Election Dysfunction II: Remedies For A Soft Candidate

 by Noel Sheppard  

| View comments |  Print This Post

With the race for President at a virtual tie, the Democrats have an army of lawyers warming up in the bullpen.

Do you remember where you were on November 8th, 2000, at approximately 4AM EST?

I do.  I was at my favorite restaurant sitting with the general manager and another patron who had stayed with us to watch the late returns.  I had been there since it was erroneously announced at 8PM EST that Al Gore had won Florida.  Now, as evening turned to morning, this proclamation was reversed, and Al Gore was apparently conceding the election to George W. Bush by phone.  The three of us finished our final drinks, and headed to our cars hugging one another in glee. 

I got to my house a few minutes later, turned on the TV set, and found out that Mr. Gore was asking for a recount.  Little did I know how many times we would end up recounting, or for how long. 

To be sure, none of us knew then what kind of precedent this was going to establish, and how this might change elections for the rest of our lives.  However, an AP story on Thursday likely gives us a frightening indication:

Senator John Kerry, bracing for a potential fight over election results, will not hesitate to declare victory November 2 and defend it, advisers say. He also will be prepared to name a national security team before knowing whether he's secured the presidency.

Six so-called "SWAT teams" of lawyers and political operatives will be situated around the country with fueled-up jets awaiting Kerry's orders to speed to a battleground state. The teams have been told to be ready to fly on the evening of the election to begin mounting legal and political fights. Every battleground state will have a SWAT team within an hour of its borders.

Democrats are already laying the public relations groundwork by pointing to every possible voting irregularity before the November 2 election and accusing Republicans of wrongdoing.

And Madison wept.

Is this how elections are going to be waged now in our country?  The loser has to immediately behave like the winner, and start mounting a legal proceeding to prove it?  Are you kidding?

Potentially even more alarming is the number of legal issues that might be raised after Election Day to contest the results.  According to Richard L. Hasen, an election law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles reporting for Slate, there are five areas that the various legal beagles out there are looking at as possible grounds for electus interruptus: voting glitches; voter disenfranchisement; Colorado’s 36th Amendment; the Electoral College dispute, and; terrorist attack disruptions.

Quite a laundry list to be sure.  Kind of makes one wonder whether this has been part of the strategy from the beginning of the campaign, doesn’t it?  Is it possible?

Well, if we rewind our VCRs back to January, we might find evidence that leans in this direction.  First, we would see Howard Dean as the odds on favorite to capture the Democratic nomination.  Unfortunately for him, he was perceived as being way too far to the left and virtually unelectable at the national level.  As a result, both Time and Newsweek on the very same Monday in January ran cover stories largely offering a negative account of the governor of Vermont while suggesting that they doubted he had the stature and experience to take on an incumbent president.

Now, fast forward a bit to the Iowa primary, and you’ll see every network in America running the “I have a scream” concession speech over and over and over again until the electorate was duly convinced that Mr. Dean was more of a wacko than we Conservatives had been secretly and quietly suggesting for months.  With Dean duly assassinated, the Democrats grudgingly put their full support behind Senator Kerry. 

Unfortunately, they had a lot of problems with this candidate as well.  First, he was probably just as liberal as Dean, and had a verifiable track record of Senatorial votes to prove it.  Second, he had a tremendously undistinguished 20-year career in the Senate wherein he was author or co-author of not one significant piece of legislation that anybody could identify or name.  Third, he had at best a dubious record with regard to issues of national defense, and a history of voting for tax hikes and against tax cuts.  Fourth, in order to appeal to anti-war Democrats in the primaries who were largely supporting Dean, Kerry was forced to vote against the spending bill that would have given $87 Billion in support to our troops already in Iraq with his blessing.  Last but not least, the guy was actually less charming and more of a wooden Indian than Al Gore.  In fact, depending on the lighting and his makeup, he resembled either Herman Munster or Lurch.

All of this was on the credit side of the ledger.  On the debit side was the fact that he wasn’t George W. Bush.  Period.  Now, as a political strategist, you can imagine that this doesn’t give one much to work with, does it?  So, it is quite likely that Mary Beth Cahill and Robert Shrum got together, and, realizing that they probably couldn’t win with this candidate, devised a plan where they could at least make the election close enough to force another Florida-style recount.  In effect, they would play for a tie, and hope that they could steal the election in overtime with a lot of legal wrangling.

In retrospect, it almost seems obvious now.  First, they spent the months between the primaries and the convention doing nothing but badmouthing the President while being careful to never actually take a position on anything.  Just continue to tell the American people that the President is a bungling moron who has done everything wrong without actually suggesting what you would have either done or will do differently.  Of course, they correctly anticipated that the press would allow them to execute such a strategy by not actually asking them to elaborate on any of these differences.  But, this probably wasn’t tough to assume.

Then, they orchestrated a convention wherein none of the typical, liberal issues were discussed, and, rather, presented Mr. Kerry to the American people as a war hero who had been strong on defense all of his life whilst ignoring his twenty years in the Senate that pointed to the contrary.  Once that was done, they sat back and hoped that something either would go very poorly in Iraq, in the economy, or that the President would fumble somehow to get the game back to even.  And, of course, in Miami, Mr. Bush accommodated them by giving the worst debate performance of his career.

Now you can quite understand why even though they are trailing in most of the polls, the Democrats are all smiling.  The strategy worked.  With a practically unelectable candidate who stands for absolutely nothing, the ballgame is basically a tie, and they’ve got they’re lawyers warming up in the bullpen.

Elections & Political Parties

Read more articles by Noel Sheppard