand count of that item."

If Gore had not described himself, quite recently, as pretty much the world's leading expert on metaphor, one would be inclined to cut him more slack. But this particular one is so logically deficient that one must protest. A ballot is not a bag of frozen peas. All products have a price, but not all ballots express a presidential preference. A better metaphor would be that of a shopper stealing an Hermes scarf or a wallet from one of her fellow patrons and trying to stuff it in a grocery bag. Like an undervote, that item wouldn't cause a scanner to beep. But a responsible cashier wouldn't "do a hand count" on it. She'd look up at you and say: "That's not yours. Don't shop here again."

Liars' Club The golden rule of lying is: Keep it simple. If you miss an appointment and are a devious kind of person, call and say, "Sorry: My car broke down." Don't say: "My daybook got stolen and all of my children have whooping cough, and traffic was terrible, then my car broke down, and my cellphone was out of batteries, and when I finally got to the phone, I called you but you must not have got the message." Gore is saying he lost for a dozen reasons: uncounted ballots in Miami, the "butterfly ballot," an insufficiently partisan recount in Palm Beach, long lines at the polls, Secretary of State Katherine Harris' decision not to certify Palm Beach's deadline-missing recount, the five-minute time limit on voting, irregularly entered voter ID numbers in Seminole and Martin Counties, Jeb Bush, racism, Republican intimidation, faulty voting machines, the kitchen sink... Gore's fibs were no worse than the exuberant falsehoods of his runningmate, whose reputation for honesty is plummeting like a bad high-tech stock. The night of Bush's certification, Lieberman deplored the result as an "incomplete and inaccurate count," and found it especially unconscionable that "thousands of hours of work by hundreds of citizens of Florida, Republicans and Democrats and independents alike, are being ignored." Well, boo hoo! Note that this is a new variation on the traditional partisan attack on investigations and inquiries. Democrats during impeachment used to complain that the independent counsel investigation was costing so much time and money that we couldn't afford to continue; now they're complaining that the Florida recounts are costing so much time and money that we can't afford to stop. Lieberman's shamelessness reached a new zenith last weekend when he held a press availability in the White House driveway to denounce moves by Florida's legislature to seat its own (Bush) electors. "It threatens to put us into a constitutional crisis," Lieberman said, "which we are not in now by any stretch of the word."

Oh, but we are! And if Lieberman is protesting too much, it's because he knows who put us there. The point of a Vote-O-Matic machine is to keep the hands of partisan vote-counters off ballots. As the liberal political historian and Atlantic Monthly senior editor Jack Beatty has noted, the Republican position is that Gore is seeking to substitute a political count for an impartial count. And the Republican position is correct?particularly since the political counts are to take place only in counties where Democrats control the electoral machinery. Fox News ran excerpts of the Broward County canvassing board's deliberations and gave a good idea of exactly how such recounts have worked in practice. There were two Democrats (Judge Robert Lee and County Commissioner Suzanne Gunzberger) and one Republican (Judge Robert Rosenberg) on the board. It's likely the several hundred votes Gore picked up during the recount were not Gore votes at all, given the slackness of counting standards (Lee assumed any ballot with all Democratic votes and the Gore space left blank to be a vote for Gore), and the routine-ness with which Lee and Gunzberger outvoted Rosenberg ballot by ballot, regardless of the merits:

Gunzberger (holding ballot): I've read some opinions that say when there is light visible, that's a punch for the candidate.

Lee: I don't see it.

Rosenberg: I don't see any light.

Gunzberger: Turn it around.

Lee (long pause): All right...a vote for Gore.

Yeah, twist my arm.

It's true that, weeks ago, Gore offered to submit to a statewide recount. He had nothing to lose by it. Having won the popular vote nationwide, Gore was in the position of the 1960 Yankees, who lost the World Series to the Pirates in seven games, despite outscoring them 55-27. The 2000 presidential election is every bit as over as the 1960 baseball season, and Bush doesn't owe Gore a fifth count any more than the Pirates owed the Yankees an eighth game to decide the "real" winner. But even if Republicans were inclined to be suicidally magnanimous, the Broward proceedings were a taste of how the recount would have worked statewide: Republican boards adding Republican votes, Democratic boards adding Democratic votes, and victory to whichever side was most brazenly corrupt. It's worth asking?and easy to answer?why Al Gore wanted that deal.

