Good Riddance to Decade That Began With Theft of the Presidency
by John Nichols
TheNation.com - Dec. 31, 2009 @ 12:44am
The British press has taken to referring to the passing
decade as "the Noughties" has made quite a big deal of
trying to identify the political, economic and cultural
trends of period from 2000 to 2009.
It is an amusing pastime that has some value, but only
if we're focused on identifying the root cause of what
made the Noughties such a miserable decade for the republic.
If we are serious about the task, there is not much mystery.
The original sin of the good-riddance decade came in
December of 2000, when the United States Supreme Court
intervened to stop a complete recount of the votes in
This extreme judicial activism was not merely a
devastating assault on American democracy. It set in
motion the Bush presidency, and with it the pathologies
that the Bush-Cheney administration imposed on the
country in the form of unnecessary wars, failed
economic policies, assaults on civil liberties and
crudely divisive and hyper-partisan governance.
Bush, Dick Cheney and aides are surely to blame for
much of what ailed
what will ail
But it was the
meddling in the presidential election process - an
intervention that would have horrified the founders of
a republic that was supposed to enjoy a separation of
executive, legislative and judicial powers - made the
Bush-Cheney interregnum possible.
Bush, it must be remembered, did not win the popular
vote nationally.
In fact, the American electorate favored Democrat Al
Gore over Republican Bush by more than 540,000 votes.
Of course, because the
electoral system that does not award the presidency to
the candidate who wins the most votes, the contest came
down to a fight between the Bush and Gore camps for
November 7, 2000, and then conducted a ridiculous
review of the close result that followed no standards
except those imposed by Florida Secretary of State
Katherine Harris, a Bush campaign co-chair.
When the
and consistent recount of all 6.1 million ballots cast
by the state's voters, the
the process and then declared Bush the winner of
The problem with this unprecedented move by a
conflicted high court was that more Floridians went to
the polls with the intention of electing Gore than Bush.
This is not some radical notion, not some conspiracy theory.
It is the reality that was evident to scholars of
voting behavior from the start.
As
scientist Anthony Salvanto, who conducted some of the
first and most exhaustive examinations of contested
ballots, noted: "There's a pretty clear pattern from
these ballots. Most of these people went to the polls
to vote for Al Gore."
Salvanto was not an outlier.
Even the media consortium that tried -- after the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the ensuing
spike in presidential approval ratings -- to suggest a
scenario under which Bush might have won produced more
scenarios under which Gore would have won.
Media outlets that looked beyond the partisan spin to
the reality of what the ballots revealed acknowledges as much.
As The Associated Press noted, "Under any standard that
tabulated all disputed ballots statewide, however, Gore
erased Bush's advantage and emerged with a tiny lead
that ranged from 42 to 171 votes."
The
"If there had been some way last fall to recount every
vote -- undervotes and overvotes alike, in all 67
be the White House."
The
the ballots and also participated in a review by a
consortium of media outlets, concluded: "Uncounted
ballots and voter confusion cost Gore the election."
Actually, that's not quite right.
The Supreme Court's blocking of the full and consistent
recount that could have sorted through the confusion
cost Al Gore an election. But the consequences were far
greater for the republic, which lost a decade of its
promise and possibility to the excesses and abuses of
George Bush's illegitimate presidency.
***
John Nichols is the author of a critically-acclaimed
study of the political and legal battles surrounding
the 2000 recount fight in
(The New Press).
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