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Although it still remains uncertain who will be the next president of the United States, the messy consequences of the November 7 election have made one thing certain already: for the first time in American history neither Al Gore nor George W. Bush will take office on January 20, 2001, with a clear mantle of legitimacy. And to further complicate matters, whichever of these two men is the next U.S. president, he will encounter major difficulties in crafting working alliances with the legislative branch of government since he will face a bitterly divided Senate and House of Representatives. In each of these chambers the majority of the Republicans is so slender as to make extreme partisanship inevitable. The bitterness which characterized the current Congress—which tried and failed to impeach President Clinton—will continue in the next Session, exacerbated by the ever deepening wounds inflicted by the Florida debacle, which will fester on because whoever losses the Florida dispute will exact vengeance on the winner for the eventual outcome of an election they will believe was stolen from them.
The consequences of November 7 will not be confined to Washington, DC. The high priests of the television networks, among whom, not so long ago, was numbered “the most trusted man in America,” the venerable Walter Cronkite, all made fools of themselves on election night, first by pronouncing victory for Gore, then Bush, then twice retracting their confident benedictions. Despite their fancy charts, flashing maps, and solemn punditry, they lost all credibility, though they have yet to realize to what extent. And the pollsters, those merry goblins of the information age, have been revealed as purveyors of misleading nonsense.
The most serious stake in the election crisis however is the credibility of the very constitutional system itself, that glory of the 18th century Founders of the American Republic, and an edifice which has served the nation well through so many storms, challenges and even civil war. It has been revealed to need serious overhaul in its most archaic provisions. This too is a divisive debate which is bound to come. And in face of the unprecedented uncertainty about who won and who lost on November 7, the American public looks on in disbelieve and increasing repugnance. Before it unfolds by the hour, a sorry spectacle exposing to the light of day those usually well hidden back rooms of American politics where ambition, money, power and betrayal rub shoulders in the dark.
No wonder the cold eyed “adults” of the “permanent” government have been wheeled out, those discrete big time lawyers, Warren Christopher for the Democrats, and James Baker for the Republicans, both former Secretaries of States, epitomes of the men who move effortlessly between high government office, prestigious law firms and blue ribbon presidential panels, the keepers of innumerable secretes and holders of innumerable obligations for past services rendered. It is to them that the political parties have turned to fix this mess for the two “princelings” these same political parties chose this time around to be their presidential hopefuls; despite the clear indications that the American public had grave doubts about the qualities and character of both Bush and Gore. Unsurprisingly, the American public voted accordingly, producing the near even result at the polls which has made a dispute over 300 contested ballots, out of 101,643,365, decisive to the decision as to who will hold the world’s most powerful office in the year 2001 .
The root of the problem, the creation of a system of “electors” to chose the president rather than a direct popular election, was one of the least disputed parts of the U.S. Constitution at the time of its drafting. The creation of this indirect mode of appointment of the “Chief Magistrate of the United States,” as Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers (No. 68) on March 14, 1788, was “to afford as little opportunity to tumult and disorder.” There has been no “tumult” so far in the sense that Hamilton and his colleagues used the word at the end of the 18th century, but there is more than a little “disorder” as a result of the impasse in Florida, and the continuing uncertainty as to who will be the next “Commander-in-Chief,” as Americans, in deference to Cold War linguistic preferences, now like to call their leader.
Voting in the early years of the Republic was also limited by property qualifications. This suffrage limited to property owners, the English agronomist Arthur Young argued, was what marked the great difference between the French and the American Revolutions, and the reasons the former degenerated into violence while the latter led to a steady expansion of wealth and prosperity. Young’s famous Travels in France During the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789 is one of those classic texts history students are supposed to have read at college, but which many, including myself, probably never did.
I found a copy in a second-hand book store very recently. I could not put it down once I started—it was so fascinating. But it is in the footnotes that some real gems can be found, including his observations on the role of electors. “In France,” Young wrote, “the populace are electors, and to so low a degree that the exclusions are of little account [...] without a single link of what merits the name of property. The very reverse is the case in America, there is not a single state in which voters must not have a qualification of property. [...] Thus a ready explanation is found of that order and prosperity, and security of property which strikes every eye in America: a contrast to the spectacle which France has exhibited, where confusion of every sort has operated...”
