Democracy resolves even unfair elections
From The Left
by Joseph Waldman
7 November 2001

It was one year ago today that the American electoral system went to hell in a handbasket. Last Nov. 7, that great bulbous mass of citizenry got up early, went to the polls, pulled the levers, and by some strange quirk of fate or history divided themselves clean down the middle, it taking a full five weeks to finally shoehorn someone--anyone--into the White House. Oh, yeah, and the Senate was split, and there were a couple of state races that were important to a few people. But come on, people, the identity of our limited-power CEO was at stake!

I, of course, was watching the whole thing intently, and with not a little bit of nonpartisan glee at first. I didn't get any sleep for almost thirty-five hours, watching the numbers roll in and then back out again, calling friends and family before dawn on the morning after to scream incoherently at them ("No one won! Do you understand what happened? We tied! This is horrible! This is great! No, I don't care if you were asleep! This is history!), and delivering the on-campus copies of this very paper that Wednesday in a vague purplish haze. Literally: I started hallucinating from exhaustion and saw the white newsprint as purple.

The Transcript, of course, like so many other media outlets, was fooled at first by the erroneous projections early that morning. It was an agonizing wait, watching the screens intently for the correct Florida numbers to come in. Little did anyone know, of course, that we'd still be watching and waiting a month later. But as the wait set in, I gradually began to see a few things about what had gone wrong, what should have gone right and what we might have done better to prevent this kind of thing.

First, and I will stand unequivocally by this statement, Ralph Nader was the Antichrist of American politics, a worthless leech who didn't get enough votes to justify his claims of a minority mandate but siphoned off just enough to throw everything into chaos. Of course I don't think Nader meant it to happen in exactly this way, but all throughout the campaign he showed not an iota of concern that he might deliver the election to George W. Bush. I was kind of a naysayer myself, not really believing Nader would louse everything up, but toward the end of the campaign I started to get scared, and my fears turned out to be justified.

I grew up as a good liberal kid with some vague idea of who Ralph Nader was and why he was a great man, but last year he threw away his whole golden career as a true gallant knight for the good people of America, all to make good on his petty little feud with the Democrats and the cult of personality built up around him by his cadre of miscreant college groupies. So, a pox on you, Ralph Nader, wherever you are, and on all the proactive leaders of your clan.

Second, we need better voting machines! I've only ever voted absentee, so I had no idea of the shoddy state of affairs, but it's appalling that, for national elections, there isn't a nationwide standard of technology and format. I understand that the lady who designed the "butterfly ballot" actually tested the damn thing and it worked out fine, without a hitch; but someone didn't take into account the fact that, well, old people can't see too well, and there are an awful lot of them in Florida.

But what made things so terrible down there was the fact that it threw so many of the Jewish retirees in the area that a huge chunk of them wound up voting, not for Al Gore, but for Pat Buchanan, the notorious demagogue and the easiest defining link between the Third Reich and the Reagan Republic (second place: George H.W. Bush). A day or two after the election, when all this information was starting to come out, I wrote my great-uncle Louie--who is gay and Jewish, lives in Boca Raton, and is a fervent Democrat; in other words, according to the Republicans, just the kind of person who'd deliberately vote for Pat Buchanan--and asked him what he thought about the whole mess. He was able to respond with some semblance of humor ("I think we're all a bit tired and the whole voting system stinks!"), but I knew that not everyone down there was able to laugh, and that hurt.

Still, some good had to come out of it somewhere. Ergo, the third point: despite all the uproar, and the intensely partisan court battles that finally planted Governor Mashed Potato Head in the White House, our Constitution still works. (Speaking of GOP dummies, this is the first time in my life that I'm deriving deep political wisdom from Gerald Ford. Amazing. Thank you, Mister Duh.) Most years, there's error, but not enough to matter; last year, it happened to be so close that it did matter.

But we resolved the thing, however wrongly, on time, and without resorting to riots in the streets or a second civil war, and will be ready to right the wrong in the next cycle around, and I'm awfully proud of that. It shows that the Republic still stands, and the Constitution is bigger than any one man; and that, in the end, was the true victory for the United States.