A
VOLATILE MIX
To
add a potentially volatile element to the mix, the
popular vote as of this writing – 5:20 Wednesday
morning, Pacific Standard Time – has Al Gore ahead
by some 200,000 votes! The resulting confusion, and the crisis
of the system, is a fitting climax to an election that was
a farce from the very beginning, no more democratic than similar
exercises in Milosevic's Serbia, UN-occupied Kosovo, or Equatorial
Africa. With both "major" parties awash in corporate "contributions,"
conspiring together to co-sponsor phony "debates" from which
the other two major candidates were barred – Ralph Nader
was kicked out of the room, even though he had a ticket!
– the fix was in from the very beginning. Pat Buchanan
received $12,000,000 in federal matching funds, but was still
deemed not significant enough by the corporate-sponsored "Commission
on Presidential Debates" to be included. Al Gore was spared
Ralph Nader's withering scorn, and lucky Dubya never had to
lock horns with Buchanan – a confrontation the former
might not have survived. In a thoroughly controlled and carefully
protected environment, like two toddlers in a playpen, the
two candidates were allowed to bicker over nuances in their
respective approaches to taxes, Medicare, federal education
policy, Social Security, and foreign policy. This made it
easier for the media to focus voters' attention on style rather
than substance, and the political debate was almost entirely
bereft of even a hint of ideology. But the two ideologues,
Nader and Buchanan, would have their revenge in the end.
NADER'S
REVENGE
Nader
polled 3% of the total, racking up some two and a half million
votes and making the difference not only in Florida,
but also in Wisconsin,
Oregon,
and New
Hampshire: if Bush holds on to his slight edge in Florida
(a mere handful of votes), then Nader will have denied Gore
a victory in the electoral college. On the other hand, even
if Bush wins in terms of electoral votes, if he loses the
popular vote – and this
appears to be the case as of this writing – his victory
may turn out to be a Pyrrhic one. The Republicans were the
first to declare that if they lost in the electoral college,
but won the popular vote, they would protest the election
results and undertake a mass mobilization to keep the Democrats
from "stealing" the election, as Milosevic tried to do in
the former Yugoslavia. But now that the shoe may very well
be on the other foot, do the Republicans still feel the same
way? What if the Democrats decide to do exactly that?
THE
STINGING PITCHFORK
On
the national level, Buchanan's 450,000-plus votes, in spite
of amounting to a little less than 1%, wound up making the
difference between a clear victory for Bush and a dubious
triumph confined to the mysterious, arcane, and suspiciously
elitist institution known as the Electoral College. While
the Weekly Standard rushed into print with a sneering
piece advising the Buchanan Brigades to "Put
Away Your Pitchforks," dismissing Pat's impact on the
election as negligible, it turned out that the Bushies did
feel Buchanan's sting – one that could prove fatal
to their hopes of recapturing the White House. Because he
is a gracious man, and also not a sectarian, Pat has indicated
that he hopes Bush wins: but that just makes the frustration
of the Republicans all the more bitter. For it means that
they needn't have lost Buchanan and his followers to begin
with, and did so only on account of their blind arrogance.
UNDERCURRENTS
In
a contest that often seemed about as profound as an election
for class president pitting George Jock against Al Know-it-All,
ideological undercurrents roiled beneath the surface –
and were, when push came to shove, the decisive factor. In
the battle between the two major party candidates personality
seemed to trump substance, and the struggle of opposing ideas
was reduced to marginal differences over prescription drug
policy. Yet ideology entered into the equation with the emergence
of Ralph Nader. Needling and ridiculing Gore as a hypocrite
and a coward, undercutting the Democratic base and having
a fun time doing it, Nader forced Gore to devote precious
resources and energy to defending his left flank. While Buchanan
was less of a problem for the Republicans, his hard-hitting
last minute ads attacking our bipartisan interventionist foreign
policy undoubtedly upped the Reformers' vote totals, notably
in Illinois, home to a large Serbian-American population,
and also in parts of the Midwest. Even crippled by endless
lawsuits, harassed by Perotista disrupters, and practically
sidelined by the serious illness of the candidate, in the
end the Buchananite rebellion landed a crippling blow –
a sucker-punch that has Bushies reeling on the ropes. In addition,
there are those many thousands of conservatives who were so
turned off by the militant "moderation" of the Philadelphia-ized
GOP that they simply sat on their hands and stayed home. No,
I don't believe the time has come for the Brigades to put
away their pitchforks quite yet: – indeed, they should
be sharpening them, and preparing for the next phase of the
battle.
NOT
A CREATURE WAS STIRRING
It
was the night before Election Day 2000, and, all through the
house, not a creature was stirring – only my mouse. Relentlessly
surfing from poll to poll, I sat at the keyboard, glum at
the prospect of what tomorrow had in store. The numbers were
depressing: while the CBS/Wall Street Journal poll
had Buchanan up to 2 percent, Zogby was showing Pat falling
behind Harry Browne, the Libertarian Party candidate. Yikes!
– I thought. I'll never live that one down!
But then Zogby was calling the election for Gore, by
two points: I looked back in their earlier results, and saw
that at one juncture they had polled 1% for the completely
unknown Dave McReynolds, the presidential candidate of the
Socialist Party. Taking comfort in the fact that something
must be definitely wrong with Zogby's numbers, I went to FirstHeadlines.com,
checked to see the next morning's articles about Buchanan
– and went into shock.
