No Rush to Electoral Judgement

Opinion by Claire Christian
Staff Writer

Lately, I’ve heard my fellow Democrats saying some disappointing things. “Gore should just concede.” “I’m sick of all this election stuff.” “When are we going to have a president?” Whine, whine, whine. First of all, we do have a president, William Jefferson Clinton, who will remain in office until January 20th. Secondly, Gore cannot and should not concede because that is exactly what the Republicans want. They have done an excellent job in the past few years of casting themselves as the party of morality, gravitas, and other important-sounding abstract nouns. Now, they insist that Gore is somehow damaging the country with his ridiculous pursuit of the true outcome of the election, as if their behavior in this election fiasco is beyond reproach. Anyone who buys this position is ridiculously stupid. Both political parties always have and always will try to win, and that means acting almost exclusively in their own self-interest.

Dick Cheney’s recent heart attack, while it has little to do with butterfly ballots or pregnant chads, is a perfect example of Republican hypocrisy. Clinton couldn’t lie about his extramarital affair, but George W. Bush can lie about the health of the man who ostensibly should be ready to serve at any moment. Bush said in a speech on November 22 that Cheney had not had a heart attack according to preliminary test results. While this statement is true of the tests done at 3:30 a. m., they are not true for the tests done later at 7:00 a. m. Bush’s advisors did not tell him this information and allowed him to give an essentially untrue speech so that they could save face. Technically, Bush did not lie, but his team had him present the facts that they liked the best. Is that really a family value?

But besides being unrepentant liars, the Republicans have also engaged in shady election practices. In Seminole County, Florida, Republican workers broke the law by filling in registration numbers on Republican absentee ballot request forms that only the voters themselves were to have filled in. Furthermore, the reason the ballot applications did not have all the required voter identification number in the first place was that the Republicans had printed them out without them. Elections supervisor Sandy Goard wanted to throw out the incomplete applications, but gave in to Republican petitions and allowed party members to come in and correct their mistakes. What Democrats should learn from this little impropriety is that when Republicans make mistakes, they have the opportunity to correct them. But when impartial ballot machines err, Democrats don’t get the same second chance.

The double standard is clear. Democratic voters who leave one corner of a chad hanging are stupid and weak, but Republicans who misprint thousands of absentee ballot requests just make honest mistakes. Let’s not forget which party has filed the most lawsuits and which party took cases related to the vote to court first: (surprise!) the Republican Party, even though they insist repeatedly that they just want this whole thing over with. Even more hypocritical is the Republicans’ insistence that machines are better equipped to count votes than people, even though W. has unceasingly expressed his love for “the people” in his campaign. So what if the Democrats’ desire for recounts is self-interested? Politics is about winning, not niceness. The Republicans, although they assert that they are acting in the best interests of the country, are still just partisans like everyone else.

Therefore, although you may think that Gore is just prolonging the inevitable result of the election, try to remember that the Republicans do not have the moral high ground here. Bush has no more morals than Gore does, he has just told you he does. The Republicans want you to think that Gore is doing the wrong thing by trying to figure out who actually won. Their anxiety stems from what they all suspect deep down: without all those disqualified ballots, Gore would have won by a much larger margin than five hundred or even a thousand votes. Ending the recounts does not benefit the country or the constitution so much as it benefits the Republican party. Just like Democrats, Republicans want to look good, which is why they have to put forth fictions about Cheney’s health, the nonexistent “constitutional crisis”, and the possibility that a candidate can concede an election to his opponent if he feels like it.

So before you allow election fatigue to set in, remember that in doing so you will just be swallowing the Republican party line. Moreover, Florida law permits the public to have access to the ballots, which could eventually result in recounts that could conclude that the current president was not the winner. Thus, it is imperative that we find the true winner now, not after an illegitimate president takes the office. To give up now is to give in to a bunch of whiny hypocrites who want us to believe that a man who didn’t quit boozing until he was forty will restore dignity to the White House.

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