Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [10]
True enough: if the ballots proved that Gore had won—which they eventually would—then I guess that would tend to dampen the country’s feelings of legitimacy about a Bush presidency.
In their decision, the Court used the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment—the same amendment they’ve loudly disclaimed when used by blacks over the years to halt discrimination based on race—to justify the theft. Because of the variation in the recount methods, they argued, voters in each district weren’t being treated equally, and therefore their rights were being violated. (Funny, but only the dissenters on the court mentioned that the antiquated voting equipment found disproportionately in poor and minority Florida neighborhoods had created an entirely different—and far more disturbing— —inequality in the system.)
Eventually the press got around to conducting their own recounts of the votes, doing their best to spin the jumbled ball of public confusion into orbit. The headline in the Miami Herald read: “Review of ballots finds Bush’s win would have endured manual recount.” But if you read the entire story, buried deep inside was this paragraph: “Bush’s lead would have vanished if the recount had been conducted under the severely restrictive standards that some Republicans advocated.... The review found that the result would have been different if every canvassing board in every county had examined every undervote ... [Under] the most inclusive standard [that is, a standard that sought to include the true will of ALL the people] Gore would have won by 393 votes.... On ballots that [suggested] a fault with either the machine or the voter’s ability to use it ... Gore would have won by 299 votes.”
I did not vote for Al Gore, but I think any fair person would conclude that the will of the people in Florida clearly went his way. Whether it was the counting debacle or the exclusion of thousands of black citizens that corrupted the results, there is little doubt that Gore was the people’s choice.
There was perhaps no worse example of the wholesale denial of the right of each voter to have his vote properly counted than in Palm Beach County. Much has been made of the “butterfly ballot,” which made it easy to vote for the wrong person because candidates’ names and punch holes were crammed unevenly onto facing pages. The media went out of its way to point out that the ballot was designed by one of the county’s election commissioners, a Democrat, and then approved by the majority-Democrat local board. What right did Gore have to complain if his own party was responsible for the faulty design of the ballot?
Had anyone bothered to check, they would have discovered that one of the two “Democrats” on the committee—the ballot’s designer, Theresa LePore—had actually been a registered Republican. She switched her affiliation to Democrat in 1996; then, just three months after Bush seized office, she resigned as a Democrat and switched her voter registration to Independent. No one in the press bothered to question what was really going on.
Thus, the Palm Beach Post estimates that more than 3,000 voters, mostly elderly and Jewish, who thought they were voting for Al Gore ended up punching the wrong hole—for Pat Buchanan. Even Buchanan went on TV to declare that no way in hell did those Jewish voters vote for him.
On January 2 0, 2 001, George W. Bush, positioned with his junta on the Capitol steps, stood in front of Chief Justice Rehnquist and took the oath that Presidents take at their inaugurations. A cold and steady rain fell over Washington throughout the day. Dark clouds obscured the sun, and the parade route, usually jammed with tens of thousands of citizens all the way to the White House, was eerily bare.
Except for the 20,000 protesters who jeered Bush every inch of the way. Holding signs denouncing Bush for stealing the election, the rain-soaked demonstrators were the conscience of the nation. Bush