According to Clinton, the integrity of this election requires selective manual recounts in Florida. Sorry, but it doesn't. We have had not one, not two, but three counts in Florida. After a third strike, normal people return to the dugout; Al Gore charges the pitcher’s mound.
Clinton's interest in this election is, of course, understandable. His “legacy” is at stake. At present, this legacy is thin gruel indeed. Its most notable features include: being the first elected president impeached; handing the House of Representatives to the Republicans three straight times; wronging his wife regularly enough that voters in New York awarded her a Senate seat as a consolation prize; and hogging the spotlight for so long that his loyal lieutenant couldn't win decisively, even at a moment of unprecedented peace and prosperity.
Historians will likely identify the last eight years with the erosion of the rule of law. America witnessed one legal spectacle after another — from O.J. Simpson's trial to Clinton's impeachment to Janet Reno's seizure of Elian Gonzalez to now Gore's attempt at an extralegal coup d'etat.
The common thread in each? The facts and law mattered not a whit, while politics meant everything.
O.J. Simpson is obviously a double-murderer. He dodged his just punishment for reasons not of law, but of raw politics. A black jury acting under the sophistical powers of Johnnie Cochran acquitted the black celebrity as a means of righting past wrongs against blacks.
Clinton obviously committed perjury and obstruction of justice in the Monica Lewinsky matter. But he, too, skated away from trouble with the winds of political correctness at his back. The Senate, lacking the courage and conviction of the House, dropped the evidence of Clinton's lawbreaking. The reason? Clinton was a popular president. The American public really didn't care about lawbreaking that “only involved sex.” And, according to the fashionable elite, lying about “sex” and obstructing justice to hide adultery amounted to nothing more than a basically harmless personal peccadillo. An amoral political culture, in other words, saved Clinton's skin.
Politics was also at work when Clinton suddenly rediscovered the rule of law during the Elian Gonzalez matter. He had the boy deported to Fidel Castro — though his mother died to see him free in America — on the flimsy pretext that America's immigration laws demanded it. The truth was Clinton feared the political ramifications of Castro dumping his undesirables — a la the Mariel boatlift — in retaliation if the boy didn't return to Cuba.
Al Gore's disingenuous talk about the “will of the people” in Florida is the latest attempt to use politics to circumvent the law. According to the laws of Florida, Gore has lost. But Gore has tried to deploy several political gambits to get a new result.
He has emphasized through his aides that he won the popular vote in America, implying that that gives him a moral claim to harvest votes in Florida. He has complained about Florida blacks being disenfranchised — though there is no proof — in hopes of ginning up enough O.J.-like resentment to have voting laws bent in his favor. He has complained about elderly Jews in Florida mistakenly voting for the (as Clinton himself put it) “anti-Semitic” Pat Buchanan. He has even allowed his party hacks to block ballots from military members and some Republicans on ludicrous technicalities.
It appears that Gore's final hope now lies in Florida's Seminole County, where a Democratic judge (who has been lobbied hard by Gore adviser Jesse Jackson) could throw out allegedly tainted ballots from Republicans. Were this to come to pass, we will have reached the height of hypocrisy with Gore, since he has lectured us for weeks about the sacred need to count “every vote” cast in good faith, a category in which the Seminole votes clearly fall. (The voters didn't taint the ballots, but someone else who handled them might have.)
Gore can only win if ballots for George Bush are not counted, or if his long march through Florida for Democratic dimples cancels out Bush's votes. Either way, a victory for Gore would mean a defeat for the rule of law.
This would certainly be a fitting culmination to the Clinton era, and a triumph for unembarrassable politicians worldwide.