Property qualifications have of course been long since abolished in the United States. But the electoral college, crafted for much the same reason as property qualifications were imposed on voters, still exists. The electoral college in the U.S. Constitution was intended to limit democracy in the sense we understand democracy today — because the Founders of the American Republic decided to confine the choice of president, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, to “a small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, [who] will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.”
How ironic then that in the very first presidential election of the 21st century this 18th century fear of the masses should now sow total confusion and provoke what could quickly turn into a major constitutional crisis. It shows once again that it is never too soon to modernize archaic procedures, however difficult this may be—and changing the United States Constitution is excruciatingly difficult, just as the Founders intended it to be (to amend the Constitution, at least two-thirds majority in both houses is needed, and amendments that have been proposed by Congress must be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures or by conventions in as many states).
It is an inconvenient fact of history that if circumstances exist to make an accident possible, even if the chances are remote and seemingly theoretical, at some point the accident will happen. In Florida this week it did. The contradiction between a popular national election in which most Americans thought they were directly electing a president ran headlong into a constitutional system where they were in fact electing electors. The result has been that the popular vote nationwide came into conflict with the allocations of those votes to the individual states of the Union where the number of electors is determined by the exigencies of a federal system.
Yet if the 18th century provisions of the constitution fooled the voters, the 21st century quality (or the lack thereof) of the two presidential candidates in the 2000 election set up the impasse. The American public was not prepared to give a clear mandate to either Bush or Gore, nor to the political parties in Congress. Across the nation on November 7 the results were so close that Bush and Gore ended up with 48 percent each nationwide, and with barely 100,000 votes between them. So Florida became the king maker with its 25 electoral votes, essential if either candidate is to gain the 270 electoral votes needed to become the next president.
Yet this in turn revealed another peculiarity of the U.S. presidential electoral system. It is the counties or municipalities that run the electoral show under rules laid down by the states. So the confusing format of a paper ballot in Palm Beach County became the fulcrum where constitution, politics, and the fixer collided, and where the next president of the United States will be chosen. Local political bosses have always liked it this way. But it has meant that while the United States is spending almost 900 million dollars to promote democracy abroad, many of its own local governments are still using voting machines with a technological capacity first introduced in the 1880s, and as in Palm Beach County, pencils poked through holes. And at the fringes it builds into the system a remarkable leeway at the local level which in the bad old days often made many local governments one-party bastions, and opened up endless possibilities for fraud and manipulation.
It was such manipulation at the local level which many now concede threw the 1960 presidential election to President John F. Kennedy. The great manipulator then was Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, who like all Chicago bosses could raise the dead from the cemeteries on election day to vote for the Democratic candidate. It was Richard Nixon who was denied victory that time around. The Republican Party never forgot or forgave it. So in one of the more peculiar rehabilitations of Richard Nixon, George W. Bush supporters are now claiming that Nixon, the patriot, chose not to challenge Mayor Daley’s manipulation of the numbers in 1960 in the “national interest.” This is something obviously they hope Al Gore will do now, by recognizing George W’s presidential “victory,” giving George W.’s father, former President Bush, the satisfaction of revenging his defeat by the Democrat Republicans most love to hate: William Jefferson Clinton.
Fat chance. Gore’s campaign manager is a tough broad-shouldered politician; old school; from Chicago; son of that old fixer who was the nemesis of the Republicans in 1960: William M. Daley, no less, whose brother and their father’s namesake is today Mayor of Chicago. It is a drama worthy of ancient Rome! A story of sons justifying their father’s omissions, with the chorus of media soothsayers braying in the background; with great institutions of state brought low by squalid parochial bickerings; a tale of high ambitions foundering on the rocks of personal inadequacies; and of a great Republic demeaned by tacticians who have lost sight of its meaning.
