Democrats should pray that Gore losses
per Sunday Times (UK)
This is how we have been depicted in England.
Some times it takes an outside observer to best
see the ugliness of this larceny in process.
This is an editorial from the Sunday Times of
London-Nov. 26, 2000.
________________
"IT IS clearer now than ever before that what we
have been witnessing in America these past two
weeks is something only a smidgen less than an
attempted legal coup. I say "legal" coup because
the law can sometimes be selectively used to
circumvent the law. And I say "coup" because
what has been going on is an attempt to snatch
victory from the twice-declared winner in a
manner that violates almost every principle of
common sense, constitutional law and due
process. Moreover, this was clearly a
premeditated, conscious decision by Al Gore's
campaign. Gore didn't blunder into this crisis.
He planned for it, prepared for it and has been
micro-managing every aspect of it from the
beginning.
The first inklings came in the early hours of
election night, November 8, when William Daley,
the Gore campaign manager, declared to the
throngs in Nashville that: "This campaign goes
on!" Can you imagine a party leader in Britain,
after a cliffhanger of a vote and a pending
recount, saying that the "campaign" goes on?
Campaigns are what happen before polling day.
What happens afterwards is mere counting. And
that counting should be done in as calm, as
dispassionate and as sober an atmosphere as
possible. When Daley injected that element of
pure politics into the night, we should have
known what was up. Even as he spoke, teams of
Democratic lawyers, experts, thugs and spinners
were being dispatched to Florida.
The war was on. As Daley was commandeering the
troops, the Gore mouthpieces were already
spinning on television. I was watching
Newsweek's Jonathan Alter with increasing
disbelief at 4.30am. "I'm not talking about
changing the rules or having the popular vote
somehow supersede the electoral," Alter
presciently opined. "If you look at the history
of close recounts in congressional races,
they're always disputed. You go precinct by
precinct and then people say this recount wasn't
fair, we have to do it again. "And the result
after weeks would be a lot of pressure to say
instead of trying to sort out who really won
Florida, let's end this thing. You get a series
of irregularities all over the state of Florida,
pretty soon nobody can figure out who really
won. What happens then?"
So the strategy was clear. The Gore team would
throw every legal challenge they could at every
recount they could find. They would routinely
invoke the phrase "will of the people" at every
convenient moment to keep reminding people that
Gore had won the popular vote nationally. And
they would simply assert something nobody
properly knew - that if "the will of the people"
were followed, Gore would be shown to have won
Florida. The longer it went on, they surmised,
the better chance they would have of saying,
"This is such a mess, let's just give the White
House to the man with the most popular votes."
And they bet that the Republicans would be so
blind-sided, they wouldn't know what had hit
them before it was too late.
There were obstacles to stealing an election, of
course. The first problem for the Gore side was
that Florida law mandated a certified result
within a week of the election. If that happened,
George W Bush would be declared the winner and
Gore would look like a sore loser. So the Gore
team went to the Florida Supreme Court demanding
that it simply rescind Florida's law. They knew
the court would be on their side - it's one of
the most biased, liberal courts in the country.
Only two months ago, the court simply struck
down a ballot initiative legalizing lethal
injection as a death penalty procedure, because
the court thought it was "cruel and unusual
punishment". Forget the fact that voters had
supported the measure by 73% to 27%.
Similarly, the court has barred 19 valid
initiatives from even going before the voters in
recent years - because the court, not the
voters, regarded them as misleading. To get
around this, Ward Connerly, the anti-affirmative
action activist, proposed four different
wordings for an initiative he tried to get
before the voters. The Florida court simply
struck all the wordings down as "confusing". It
is in favour of affirmative action and it
believes its role is to stop voters from having
a free vote on the matter. End of discussion.
