Man with No Mandate
http://www.consortiumnews.com/010901a.html
By Sam Parry
Mandate: The wishes of a political electorate, expressed by election results
to its representatives in government.
On Sunday, Dec. 31, 2000, The Washington Post reported that President-elect
George W. Bush’s transition is “defying predictions” and is proceeding “as
if he had won a resounding victory.”
Bush, according the Post, “has determined the best way to establish his
legitimacy despite his messy victory is to lead as if had a mandate.”
Six days later, on Jan. 6, during the joint session of the U.S. House and
Senate that officially received and tabulated the final electoral vote count,
Democratic representatives, led by the Congressional Black Caucus, rose –
again and again – to object to the Florida electoral count.
When no senator joined the House objectors as required by the rules of the
joint session, the objections were gaveled down by the outgoing President of
the Senate, Vice President Al Gore.
Near the end, Rep. Alcee L. Hastings, D-Fla., turned to Gore and said, "We
did all we could." Gore smiled and replied, "The chair thanks the gentleman."
With that last-ditch Black Caucus protest, the legal challenges to Bush's
formal election had ended, but the fury felt by many Americans outside the
halls of Congress remains palpable.
The question that Bush supporters now must try to get the country to forget
is this: What mandate can Bush claim, given the twin realities that he lost
the national popular vote by more than a half million votes and almost
certainly was runner-up in the key state of Florida?
The Ruling
Bush was awarded Florida’s 25 electoral votes, which gave him one more than
the required 270 electoral votes, but he got that total in a manner that will
remain a topic of historical debate and controversy for years to come.
As the world knows, the U.S. Supreme Court, in two 5-4 rulings, first halted
the manual statewide counting of ballots in Florida that showed Bush's tiny
lead dwindling toward zero and then prevented the count's resumption because
of alleged inconsistencies in the recount standards. The court further
imposed a deadline – two hours after the ruling – that made any adjustments
impossible.
A careful reading of the ruling by the court's five most conservative
justices as well as the sharply worded dissents make clear that the court was
unsure what to do about Florida’s election quandary. Yet, given the
well-documented irregularities in Florida, why were the 25 electoral votes
given to either candidate?
Considering that Florida’s election laws were created as a single election
scheme, it was inconsistent for the court to strike down the election
recounting process without striking down the whole system.
One uncharitable explanation, of course, is that the five conservative
Republican justices simply were making up legal arguments to guarantee the
victory of a conservative Republican.
It was even more troubling to many, particularly in the black community, that
the court based its ruling on the "equal protection" clause of the 14th
Amendment, enacted after the Civil War to ensure legal rights for
African-Americans.
The disparate access to modern voting equipment and polling locations across
Florida tended to favor wealthier, predominantly white precincts – with
optical scanners – over poorer, disproportionately black precincts – with
old-fashioned punch systems.
To level the electoral playing field, the Florida election law provided for
hand counts especially where old or malfunctioning machines may have erred.
By throwing out only the election law provision for counting these missed
votes in the poorer precincts, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling effectively
gave greater weight to votes cast in the wealthier precincts. The court's
legal reasoning was thus seen by many blacks as a perversion of the equal
protection principle.
Largely lost in the high-stakes political drama of Florida’s vote count also
was the final national popular vote tally.
As late absentee ballots across the country were tabulated and added to the
vote totals, Gore’s slim election-night popular vote lead swelled to almost
540,000 votes.
Gore's popular vote margin over Bush was more than four-times greater than
Kennedy’s over Nixon in 1960 and larger than Nixon’s over Humphrey in 1968.
Of all the presidential candidates in history, Gore’s popular vote total was
second only to Ronald Reagan’s in 1984.
Not only did Gore defeat Bush one-on-one in the popular vote count, but
left-of-center presidential candidates – Gore, Ralph Nader and John Hagelin
– defeated right-of-center candidates – Bush, Pat Buchanan, Harry Browne and
Howard Phillips – by almost three million votes.
