One can only peer so far into the inner workings of the Liberal mind before reaching the black hole of logic and reasoning, where all input from the outside world is swallowed up into a bottomless void from which there is no escape.

Chapter 7:  Predictions, Pundits and Political Pabulum: Election Day Draws Closer

Harry and I continued our email exchange in October 2000 regarding the presidential debates.  After some discussion about Gore’s long, rambling, pseudo-academic responses in his condescending Mr. Rogers voice — compared to Bush’s direct, uplifting, on-message vision about a better America — I stated flatly that the latest re-invention of Al Gore’s persona wasn’t going to change any votes.

Phil: Bush is going to win the election. Whether you support him or not, he tells people what he believes, and people respond to this.  Algore wants to be all things to all people, and takes all sides on an issue.  He comes off as a pompous, arrogant man who has no core beliefs.  He’s Clinton without the charm.  People can spot a phony, which is why the momentum has shifted to Bush.

To his credit, Harry was the first of us to recognize that “the winner in Florida is going to win the election.”  I admit to being a dilettante of sorts in that I follow the overall trends and logic of a race, and leave it to my brother Dan and guys like Harry to crunch the state-by-state, county-by-county numbers.  Dan’s calculations I’ve learned to trust, because he’ll give me an objective read whether the numbers are good or bad.  Harry on the other hand, well, let’s just say that he’s a bit of an eternal optimist in the face of crushing reality when it comes to promoting his own interests. 

Like the global warming advocates who see confirmation of this phenomenon whether it’s hot, cold, wet, dry, windy or calm, Harry always found at least one poll out of 20 that showed his guy ahead.  Usually, these were the polls where a voting population of 50% Republicans and 50% Democrats were skewed so that the sample had an 80-20 Democrat bias.  The idea here is that to be “fair,” for some phony reason or another, we need to include more Democrats in the poll than Republicans.  Never mind that historically Republicans as a percentage of their registered voters vote in greater numbers than registered Democrats, the poll’s creators were sure that in this election it was gonna be different!  Even with such blatant manipulations, Algore normally managed to lead such polls by a statistically insignificant margin.  Nevertheless, it was proof enough for the Harrys of the world that victory was just around the corner.   

Still, I think my constant goading about Gore’s lies had gotten to Harry.  In a classic display of moral relativism, he wrote me a mid-October 2000 email admitting, tongue-in-cheek, that “I will grant you that Al is quick to take credit and exaggerate a tad bit,” but then getting serious he claimed that “George is no better, and here is the substantiation.”

My heart stopped, and my mouth went suddenly dry.   Here was my greatest fear: clear, convincing, incontrovertible proof that my guy was as much a liar as his candidate.  I knew that acknowledging Gore’s penchant for “serial exaggeration,” to put it kindly, would have no impact at all on Harry’s decision to vote for him in November.  Hey, so he’s a liar?  What politician isn’t?

But I had both principles, and a track record that wouldn’t allow me to support a fatally flawed candidate.  As recently as a dozen years earlier I refused to vote for Clayton Williams, the Republican candidate for Texas governor, who was leading Ann Richards in the polls and was within striking distance of becoming only the second Republican governor of Texas since Reconstruction.  At the 11th hour he did something so egregiously stupid that I had to stop and re-think my vote.  Nothing dishonest or immoral mind you, but clear enough evidence that he wasn’t fit to lead the state.  Like the majority of other principled Republican voters, we withdrew our support and allowed Ma Richards into office.  Was I about to be presented with another stinging rebuke of the man, George Bush, I had come to admire, but now might not be able to vote for?

Harry: Okay, here’s the verification that George will tell a little fib every now and then.

I was beginning to breathe a little easier.  A “little fib” may not be so bad, I thought.  Graduated magna cum laude instead of summa?   Cut the budget 4.2 percent instead of 4.3?  Then again, a “little fib” to Harry was something like “your policies are putting all old people out on the streets.  Oh, only one person was affected, and they didn’t pay their rent even though they have plenty of money in their bank account?  Never mind.”  So even though I was cautiously optimistic, I wasn’t out of the woods yet.

Harry: Phil, here is the ultimate lie from George.  It’s almost as bad as the Internet and Love Canal.  When asked in one interview to name his own favorite childhood book, Bush cited the Very Hungry Caterpillar.  This book was first published when he was 23.”