Mister Let-Every-Vote-Count is so keen to get into the White House by hook or crook that he is waging courtroom war on dozens of fronts to get votes added to his column and subtracted from Bush's. He is willing, in fact, to take power in Washington based on the say-so of one Leon County judge, Nikki Clark. He trusts Clark to throw out thousands of "irregular" Bush ballots in Seminole County in a lawsuit brought by a Gore-supporting trial lawyer who claims his goal is to "protect the very integrity of the electoral process."

That way lies madness. A Gore victory would spawn hundreds of lawsuits in any close race from now on, and drastically undermine democratic rule. This is a slippery slope, but we're only halfway down it. Democrats have used judiciaries to challenge conservative victories in referenda: Colorado's 1992 Amendment 2, which would have banned "special rights" for gays, for instance, and the 1996 California Civil Rights Initiative, which aimed at eliminating affirmative action. Now they're hoping to overturn a presidential election. The situation is particularly worth watching, given Democrats' thinning patience with the Electoral College, which is right now stacked heavily in the Republicans' favor. There is absolutely no way to get rid of it. Since it's in the Constitution, 38 states would have to ratify an amendment, and a coalition of Republicans and small-state Democrats could easily ensure it would fail to get half that many states. If California and New York continue to give Democrats landslide wins, Democratic popular victories and Republican electoral ones could become a regular occurrence. If it does, Democrats' temptation to act extra-constitutionally will only grow.

My Left Foot One thing I'm mighty sick of hearing from tv commentators is the statement: "If the shoe were on the other foot, Republicans would be doing the same thing." There are some respects in which this true: Before the election, Washington's conventional wisdom (never shared by "Hill of Beans") was that Bush might win a popular vote and lose the electoral majority. Back then, Bush staffers like Karen Hughes talked up efforts to sway Gore electors, much as Gore ally Bob Beckel seeks to do now. But in general, the almost universal assumption that the parties are ideologically symmetrical is fallacious. Television analysts note that 60 percent of Bush supporters would regard a Gore victory as coming from a "stolen" election, while 21 percent would see it as legitimate; 47 percent of Gore voters would grant Bush legitimacy, while only 30 percent would call it stolen. The media wrongly treats this as a primary phenomenon, as evidence only that Bush voters are more "mean-spirited." It's actually a secondary phenomenon: Gore would be illegitimate, and Bush voters therefore have more to be upset about. This is not to ascribe higher moral standards to Republicans. But pragmatically, Republicans would not be inclined toward a litigation strategy. In general, they fear rule by lawyers, because the vast majority of lawyers are Democrats. The evidence of the past few days of contest hearings in Tallahassee is that Republicans shouldn't be so frightened. On Saturday, Bush attorney Phil Beck took the Gore campaign's star witness, election consultant Kimball Brace, and mopped the floor with him. He showed that Brace knew nothing about rubber (despite weeks of theorizing about how the rubber beneath voting cards "hardens" and makes ballots difficult to punch), and nothing about "chad buildup" (another Gore campaign theory). In so doing, he showed how wrong Gore's attorney Kendall Coffey and CNN legal analyst Greta Van Susteren are when they claim that Republicans are trying to "bog down the case." It was Brace's weaselly, periphrastic nonanswers that dragged the first morning's session out until after 1:30, along with the platitudinous guff of Gore's lawyer Steve Zack, who asked Brace things like: "When you vote, do you believe your vote makes a difference?... Would it be an honest election if the chad just fell out of the ballot?" Nor was the storied David Boies, who looks alarmingly like the anorexic twin brother of Pat Buchanan, particularly impressive.

The most surprising development since Election Day has been that Republicans have decided not to take Gore's attempted usurpation lying down. The Bush campaign entered Florida's contest procedure by filing its own papers to protest Broward County's recounts and block the Gore campaign's bid to get Seminole County's absentee votes thrown out. Republicans won a moral victory when the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the Florida Court's decision on recounts. In the less-and-less-likely event that Florida has no electors by the end of this week, the Florida legislature will call a special session to name (on airtight constitutional grounds) a roster of electors. Done in isolation, this would be a hideous act of constitutional overreach. Under the circumstances, it is a purely defensive maneuver, one of the last democratic means Floridians have to keep an increasingly megalomaniacal candidate from stealing an election by legalistic legerdemain.