The CoverageBush’s election victory also followed a campaign that benefited
from two key factors that call into question whether the American people were
presented with an impartial view of the candidates and thus whether they were
prepared to cast well-informed votes.The first factor was the merciless
criticism from many in the mainstream press of Gore’s supposed
exaggerations.Throughout the campaign, the press was relentless in
criticizing Gore as a man who didn’t know who he was, a candidate engaged in
constant reinventions and a politician who stretched the truth in an almost
pathological manner.At times, Gore-the-exaggerator stories seemed to consume
the press, particularly the pundit television shows such as CNN’s Crossfire
and MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews.Newspaper reporters such as Ceci
Connolly of The Washington Post and Katharine Seelye of The New York Times,
in their zeal to catch Gore in an exaggeration, actually altered a Gore quote
on the environment to make it seem like he was taking too much credit for
helping to clean up toxic waste. [For details, see "Al Gore v. The Press".]
The 'Oppo'The national Republican leadership eagerly contributed to this
portrait of Gore as untrustworthy.The Republican National Committee's
"opposition research" -- or "oppo" teams -- combed Gore’s statements and
successfully planted their hostile interpretations of Gore's words with
political reporters. The RNC ran regular Gore-exaggeration updates on their
Web site, even producing an online documentary of Gore’s RNC-diagnosed mental
illness – his pathological insincerity.In the final weeks of the campaign,
the Republicans pounded Gore's supposed untrustworthiness with television ads
in key swing states, including Florida.All the while, Bush remained publicly
committed to his campaign pledge to elevate the debate and avoid negative
personal attacks.Missed IssuesThe second factor benefiting Bush was the
press’ disinterest in the details of the policy differences between the two
candidates.For instance, Bush was never forced to fully detail his Social
Security partial privatization plan nor directly answer the question of
whether there was a pot of $1 trillion in Social Security funds promised to
both current and near retirees and to young workers to set up private
retirement accounts.Education was another important issue that suffered from
lack of clarity.Though late in the campaign, the Rand Corporation issued a
study that called into question Bush’s claims to have reformed and
dramatically improved the education system in Texas, the press never pieced
together for the American voters what the truth was.Many Americans went to
the polls on Election Day assured that Bush had really performed education
miracles in Texas.Bush also was never forced to fully account for his state’s
poor environmental record. Under Bush, Texas became the most polluted state
in the country and Houston became the most polluted city. While this was
reported sporadically, the national press failed to probe the record
thoroughly.Instead, the media coverage focused on the horse race or on the
latest Gore exaggeration story.The pundit shows were more interested in
Gore’s claim to have visited fire-damaged land in Texas with the Federal
Emergency Management Agency director when he had instead traveled with the
deputy director – a mistake detected and trumpeted by the GOP's "oppo" team.
A Pass on a PastPerhaps most amazing, given the press’ insatiable appetite
for personal scandals, were the passes given to Bush on his past.The press
never demanded that Bush disclose his history of drug use despite the obvious
suggestion fueled by Bush’s own statements that he had abused drugs at some
point in his life.The press also did not require Bush to account for his
whereabouts when he was supposed to be serving in the Alabama Air National
Guard, but apparently did not report for duty for 18 months. Officers on base
in Alabama at the time said Bush never reported, but the story received faint
coverage by most outlets.Bush also drew only mild criticism of his business
dealings throughout the 1980s.As we reported last summer, Bush’s record as an
oil man left many questions about the source of his financing and the
deep-pocketed benefactors who lost money to keep Bush’s failed oil companies
afloat.Bush ran into trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission,
too, when he failed to disclose to investors in a timely way stock purchases
and sales he made in Harken Energy, a company he helped run.The Clinton Rules
In contrast, when Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, his drug use,
military service and personal finances became headline stories that dogged
his campaign and his entire administration.Clinton won in spite of these
hard-hitting stories while Bush squeaked by without having to fully explain
any of these personal mysteries.Bush benefited, too, from the media's