Was this some attempt at dry humor that went completely over my head?  No.  As Harry continued in his own words regarding “Georgie’s favorite book”

Harry: Sorry, I think he lied big time on this one and got his hands in the cookie jar.

I know it’s difficult to believe, but I honestly tell you that I’m not making any of this stuff up.  I write science fiction and other novels as a hobby, and have been known to illustrate the absurd by being absurd, as Rush Limbaugh likes to say.  But the hallmark of good satire is that it has to contain an element of at least minimum believability.  If I was to invent this exchange, it would diminish my points about the lunacy of the morally-relativistic, internally inconsistent, completely out-of-touch-with-reality Left.  But when Harry hands me a gift like this that goes beyond my wildest imagination, I give proper thanks to God for what I’ve received, and then point it out for the world to see as a shining example of everything I’ve been writing about.

Phil: Harry, a guy appearing before a bunch of first graders misremembering the “favorite book” he used to read to his children when they were little, does not equate with Algore pandering for votes in front of a union audience by telling them that his mother was a political activist who instilled a deep love for unions in his soul by singing him a non-existent lullaby when he was a child.

What possible advantage did Bush hope to gain by the Caterpillar “lie?”  Is he courting the 5-year-old vote?  No, GW’s actions were innocent at worst, and irrelevant to the “lie and exaggeration” debate at best.  Algore, on the other hand, uses the truth as a malleable weapon to suit his own political objectives.

I had challenged Harry on numerous occasions to give me a positive reason why he supported Gore-Lieberman, other than Bush is an idiot, Lieberman is a Jew, and Gore is a Democrat.  I finally got an answer on September 5, 2000.  It wasn’t exactly what I expected, but then again I learned a long time ago that one can only peer so far into the inner workings of the Liberal mind.  At some point you reach the black hole of logic and reasoning, where all light and other input from the outside world is swallowed up into a bottomless void from which there is no escape. 

Although I’ve become proficient at anticipating most of the ridiculous answers I typically get from committed liberals, even I don’t dare to immerse myself too heavily in an effort to truly understand their thought process.  I’m afraid if I actually understood how they thought one day — instead of simply being able to predict the type of silly answer a given situation calls for — I may not be able to climb out of that morass myself.  Better to know that you turn a key and the car starts, and appreciate the predictability of that knowledge, than try to piece together the astrological charts of the earth spirits and crystalline entities who surround the globe with their positive karma, thus allowing our machines to work, our plants to talk, and our good intentions to take the place of genuine policy analysis.

Harry: Okay, you have asked me twice and I have not responded as to why I plan on voting for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman. 

I think one of the major issues that truly separates the candidates is gun control.  I simply am in favor of controlling easy access to guns by children and criminals as Pedukah, Columbine and Arkansas have substantiated.

George as governor has favored carrying concealed weapons into churches and hospitals, which to me is ridiculous.  Back in 1986, and I am not aware of any change in view, Dick Cheney vetoed making illegal use of armor piercing bullets.

This is a major issue that in my humble opinion Al Gore is holding close to the vest as he will attack George during the debates.

That’s it?  Gun control?   And it’s Harry’s focus because it’s a good tactical weapon (pardon the pun) as well as a personal philosophy?  The rest of the email went on to talk about the upcoming debates, and how Bush was outclassed by Gore before he took the podium.  I even broke Harry’s original response above into four separate paragraphs to make it seem longer, just to be fair to him in repeating his reply.  But this was all he said on the subject.

So I got my answer.  There was no reference to a set of core values, only a single issue.  And it wasn’t even a genuine single issue, in my opinion.  Sure Harry believed strongly in gun control, but if he was going to talk about why he supported Gore-Lieberman from an issues standpoint, what about their stand on Israel, abortion, gay rights, universal government subsidized health care, race relations, and a myriad of other topics? 

