The political left says it subjected the country to its 35-day siege in order to vindicate voters' rights. This is nonsense. The origin of this controversy was not voter fraud, but voter error.
The dispute started with the Palm Beach butterfly ballot, an issue so bogus that it quickly disappeared from the radar screen and now seems like ancient history.
Yet it served as a pretext for throwing the election outcome into a demagogic chaos from which the left hoped to emerge victorious.
Jesse Jackson, one of the more astonishing hucksters in American history, fanned the flames of partisanship that soon consumed the common sense of local canvassing boards and ultimately the Florida Supreme Court.
Without a scintilla of evidence, Jackson asserted that Florida's election system was discriminatory. He conveniently ignored the fact that voters had disenfranchised themselves by failing to follow voting instructions clearly stated on their ballots.
For Jackson, some voters were simply more equal than others — an ironic posture for a figure who constantly clamors for “equal protection” under the law.
Now Jackson is comparing the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on this matter to the Dred Scott decision, and is planning to march against the new “illegitimate” election on the hallowed ground of Martin Luther King. One wonders: Where are the cooler heads on the political left to tell Jackson that he is engaging in obscene blasphemy?
The foolishness of the present makes one nostalgic for the past. The Founding Fathers — those much-maligned dead white males — saved this election with their deftly-crafted Constitution. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court cited their specific language in Article II of the Constitution to resolve this election fracas. The Founding Fathers said that state legislators, not freewheeling state judges, should decide the manner in which presidential electors are chosen.
Al Gore, to his credit, has finally dropped the incendiary rhetoric, and with eloquence, exhorted the nation to rally behind George Bush. Gore is, as the saying goes, taller when he bows.
Bush, too, showed graciouness in his remarks on Wednesday night, and struck a sincere religious note with his calls for prayers — a note we haven't heard since his father occupied the office. Reaching across the aisle is certainly appropriate under the circumstances, and Bush possesses the charm and congeniality to unite Democrats and Republicans on some marginal issues.
But let us hope that calls for bipartisanship — which too often conceal a mindless attachment to the status quo — do not derail the conservative agenda Bush presented in his campaign. Bush promised to restore honor and integrity to the White House, extend tax freedom to families, ban partial-birth abortion, support vouchers, and appoint strict constructionists like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas to the federal judiciary.
Bush should do something really novel in politics and actually execute his campaign promises.
Bush can take some solace in the fact that Ronald Reagan also faced a rancorous Washington. But Reagan knew that uniting the country is far more important than uniting the Beltway political class. On important issues, Reagan would often go over the heads of pols and appeal to the common man for support of his traditional values agenda.
Reagan had confidence in the American people's willingness to embrace conservative views rooted in America's fundamental, Natural Law principles. These principles, Bush would do well to remind America, are the most bipartisan of all, for they formed the basis of our founding and flow from a wisdom that is timeless and transcends party.