obsession with scandals of the Clinton administration, including the sordid
Monica Lewinsky case that resulted in Clinton's impeachment in 1998 by the
Republican-controlled House.Even though many of the so-called "Clinton
scandals" were ultimately dismissed for lack of evidence, the effect of eight
years of endless investigation into an otherwise popular presidency exhausted
Clinton supporters and energized the Republican base.While Clinton’s behavior
created some of the opportunities for these investigations, it cannot be
disputed that Clinton was the target of a coalition of enemies.This coalition
started with right-wing Republicans in Arkansas and grew into a well-funded
apparatus of the national Republican Party, conservative news outlets, the
Christian Right and Richard Mellon Scaife. This ugly campaign is
well-documented in Joe Conason and Gene Lyons’s book The Hunting of the
President.Bush's 'Mandate'In 1999-2000, the anti-Clinton operations morphed
into the unrelenting assaults on Gore's integrity. Bush was free to offer his
campaign promise to "restore honor and dignity to the White
House."Nevertheless, Bush still lost the national popular vote and only was
handed the White House by five conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme
Court.Despite this tenuous grasp on the presidency, Bush’s transition, headed
by Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, is proceeding with a single-minded
purpose, almost a swagger, as if Bush had won in a landslide.His nominees on
the whole have not been moderate, but conservative, in some cases very
conservative. They reflect the kind of appointments Bush might have made had
he trounced Gore by 10 million votes.One goal of the transition seems to be
to distance the country from the electoral realities -- by treating the
popular vote as irrelevant -- and bestow on Bush the crown of
legitimacy.Instead of using the transition to heal the country’s election
wounds by taking a centrist, cautious and moderate approach to
Cabinet-building, Bush is aggressively asserting his mandate through
rock-ribbed Republican choices.The Wall Street Journal editorial page – known
for its own hard-right views – hailed Bush's Cabinet as "actually more
conservative than the one Ronald Reagan selected." [WSJ, Jan. 8, 2001]On the
environmental front, Bush has appointed two pro-business women to head
environmental posts – Gale Norton to the Interior and Christie Whitman to the
Environmental Protection Agency.While Norton wins endorsements as smart and
professional and Whitman is viewed as a socially moderate Republican, both
women approach environmental issues with sympathies to business interests
that overshadow science, health or environmental concerns.During her
appointment press conference, Norton went on record supporting Bush’s plan to
open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil exploration.If
the environmental community is prepared to fight any environmental battle
during Bush’s administration, it will be to protect ANWR from drilling. Yet
this proposal remains high on Bush’s agenda.Nomination FightsThe Sierra Club
and a number of liberal groups oppose Norton’s appointment, as well as the
appointment of another polarizing political figure, John Ashcroft, as
Attorney General.In the Senate, Ashcroft opposed many environmental bills and
Clinton administration executive orders. Norton championed "wise-use/property
rights." Ashcroft also is opposed by black leaders, women and labor
groups.Given the fact that the Senate is evenly split and that the position
of Attorney General is arguably the most important domestic policy Cabinet
position, this coalition of opposition from the Democratic Party’s base poses
a formidable challenge to Ashcroft’s confirmation.Considering the positions
to which they were appointed, the Ashcroft, Norton and Whitman nominations
are far from the choices Bush would make if he were building his Cabinet from
the center.Combine that with choices of an ardent supporter of private school
vouchers to Education, Rod Paige; a man who once called for the abolition of
the Department of Energy to Energy, Spencer Abraham; his aborted choice of a
woman who blames sexual harassment lawsuits for turning America into "a
nation of crybabies" to Labor, Linda Chavez; and an assortment of
corporate-board-room executives to fill other Cabinet posts.On the whole, the
Bush’s choices reflect an ideologically right-wing Cabinet, not one in line
with Bush's fuzzy campaign promise to be "a uniter, not a divider."
Policy ChoicesBeyond his appointments, Bush has made some of his most
polarizing campaign proposals the top priorities in his transition. He has
pushed theater missile defense and his $1.6 trillion tax cut as two top
goals.With those priorities – plus his plans for drilling in the Arctic and
threatening to undo President Clinton’s efforts to conserve public lands and