No.  Gun control was in the news because of three places where innocent people and children were gunned downed by their mentally disturbed fellow-students, and there was a lot of understandable national sympathy for doing something to prevent future tragedies like this.  Since holding parents more responsible for monitoring the behavior of their kids was not an option on the table, gun control was the de facto Liberal Democrat solution. Clinton had completely screwed up the Middle East peace process through his legacy building efforts, so Gore had no coattails to exploit on this issue.  Abortion was the wrong choice for Harry, because Gore supported “the right to choose,” and I knew that Harry was personally opposed to killing babies like I was.  National Health Care brought up nightmares from 1994 when the country rejected Hillarycare and swept the Republicans into power in Congress.  As for all the other potential issues, well none was sexy or exciting enough to tie your voting philosophy to it, so it was gun control by default.

Instead of repeating my oft-stated position about the importance of shared values, and identifying what those values were regarding respect for innocent life, the quest for true equality vs. perpetuating discrimination (only this time with a different group as the beneficiary), the proper role for the state and families to care for the less fortunate (and help them get back on their feet, instead of simply subsidizing a life style and making them further dependent on government), tax policy, national defense, and all the other practical applications of these values, I decided to put the lie to Harry’s own words.  I wasn’t going to let him wriggle away with a phony, life-is-precious answer, when we both knew he was simply playing a game with words.

Phil: GUN CONTROL!  Give me a break!  You’ve got to do better than that!  Didn’t you watch the Democratic Convention?  Tommy Lee Jones was celebrating Algore’s marksmanship prowess.  But I guess this is just another case of Algore’s “evolution.”  He supported right-to-life, tobacco farming and the 2nd Amendment to get elected to Congress, but as soon as he moves to the national stage he “evolves” different positions because it’s expedient to do so.

What exactly does Algore want to do to control guns that makes you support him?  I guess we could adopt the Washington, DC model where gun sales are outlawed and regulation is taken to the extreme.  As long as Carl Rowan owns a gun so he can shoot teenagers swimming in his pool, and other elites like Rosie O’Donnell can hire bodyguards with weapons to protect their children, then screw the little guy and take away his second amendment rights.  After all, the Democratic credo has always been “the ends justify the means.”  The little guy may have to give up his Constitutional right to gun ownership and self-protection, but look at the positive trade-off.  Gore has a campaign issue (and your vote), and Washington, DC has become the safest city in America. 

And pigs fly.

Algore is pandering on the gun issue, just like he does with everything else.  What is his real solution?  In Texas, since they allowed concealed weapons, violent crime (including carjackings) is down.  The fact is, if the bad guys don’t know whether their potential victim has a gun, they think twice before acting.  Thanks to the NRA we have courses in gun safety to teach the responsible use of firearms too. And your charges to the contrary notwithstanding, every location in Texas (churches and hospitals included) has the option of posting signs prohibiting the concealed weapons on their property.  Those who violate the law are arrested.  Since responsible people in Texas have a history of obeying the law, the only people likely to carry guns into a hospital or church that prohibits it are the same people who couldn’t care less if there was a concealed weapons law in effect or not!

I agree there is a difference between Gore and Bush on this and other issue.  Gore wants the government to solve my problems whether I want that solution or not — while exempting themselves and the elite from these same regulations.  Bush wants to establish conditions where I can take care of myself.

So, to summarize your position, as I understand it your reason for supporting Gore boils down to this.  He likes gun control, but you don’t know exactly what he wants to do about it, other than demagogue the issue.

Suffice to say, Harry did not follow up on my email.  Over the course of the next few weeks he did toss out another “reason” here and there, but usually on an ad hoc or episodic basis reacting to something that was in the news.  I never received anything close to a reasoned, principled defense of his support for Gore, but then again I really didn’t expect to. 

About as close as he got was to bring up the issue of presidential nominations to the Supreme Court.  I agreed that this was an important issue, but hardly a core value the way Harry expressed it.  Rather, it was an acknowledgment of the power of the presidency, and nothing more than that.  As I pointed out in my email:

Phil: The fact that the President will appoint a couple of Supreme Court Justices is a good reason [to support Gore] if you believe that he has a litmus test for his nominees.  But we all know that [having a nominee ready to promote his/her core values] is a bad thing when a Republican is accused of it.

So what was I to conclude?  It’s good for a Democrat president to nominate a Supreme Court justice who believes that abortion is necessary and appropriate, and will interpret the Constitution accordingly, but it’s a travesty for a Republican president to pick a justice who is personally opposed to abortion, for fear that he/she will impose those values on his/her own interpretation of the Constitution.

