“. . . The world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”
These are the closing words of The Hollow Men, a lengthy poem penned by one of the writers of days of yore. However, the same words could be applied to the arduous ordeal endured by the country last November. There was no clear, defining moment which marked the finish line of Election 2000. It certainly wasn’t the moment when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its muddled, multi-layered, convoluted opinion. Nor was it when Al Gore addressed the nation to announce the end of his campaign; we knew before he said a word that the end had arrived.
Rather, the realization that the exhausting overtime session was reaching its conclusion slowly dawned, first on those who studied the Court opinion-the media and political higher-ups-and then on the rest of us, in the hours between the High Court’s decision and the Vice-President’s announcement. A highly-anticipated decision that initially appeared simply to append another chapter onto the drama by remanding the case to the Sunshine State ended up writing the final pages of Elec2K. All of the distinct images, discussions, and events that followed Election Night-angry protestors, hanging chads, butterfly ballots, Ryder trucks, canvassing officials with magnifying glasses-were all swept to a conclusion, not immediately, but gradually, incrementally, and, in the end, definitively.
The images of Al Gore and George W. Bush making back-to-back speeches provided an interesting parallel to their speeches at their respective party primaries a few months earlier. In the earlier pair of oratorical pieces, George Bush preached the gospel of compassionate conservatism and of restoring dignity and honor to the Presidency while Al Gore hammered home his commitment to work for the American people and to maintain the booming economy. Now, within only an hour of one another, the two again begged our ears, one using the moment to step aside with grace and humor, the other taking the pulpit to call for unity and conciliation under his watch.
But, even though we finally have a conclusion, I can’t help but wonder what lies ahead for these two men. I ponder the fate of Al Gore, a man regarded as a lightweight through most of his vice presidency who proved that he was anything but in 2000; he garnered more votes than any Democrat in history, including “Slick Willy.” Thrice before, a man won the American popular vote but was denied the big prize; in two of those scenarios, the loser roared back four years later to defeat the incumbent soundly, to roust from office the one who had nipped him in the last go-round. Will Al Gore someday see his dream of the presidency fulfilled, or are his political days now ended?
And what of George W. Bush? He had one strike against him from the beginning; he was written off by many as nothing more than the latest incarnation in a political dynasty. He has assumed office knowing that, regardless of whether Florida’s majority supported him, more people went to the polls nationwide to throw their backing behind a Gore-Lieberman administration than a Bush-Cheney one. He is now the President, a man whom a significant percentage of Americans supported but whom an equally large percentage rejected. (Of course, the statement would have been true of either outcome.)
Was the Court’s the right decision? I won’t say; I tend to believe that there was no right decision, only two equally polarizing alternatives. Somewhere, Ralph Nader is smiling, saying “I told ya so.” We could surmise that Nader’s message-that the entire American political process is a joke-was the big winner here, but that may not be accurate. We saw some pretty bizarre, far-fetched scenarios played out over five weeks in November and December, but in the end, we have a perfectly normal, anticlimactic result: we have a president. We can only hope that the candidates in 2004 carry no thoughts of an encore to this thing.