This is what judicial tyranny is. So the
Goreites were not surprised when the court
peremptorily stopped the legal certification of
the result. The court cited confusing language
in the law, which both says that Florida's
secretary of state must certify results a week
after the election and also that she may make
exceptions for late counties. Under the law,
these questions are routinely settled by the
secretary of state herself, who has "discretion"
to resolve the matter. She can be overruled by
the court only if her actions are "clearly
erroneous". Debatable they were - but "clearly
erroneous"? Not a chance, as a lower court judge
rightly ruled. Still, the Florida court was not
one to let legal precedent guide its actions. It
did the Gore team's bidding, overruling the
lower court, legalizing recounts with no firm
rules for what constitutes a vote, and then
setting an arbitrary date to complete them:
today. Score one for the legal coup. So with
this court behind them, Gore's aides hired every
hot-shot lawyer they could find and fought on.
They first said that the Palm Beach "butterfly
ballot" was illegal - and sowed confusion for
several days. Haven't heard of that blessed
butterfly lately? It was ruled clearly legal by
a judge last week, who barred any re-vote. Never
mind. It was worth a try.
Then Gore tried the racial angle, declaring that
black voters had been intimidated from voting by
police, election workers and even dogs. Forget
the fact that black turnout was at record levels
and that, as yet, no such intimidation has been
proved. It was enough to sow more confusion
while Gore's team tried to get hand recounts in
four carefully selected counties where he had
big victories.
In one of those counties, Broward, the
Democratic-run canvassing board looked at the
number of disputed ballots and concluded that a
hand count was unnecessary. Lo and behold, a
couple of days later, one of those Democrats was
leaned on and unaccountably changed his mind.
When it appeared in Palm Beach County that the
hand-counts weren't turning up enough votes for
Gore, the Democratic-run canvassing board
decided to change its rules on what constitutes
a vote and allowed a mere indentation near a
candidate's name to be valid - the now famous
"dimpled chad". To defend the preposterous
notion that such an indentation is a valid vote,
the Gore lawyers cited a case in Illinois where
such votes had been allowed in a recount.
Surprise, surprise, two days later the Chicago
Tribune ran a story showing that that was simply
untrue. Those dimpled ballots had never been
ruled valid in such a case. The next day The
Washington Post showed that such ballots had
almost never been included as valid votes in any
election in the country - with the exception of
a case in Massachusetts, where the ballots had
been spoilt by rain. Nevertheless, the Gore team
fought on. In Dade County, when the deadline was
approaching and Gore votes weren't emerging
quickly enough, the board decided to meet in a
small room, exclude any Republican observers and
the press, and count only those ballots that
were disputed.
When this further change of the rules prompted a
near-riot from vote-counters, the county decided
to call off the entire recount. Undeterred, the
Gore team sued the board to force a recount.
That suit mercifully failed.
You could add to this litany of thuggishness the
fanatical Gore effort to disqualify nearly 4,000
absentee ballots from military personnel for
often piddling technical reasons. The assumption
is that most of these votes are for Bush. In
Democratic-run counties, therefore, about 70% of
these ballots were thrown out as invalid.
Compare that with the 4% spoilt ballot rate in
Palm Beach, and you can begin to see the
ambition of the Democrats.
As I write, it's still not clear whether Gore
will be able to scrounge enough votes to eke out
a victory over Bush today. But Gore has already
said that if the final tally this evening
doesn't give him total victory, he will fight on
and force further recounts. This is a man who
will do anything to win: trash the constitution,
get his lawyers to peddle falsehoods in court,
change counting rules in mid-stream, gerry-rig
recounts to favour him, intimidate anyone who
stands in his way.
In a sign of how serious this has become, the
Supreme Court has now decided to step in. It is
almost unheard of for the United States Supreme
Court to intervene in an electoral process that
is rightly usually left to the state running the
election. It is a sign, perhaps, that the
justices in Washington have been able to see the
travesty of justice and due process that the
Gore team has been foisting on the election.
I will tell you one thing about this endgame. It
is enough to make any fair-minded person realize
that Gore is a danger to the country and to the
constitution. He's beginning to make Richard
Nixon look magnanimous and Bill Clinton look
honest. I once believed he was a good man, of
serious purpose and honest intent. That belief
is no longer tenable. He is a coldly ambitious
man who is prepared to hold the country hostage
to this trauma indefinitely and destroy his
party's slow march back to the centre of
American politics in the process. We should all
be praying that he doesn't make it to the White
House. But the people who should be praying
hardest are the Democrats who still have faith
in their party and reverence for their country.