Yeah, I think I got that one correct.  A conservative with core values is a threat, but a Liberal with core values isn’t.  Of course, since very few Liberals have genuine core values, we may be setting up a straw man argument.  Certainly, the core value in finding abortion rights in the Constitution wasn’t an adherence to the strict interpretation of that document.  Rather, it was a belief that “fairness” trumps the intentions of the founding fathers.  If you need to invent a new right (“privacy”) that isn’t there, so you can promote another right (abortion) that also isn’t there, and wrap it all up in abstract notions of fairness and international law (neither of which are part of the Constitution), I maintain that this debate was not about core values, but a tactical decision brought on by expedience.

I wasn’t the one to create the following analogy, but I applaud the brilliance of the person who did.  The day science discovers that homosexuality is in fact “genetic,” the gay community will applaud and demand the immediate repeal of all laws barring them equal access to marriage and other social conventions.  But when women start choosing to abort homosexual fetuses because they are homosexual, you will see a new “right” appear in the Constitution promoting unlimited, unrestricted abortion for every reason except aborting homosexual fetuses, which will become an officially sanctioned protected class.

I have nothing against gay people who want to practice their sexual preferences in private, so don’t read anything into this observation than the point that it was intended to make.  Until such time as science proves to me that being gay is like being white or black, tall or short, or any other genetic disposition, I’ll continue to support domestic partnerships and oppose gay marriages.  And whether it’s now, or that time in the future should such a thing transpire, I will still cringe at being forced to bestow special recognition upon a class of people not because of the color of their skin or their ethnic background, but because of the way they have sex.  I can think of nothing sillier than people who make sure I’m aware they’re gay instead of allowing me to get to know them first as a fellow human being. 

For those who do insist on making their sexual identity the controlling feature of their public personae, it’s my nature to respond by extending my hand in friendship and announcing, “Phil Jackson, missionary position, with a strong preference for oral sex,” or some such other graphic description of my own sexual interests.  After all, if I’m forced to have the mental image of them in bed as part of their public identity, they can suffer through the image of a middle-aged fat guy doing the nasty with his wife.  As an aside, I’ve found it to be a highly effective form of birth control when I make a modest romantic overture toward my wife with my daughter in the room.  One slightly raised eyebrow as I look at my wife is enough to send my daughter into a fetal position with her eyes closed, foreswearing sex while praying loudly to God to give her a sign that she was actually brought here by a stork instead of conceived by her parents. 

As the big day in November drew closer both Harry and I dug in our heels, each of us predicting victory for our respective candidates.  Harry’s reasons were — well, you can fill in the blanks from everything you’ve read so far.  Call it destiny, call it kismet, call it whatever lie of the day was needed to make the case, Harry knew in his soul that Gore would prevail.

I, on the other hand, preferred to back up my gut instincts with a little more than wishful thinking.  On October 24 I wrote Harry a long email entitled, “It’s Over.”

Phil: Gore has lost the election.  Every poll shows him behind, even the phony ones.  He’s history.  The country is taking a nice, long, national bath and getting rid of the last vestiges of Clinton Gore.

Gore thinks “big business” is bad — except for those who support him (like Hollywood), where he’ll give them a tongue-lashing for public relations purposes, but nothing more.  He supports “targeted” tax breaks, meaning “you must jump through my hoops to get your money back.”  His macho-man, Alpha male stalker behavior has made him a national joke.  I heard one person say it looked like he was sneaking up on Bush to cold-cock him in last night’s debate.  What I would have given to see Bush turn and look at him with a puzzled smile and say, “lost your way again Al?”  He’s the ultra-liberal who nevertheless promises smaller government by telling us he’ll outspend Bush in every category.  His tactics are slimy.  He makes personal attacks against Bush via his surrogates while denying he is doing it.  And he has no core principles.  We saw three different Algores in the debates alone, not counting every other manifestation we’ve seen over the last twelve months. 

