-by Dr. Wombat

Disclaimer: This is being written before the U.S. Supreme Court makes its ruling on whether to permit hand recounts of votes for Gore's contest of Florida's election results. They will probably have ruled by the time this gets published. That ruling may decide the outcome of the election. Heck, for all I know, we may have gone through three new Presidents by the time Grumble is published. Or perhaps the contest will still be going. I have no idea.

Okay, okay. I'm perfectly aware that most readers of Grumble would like nothing better than to forget all the absurd goings on in Florida and DC by crawling into a safe, comfy nest of snarky commentary on bad movies, idiot drivers and prostate exams. I know that most of you think that even making jokes about Presidential Candidates having surreptitious homosexual liaisons is taking this fine webzine too far into the world of politics. But I have something to say about the public debate over the 2000 Election, and Grumble is, frankly, the only forum that will print anything I write. Apart from the dreaded "who actually won" question, the concern on most people's lips is whether this whole mess will Tear Our System Apart. (You can always hear the capital letters when people say it, so I thought I'd continue the trend in print.) On the surface, it seems a pretty legitimate concern. After all, Republicans are running around convincing people that Democrats are win-at-all-costs, steal-the-election, old-style-Party-Boss crooks. Democrats are running around claiming that Republicans are old-boy-networking, racist-thug, democracy-be-damned fascists. And Power Brokers on both sides are trying to manufacture angry mobs that they can sell to the highest political bidder1. It seems like a recipe for massive civil unrest. But this isn't new behavior. The aforementioned groups of yahoos have always behaved this way. Whenever an issue makes the level of national news, evenhanded rationality is the first casualty. Besides, this passionate debate is proof that our system is doing just fine. No, I'm serious. Hear me out on this.   It is a fundamental fact of life, well documented by this site, that Stupid People do Stupid Things. In fact, there are some people who simply cannot manage to do very simple things with any degree of success. We all meet these people from time to time (although the Big Jew tends to meet them with remarkable regularity.) Just today I had a ten minute conversation trying to explain to someone why "a Big Mac and a medium Coke" doesn't mean "hot chocolate and an apple pie." Here's another fundamental fact of life: the act of voting requires people to vote. And no matter how easy you make the process, someone who's dumb as a post will still make mistakes. They'll think, "vote for Gore" but actually vote for Buchanan. They'll think, "vote for Bush" but actually vote for Bush, Gore, John Lennon and their pet cat Snuggles. Speaking of fundamentals, here are some of the United States' bedrock principles:

Democracy The idea that everybody's voice is equal and deserves to be heard. Neither race, sex, creed, political beliefs, level of body odor or even IQ should disenfranchise you. Every voter's wish must be expressed. Government, after all, exists only by the sanction of the governed.   Rule of Law Our government is also predicated on the idea that our laws reflect an objective morality that remains unchanged by public opinion. And it's a good thing, too. Remember the whole flag-burning debate a decade ago? A pretty sizable majority of the country wanted it to be illegal to burn our flag. So if we were a straight up Democracy, it would have been. Fortunately the U.S. Supreme Court said, "what part of ‘Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech' don't you understand?"   It is obvious to even the casual observer that if even a small fraction of the Floridians whose ballots didn't register a vote for President actually did mean to vote for Bore or Gush Gore or Bush, it could change the outcome of the whole election. And so it's obvious that the damn things should get recounted, just to make sure. But it is equally obvious that the law ought to be followed -- that abandoning the prior standard for determining what makes a ballot legal puts the validity of the election on very shaky ground. And so these two ideals, which normally support each other, are now pitched against each other. Do we follow the letter of the law and risk disenfranchising people? Do we bend the law and risk having partisan interpretation of subjective standards trumping objective nonpartisan law? This is not an easy choice. So it's perfectly appropriate that we haven't found an easy answer. And our System (you know, the one In Danger of being Torn Apart) is built to accommodate this. Step One is wrangle it out in court, and live with the decision. Step Two is engage in a political process of changing the laws so that they provide better guidance for this sort of thing in the future. And in four years, we'll get to Step Three: throwing out the guy in office if we decide we didn't want him in the first place. All our debating, all our worrying and all our rabble-rousing are simply how we accomplish these things. It's how we've always done it, and it's how we'll do it next year when the problem du jour is a national prescription drug plan, and it's how we'll do it ten years from now when we're trying to decide whether to make Cathy illegal2. This mess, this debate ... this is our system. It's working.

1. Please don't tell me that Jesse Jackson and Kweisi Mfume are serious in their claims that there was a systemic, organized effort to suppress the African-American vote. African-American voter turnout was up 65% from 1996 in Florida, and set record levels nation-wide. And Pat Robertson has to do a whoooooole lot of talking before he can convince me that there's some sort of unique Christian angle to the recount question. Fortunately, most people stopped taking him seriously years ago. 2. A man can dream, can't he?