SHOCKED
The
headline read: "Buchanan Re-examines 3rd Party
Idea." Say what? Isn't it a little late for
that? A numbness seemed to coat my consciousness, my mind
reflexively protecting itself from the shock of what was to
come. Reporting from Michigan, the Associated
Press story quoted Buchanan as saying that "a third party
may be the wrong way to reach the American people." Pat went
on to say:
"I've
decided that a presidential campaign is really not a place
where great ideas and great issues can be best advanced. .
. . You've got to think as to what is the best forum. I've
been able to influence, I think, over my career of 35 years
... a lot of policies and a lot of decisions. But this does
not appear to be the best format to do it."
SECOND
THOUGHTS?
To
begin with the obvious: is this really the kind of thing to
say one day before the election? Pat's supporters,
who gave their money and their time – some of whom traveled
all the way to Long Beach, California, and tangled with the
Perotistas on his behalf – deserved better. What are
they – chopped liver? At a Wednesday morning press conference,
Buchanan explicitly denied the import of the Associated Press
report. That said, Buchanan is, after all, only human: at
the end of a long and physically grueling campaign, with less
than half a million votes to show for it, it's only natural
that a certain level of depression should set in, or that
a reporter should mistakenly interpret Buchanan's remarks
for terminal despair. The next day, however, as the returns
came in, Pat appeared to be taking
it all in stride, declaring to his supporters on election
night in Arlington, Virginia, that "This
is our party and this is our home." He said that the Reform
Party will "become the core of a national conservative populist
party. It will be the first in America. It's a number of years
off, but it will happen." Now that's more like it.
FROM
REPUBLICANISM TO REFORM
A
third party movement is certainly not the best forum:
indeed, it was, you remember, a step taken as a last resort.
The whole reason for Buchanan's switching to Reform was the
complete prostration of conservative Republicans before the
party's liberal internationalist wing. A major problem was
that, during the GOP primaries, conservatives had hardly presented
a united front. While Buchanan's first two campaigns enjoyed
the distinction of being the only conservative alternative
to a Bush or a Dole, election year 2000 brought a plethora
of ostensibly conservative standard-bearers, all of whom contended
with Buchanan for hegemony on the Right. Each and every subset
and faction put up their own preferred candidate: Alan Keyes
for the pro-life crowd, Gary Bauer for the remnants of the
Moral Majority, Steve Forbes for the economic conservatives,
and Buchanan for the antiwar, anti-globalist contingent. Lost
in the crowd, Buchanan never gained momentum, his contributor
and volunteer base was severely constricted, and he was forced
to drop out of the GOP primary: his bolt to Reform kept the
movement alive, though, well after the rest has fizzled out
and dropped by the wayside. Buchanan and his following, unlike
the other largely single-issue Johnny-one-note candidates,
actually represented a new political development: a populism
of the right that combined the traditional conservative opposition
to the Federal Leviathan with an increasingly sharp critique
of the liberal corporate state. Buchanan and his intellectual
sympathizers, the "paleo-conservative" writers and publicists
associated with Chronicles magazine, had by this time
mapped out a fairly coherent and comprehensive program: militant
opposition to the three main trends now dominant in American
political culture: imperialism, mercantilism, and a super-centralism
culminating in "global governance."
VICTORY
DENIED
On
the left, a very different but parallel critique of these
three trends took shape in the form of the Nader campaign:
Nader, like Buchanan, criticized the two party system as a
"duopoly" and pointed to the bipartisan collusion that ensured
a regime of corruption, corporate welfare, and cronyism. Both
took up themes of sovereignty as a principle worth defending,
and both denounced our interventionist foreign policy, calling
for an end to NATO and a more evenhanded approach to the problems
of the Middle East. Acting separately, but marching together,
both the left and right-populist movements, represented by
the Greens and the Reformers respectively, effectively denied
victory to either of the two "major" parties. For months,
Nader and Buchanan have spent a lot of their time and effort
trying to deny the legitimacy of the electoral process –
and in the end they succeeded in making their point rather
forcefully.
THE
SOLUTION: A SECOND ROUND
What
is the solution to this looming constitutional crisis? It
is urgently necessary to re-legitimize a process that seems
more dubious by the hour: what is needed is not a recount
but a rerun, In short, a second round of voting. This
time, however, let's do it right: we need one last debate
– this time opening it up to the top four vote-getters
– followed by another round of voting. The closeness
of the vote, and the need to resolve the national crisis,
will increase voter turnout, which was
only about 52%. This is up from 1996, but less than came
out in 1992, when they let Perot into the debates. The only
way to solve this otherwise insoluble dilemma is to subject
both Dubya and Gore to some ordeal – say, forcing them
to get in the arena with two of the most skilled polemicists
in the country. Let's see what these guys are really
made of – and then put the fate of the country
up for a vote.
THE
SYSTEM BREAKS DOWN
The
choice is clear: either we open up the system, or else the
system will collapse, as it did in Yugoslavia, when the people
took to the streets to defend the integrity of the electoral
process. As Republicans claim their hollow Electoral College
"victory," and the Gore camp digs in its heels, insisting
on the validity of their popular plurality, a second round
is the only way out. Besides clarifying the real views of
the voting public, this would give the Gore camp a few more
weeks to come up with the real dirt on Ralph Nader,
or else try to make a rational appeal to Green voters; it
would also give Dubya a chance at claiming a true national
mandate by winning over Buchanan voters with, say, a pledge
to get our troops out of Kosovo by a date certain, as congressional
Republicans have proposed. The present crisis of American
democracy is a direct consequence of excluding the so-called
"extremes" of left and right from the national debate, and
locking them out of the process: the result has been the failure
to generate any meaningful consensus, and the virtual breakdown
of the electoral system. The alleged "extremists," Nader and
Buchanan, have had their revenge – and made their point:
they have had the last laugh and are the real victors in this
election.
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