The election is over.  George has won and will probably take Florida, regardless of Lieberman’s appeal.  Although judging by the way things are shaping up, GW doesn’t need Florida to win.  The blowup in the Middle East will further drive nails into Gore’s coffin.  The Administration told us we had “peace in our time.”  Now they’re about to launch a few cruise missiles at someone (Bin laden? Saddam?  Another aspirin factory?  It doesn’t matter to Clinton) while Israel is building a new Berlin Wall — only this one to keep people out, instead of lock them in.  The Administration’s policies have been an unmitigated failure, and the people will rally around Bush-Cheney to get our policies back on track.  The public is so jaded by Clinton’s Monica-missile attacks to divert attention away from his own corruption that anything Clinton-Gore does looks like pandering.

The Democrats are in a panic over the thought of being completely out of power for the first time in fifty years.  The only bullets left in their guns are negative attacks, and trotting out Bill Clinton to save Al.  But the public has been told by the Democrats that it’s “mean” to attack your opponent, so this will fail.  Live by the sword, die by the sword.  As for Bill, bring him on.  He’ll shore up California at the expense of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois.

Okay. So I was a little optimistic about a decisive Bush victory.  Don’t count on me to get the point spread right, but I can usually tell you which team will win.  And in politics, as we were about to find out, it only takes one more vote than the other guy to get the victory.  That, of course, assumes that we know what the meaning of “is” is, or in this case, whether we can tell a hanging chad from a pregnant or dimpled one.  Harry was closer to the mark when he predicted “stay tuned, this race could be decided by my son’s absentee ballot.”

Unfortunately for Harry, his son wasn’t in the military, so the absentee ballot issue didn’t exactly work in his candidate’s favor.  But then again, even back in 2000 the people could see through the Liberal lie-of-the-day, better known as Democratic Party talking points.  When Clinton faced Dole, a genuine war hero who was severely wounded in battle, we were told that this “detail” shouldn’t factor into our vote.  Not only that, the economy was roaring (thanks to the Reagan tax cuts, and Clinton turning a blind eye to the dubious business practices of Enron, Global Crossing, and the dot.com mania for fear of bursting the bubble.  It took a Republican president — George Bush — to go after these crooks, not that you’d know it by the way Dan Rather reported the story). 

As long as things looked good domestically, and the Arabs confined their attacks to Israeli schoolchildren and the occasional U.S. warship or foreign embassy, character didn’t matter.  Who cared if Clinton dodged the draft?  It’s not my kids being threatened by terrorism, and besides, my IRA grew by 20 percent last year.  That was the Democrat message.

But fast forward to 2004 when AWOL-Bush had the temerity to stand on the same stage with war hero John Kerry.  Many of you may not know this, but John Kerry served in Viet-Nam and won five purple hearts and some other medals defending our country while George Bush got drunk and evaded his military duty.  That became an important reason to support Kerry; that plus he voted for key legislation before voting against it. 

Even without the clownish, Keystone-cops manner in which he ran his campaign holding him up to public ridicule, the American public saw through the vacuous logic Liberal Democrats employed to promote their guy and re-elected Bush convincingly.  Convincingly, that is, unless you think Bush stole a hundred thousand votes in Ohio in between lying to the American public about WMD in Iraq, and taking remedial education courses at the local Washington, D.C. community college.

I concluded my October 24, 2000 email with my grand prediction for the years ahead.

Phil: It’s over, Harry.  And you know what the most fun will be?  When the Democrats lose in November, they’ll conclude it was because they weren’t LIBERAL enough!  2004 will look like 1964 when the Dems nominate a real left-wing nut (Like Hillary Rodham — she’ll drop the “Clinton”) and get slaughtered.  If Nader gets 5% of the vote in 2000 and earns matching funds in 2004, the rout will be even greater as he pushes Democrats even farther left. 

Yeah, okay, it was the tall goofy guy, not the shrill blonde, who got his clock cleaned in 2004.  But I think my point about Democratic Party strategy held up pretty well.  Those who lack core values also lack a sense of history.  Your wife is mad at you?  Try candy.  That didn’t work?  There’s a tennis bracelet she’s had her eye on. Still sleeping on the couch?  Maybe a romantic weekend getaway will do the trick?  These are all tactics, not apologies.  It matters whether the issue is your late night carousing, spendthrift ways, or failure to take out the garbage last night.  Liberal Democrats see only a superficial problem (the wife ain’t happy), and immediately go into strategy-mode to solve the “problem,” whatever it is.

