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 t he 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 and inevitably the U. S. Supremes had to play Solomon for the Dade County count. Bush, to the undying grief of legions, won, and Gore was thereby liberated to give his ample talents and heroic presence to the making of An Inconvenient Truth. A sad day, some still say, for the presidency, but a peacheroo 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 t he 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 even more intensely.
The days when people accepted an election result, confident both in the processes of democratic choice, and the oversight and monitoring of going to the polls, were over.
Elections don’t “settle” matters as once they did. In many cases, they spike and blister the very contentions they were devised to resolve. Not so long ago that was — really — not the case. Even Richard Nixon, one of the most cagey and powerseeking personalities ever to enter the White House, against the advice of many of his supporters and advisers, chose not to contest the close race of 1960 against John Kennedy. ( There was and remains, as myth or mystery, that Chicago mayor Richard Daley gave a boost to the ballots for Kennedy in the tight Illinois result.) Rather than perturb the nation (“Our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis”), Nixon quietly relented on any thought of challenge.
It’s a very different movie in this year of Our Lord 2016. “Rightly to be great,” said Hamlet, “is not to stir without great argument/But greatly to find quarrel in a straw.”
A timely quotation, I think, when a presidential election is twisting on the weight of a Venezuelan beauty queen and her interesting history, or the rel- evance of immunity deals and basement servers.
If, as so seems the case, people are looking with astonishment and alarm at the 2016 campaign, just wait for the result. Unless there is a landslide victory, an astonishing and utter collapse of either Trump’s or Clinton’s campaign, what horrors have marked the process will be but an appetizer- prologue for the morning after the vote.
The factions in contest will not accept any result but their candidate winning. The Clinton camp despise Trump and their dismay even at a convincing loss will be inexplicable and against every law — as they see it — of reason. The forces behind Trump are already primed for seeing a “rigged” result. There will be no “peace in the valley” on Nov. 9. To borrow again from the Bard, “When (politics) breeds unkind division: there comes the ruin, there begins confusion.”
America is divided against itself and this election portends an explosive period of discord and discontent.
THE U.S. PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN HAS BEEN BAD. THE ANGER OVER THE OUTCOME WILL BE HARDER STILL.