It will get worse

One of the more delicious episodes in modern political history was the splendid Florida recount following the U.S. presidential contest of 2000. The vote was so close that on the night of the election itself, U.S. news networks passed Florida back and forth between George W. Bush and Al Gore so fast and frequently it felt like watching Olympiclevel ping-pong. Anticipating challenge and recount, even before full results were in, Gore and Bush dispatched herds of lawyers and flocks of spin doctors via cargo jets to oversee the process.

The nation and the world were quickly enthralled by the battle of the hanging chads, and the finer minds of the U.S. judiciary offered the further entertainment of disquisitions on the differences between the multiform nature of the chad itself. The nature of the triune Deity received less scrupulous parsing from medieval scholastics. Notwithstanding that not one in a million had ever heard of a chad before Bush/Gore, within a couple of weeks stock clerks at Walmart, and even professors of political science, were ready to distinguish the eversubtle variations between the aforesaid hanging chad, the alluring dimpled chad (also known as the pregnant chad) and, it being Florida where the living is forbiddingly lascivious, the swinging chad.

It is difficult even at this distance to void the mind of the images of the beadyeyed vote counters holding the ballots up to the light and glaring, Sherlockianly, through great magnifying glasses to diagnose whether the chad was pregnant (for or from Bush or Gore), whether it was hung, swinging or merely “fat” — this too being a term of art.

The Florida courts batted the issues back and forth for the planet. It is difficult to disagree.

But, gloomily, not even the collected wisdom of the highest judicial authority could rid many Americans, and certainly most Democrats, of their doubts over the outcome. The Bush presidency was never accepted, in any final sense, as legitimate, and following Bush/Gore the fevers of partisanship, raging in American politics even before those turbulent days, flamed