The exit polls taken during the 2002 midterm elections seemed to suggest that the American public wanted leaders who viewed morality and religion as important values.  The Democrats reviewed this data, huddled for a few days, and then announced “hey, we’re moral and religious people too.”  They even managed to slip the words into their everyday speech to reinforce this fact to the American public.  “Mr. Chairman, I support your call to have a five minute restroom break in these hearings because it’s the moral and religious thing to do.” 

The Dems were stunned when the American public didn’t flock to their party as a result of professing their verbal support for these issues, while simultaneously voting against every piece of legislation designed to promote them.  It’s the same Liberal logic that says popular reaction to The Passion of the Christ was a fluke — but it did make a lot of money, so maybe there’s something to this after all.  So we’ll give the public what they want, more religious broadcasting like The Book of Daniel, a television show about an Episcopalian minister who's hooked on Vicodin, whose oldest son is gay, and whose daughter is arrested for selling drugs.  Oh, and there’s a lesbian couple thrown in at some point for good measure.

It’s certainly what I think about when I focus on religion.  Hollywood doesn’t have a clue, and Liberals don’t have a clue.  And since Hollywood and Liberals form two key components of the present-day Democratic Party, we begin to understand why they don’t have a clue either.  It’s not enough to say you’re honest, conservative, moral, religious, etc.  You actually have to be honest, conservative, moral and religious; or when speaking about the policy arena, you have to actually promote policies and objectives that further these issues.  On a personal basis, I couldn’t care less whether Hillary Clinton fudges the value of her charitable deductions by writing off Bill’s old underwear at $2 a pop, goes to church every Sunday, condones Bill’s philandering as part of a marriage of convenience, or watches Lawrence Welch re-runs at night instead of The Osbournes.  As long as she’s not hurting anyone other than herself, it’s none of my business.  

I don’t even care if she introduces legislation to criminalize some of the things she does in her own personal life.  When prohibition was passed, people still drank.  Some of them were the same people who allegedly supported the Constitutional amendment in the first place.  Such behavior may make them hypocrites, but it doesn’t negate the fact that they passed a law, and were subject to the same fines or imprisonment as everyone else who broke that law.  It’s their actions in the public sector that matter, not their hollow words of support or opposition. 

This is what Liberal Democrats never seem to grasp.  Bill Clinton’s success in office was due to his ability to attach some real action to his words of support for mainstream issues — NAFTA, welfare reform, etc.  He didn’t believe in any of this stuff for a moment, but he knew that without public deeds, his “support” for free trade, welfare reform, and other issues important to the majority of voters wouldn’t have gotten him re-elected.  

Clinton, in effect, adopted the core values of most Americans as a substitute for having any of his own, and through a “triangulation strategy” developed by Dick Morris, held onto political power.  In a similar way, the Democrats regained power in the House and Senate in 2006 by doing the same thing.  Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed went into hiding in the weeks before the election, and the party put up even more conservative candidates against several key conservative incumbents to tip the balance of power.  Dissatisfied with Bush on immigration policy or the way the war in Iraq is being portrayed by the media?  No problem.  You can vote for the Democrat.  He likes guns, Jesus and salutes the American flag just like you!  And while you cast those votes, don’t think too much about the fact that his/her election will put Nancy and Harry in power, who have a decidedly different take on these issues, while your freshman Congressman or Senator will warm the back benches waiting to be told how to vote.

But returning to the 2000 election, Gore wasn’t smart (or devious) enough to do the same thing, so he — and later Kerry — lost to a man who had no such trouble identifying and acting upon his core values.  In this regard, Bush had the added advantage of not just implementing others’ core values, but actually implementing his own, which mirrored the majority of Americans today.  Where Bill Clinton needed Dick Morris to craft an appropriate strategy for him to first select, and then act upon, individual core-value issues, Bush doesn’t need a focus group to tell him which policy option to pursue.  Al Gore was too busy re-inventing himself on a daily basis to have any real core to guide his actions — whether they were his, yours, mine, or someone other’s.  And by the time Kerry ran against Bush in 2004, George Soros and Moveon.org had already hijacked the Democratic Party.  It didn’t matter what Kerry did or didn’t believe.  If he wanted the funds to run his campaign, he’d have to adopt the policy objectives his benefactors gave him.

As I wrote to Harry in October 2000:

Phil: Like it or not, the country is basically conservative.  Clinton ran as a “new Democrat,” and Gore is trying to pitch the line that he’s “the real conservative” — to the laughter of most of the people.  By contrast, GW hasn’t run around saying that he’s the “real liberal” in the campaign.

You guys made a serious mistake by misunderestimating Bush.  It’s one thing to call him stupid.  It’s another to believe that he really is.  The guy is cleaning Al’s clock, and there’s no way to recover at this late date.  Of course, I could always be wrong.  But I’m not.

But I was wrong — at least about it being over.  Harry had written me back chiding my “histrionics” for predicting that the Democrats would be completely out of power for the first time in 50 years.  He expected a gain of between seven and fifteen seats in the House, and a pick-up of three Democratic seats in the Senate.  History was on his side, Harry contended, citing the steady loss of Republican House seats since the earth-shattering 1994 midterm Congressional elections.

So I offered to place a bet on the outcome of the election: a hundred dollars on each race — President, House, and Senate.  If the Dems swept all three like Harry predicted, I’d write him a $300 check.  If the Republicans swept all three, or if control of the three was split, we’d pay off accordingly.

It was about this time that Harry revealed a hitherto unknown (to me) personal core value of not gambling.  It would be a gentleman’s bet, with only our respective pride at stake. The Gore forces were already blaming Ralph Nader for Gore’s impending loss, and Gore was finally figuring out that having Bill Clinton campaign for him did as much harm as good.  The current cover of Esquire Magazine featured a “Monica-view” crotch shot of the man Algore had called “the greatest U.S. President.”  Even Gore’s own designated spokesman on the morning talk shows wouldn’t repeat that phrase, saying only that Clinton had “made a contribution” to history.  

I was feeling pretty good about things as we got into November.  Even CNN was starting to report that Bush was ahead of Gore, and had a lot of momentum compared to Gore’s floundering campaign.  Harry and I traded a few more jibes and barbs about the strengths and foibles of our respective candidates while preparing for the November 7 showdown, when a last minute smear by the Gore team about Bush’s DUI conviction changed everything.  Harry wrote to me about the “damn self-righteous hypocrite” I was supporting, and I not-so-delicately reminded him that it was a former delegate to the Democratic National Convention who just happened to stumble across the story on November 2 and immediately leaked it to the press.  Like Louie in Casablanca, I was sure that the Gore was shocked, shocked, mind you, to learn of the DUI conviction.  There was undoubtedly no coordination between Gore’s campaign and the last minute ad hoc smear, just a fortuitous coincidence.

Now Harry was feeling good enough about Gore’s prospects to ask me if I wanted odds on the $300 bet.  I wrote back telling him that I was happy to see him accept my offer.  The friendly bantering had a sharp edge on both sides, however.  Where Harry thought he’d scored a great debating point, I returned the salvo with the statement that:

Phil: I made [this bet] in all seriousness, and I’m assuming from our response that you now think the sleaze attack on Bush will result in you winning at least two of the three categories.  I still think GW will prevail, but I won’t rub your nose in it and give you odds.  It’s still a straight win-lose proposition.  Of course, if you’re just being rhetorical (like most good liberals, it’s the thought that counts, not the actual follow-through), I’ll give you one final chance to back out.

That was the last time Harry ever mentioned gambling.   The election was going to be closer than I thought, but I was still confident of a solid Bush victory.

My brother Dan and I bought a six-pack of beer and settled in front of the TV set at my
house a couple of days later to watch the election results with me, an ongoing family tradition of ours, while Harry did the same in Florida.   Dan and I were absolutely convinced that Bush would win, though as the night drew on we found it to be a real nail biter.  For some reason every time Gore took a state, the Voter News Service immediately credited him with a win.  When Bush carried a state, it took an hour or so to make the call.  The margins of victory for both candidates were about equal in their respective wins, but it always took longer for the press to acknowledge a Bush victory than it did for Gore.  Nevertheless, as the race closed in on Florida, the “Big Mo” seemed to be on Bush’s side, and I was still confident of a win. 

Little did my brother and I know that three beers apiece was hardly enough to get us through one of the most tumultuous political events in our lifetime.

Look for the next chapter coming soon — “Election Day Arrives, and Arrives, and Arrives.”