Lingering doubtfuls

The postmortem of the undead

By Barry Crimmins

THE PROBLEM WITH most elections is that somebody wins. So much for that problem. That we had no presidential winner on Election Night didn't really bother me. One lame president at a time is plenty. Besides, I don't believe in presidents, just Yoko and me. On Election Day, I ignored the dire warnings of mealy-mouthed liberals and voted for Ralph Nader in Ohio, a battleground state. I felt clean and noble and proud of myself. Vote hope, not fear, eh, Yoko?

My Era of Good Feeling lasted less than a day. An old culprit ended it.

Richard Nixon is like herpes: just when you think he's gone, he flares up again. Not even his death ended Nixon outbreaks. So when Republicans started saying Gore should emulate Nixon -- who conceded in 1960 rather than challenge the results in Cook County, Illinois -- the enemy of my enemies became my friend. I was for Gore -- but just until this mess was over.

I have no doubt Nixon kept his mouth shut in '60 to sidestep exposing some Nixonian fraud or scandal even worse than anything that went on in Cook County. When the R's invoked the late prez, I had to take this personally. I wasn't alone.

By Friday afternoon, the cost of Campaign 2000 was written all over George W. Bush's face. A stress boil, undoubtedly the first payment due to Bush strategist Satan for his work in Florida, drew attention above the Texas governor's collar, an area millions of voters had failed to consider just three days earlier.

There was disagreement as to whether the boil, six times the size of Bush's brain but only twice as competent, marked the spot from which an alien or the Antichrist would emerge. But everyone concurred that if the pus-laden Goliath continued to expand, the next photo op would have to be held in the Astrodome.

Even at this grave moment in American history, it was hard to take anything this silly man from Texas said seriously. But the gist of his remarks about the undecided election filtered through: "Surrender, Dorothy!"

Unfortunately cast in the role immortalized by Ms. Garland is the aforementioned Al Gore, a man so shifty he isn't even from his own home state. Gore's dad was a senator from Tennessee, and Al grew up in Washington -- thus the half-hearted bid to win his "home" state and its 11 electoral votes. Tennessee could have put him over the top in that ancient safeguard against direct American democracy, the Electoral College. Early Wednesday morning we knew it hadn't.

Florida was a different story. Gore was there throughout the fall and ended the campaign with a Tampa rally early Tuesday. Well, he thought he ended the Florida campaign in Tampa Tuesday morning. As I write this, Florida is still being contested at the ballot box, in the courts, in the streets, and in the media.

The standoff involves the invalidation of the last shred of American democratic dignity because it was found to have 19,000 or so extra punch-holes in it. As a result, the presidential election may be decided by Jewish people accidentally voting for a man who is soft on Nazis.

During his run for president, Bush promised the American people to return ethics to Washington. If stealing the state his brother Jeb governs is all it takes for him to keep his promise, it's a sacrifice he appears happy to make.

As soon as he selected Dick Cheney as his chaperone/running mate, any notion that W. was his own man was replaced by the understanding that this was Daddy's campaign. On the Florida front, Poppy's old auxiliary president, James Baker, and a team of GOP ground troops spout impatient, condescending rhetoric. "The nation needs to move forward." "The United States shouldn't be dragged through all this muck just because Al Gore doesn't want to face electoral facts."

It's appropriate that in the election that won't die, the Texas governor has surrounded himself by the politically undead. His "dream team" of advisers consists of Baker, Cheney, and war criminal emeritus Henry Kissinger. Of the three, only Kissinger has yet to demand Gore's sword, and that's only because he's been laid up by a heart attack. Who'd have thought him eligible?

But Baker et al. have been diplomatic compared to the Florida Republican man on the street. Snarls about Jesse Jackson's appearance at a West Palm Beach protest and signs advising DON'T CIRCUMCISE THE ELECTION! unmasked prejudices much more welcome in the GOP's big tent of bigotry than were the minority quislings who appeared in political drag at the GOP convention.

Still, the basic message from Republicans on the streets and in the suites has been "Gore is a sore loser!"

Until Sunday, few were discussing voting fraud, but a document urging improper use of absentee voting, signed by Jeb Bush and distributed by Republicans, was quoted in a report by Robert W. Neill Jr. of WebSiteDaily at http://websitedaily.badland.com/floridagate/.

So the battle over recounts has now expanded to darker issues, but there was good news for the R's on Monday: Unpresident-elect Bush's stress boil had begun to recede. Either that or there was an alien or the Antichrist loose in Texas. If he's smart, he won't head to Florida.

Nineteen thousand votes were disqualified because some people get confused when they arrive at the polls expecting to find a ballot but instead discover assembly instructions for a back-yard grill.

Should those people, and everyone else in pro-Gore Palm Beach County, be allowed another crack at voting? The Republicans say no and have a good argument: a re-vote is unprecedented; it would allow one county to go to the polls with full knowledge of how the rest of the country voted, and select the next president.

The Republicans should shut up there, but of course they haven't. They go on to say that if voters aren't smart enough to complete a ballot, that's their tough luck.

People who think beady-eyed Junior Bush, a man who is no Dan Quayle, should be president of the United States have a lot of nerve calling people stupid because they were confused by a confusing ballot.

ON SUNDAY night, I watched the O.J. Simpson mini-series on CBS and found it, compared to this week's political events, to be a nostalgic stroll through a more innocent age. It was Dem flack James Carville's appearance on Meet the Press that helped turn the Simpson saga into escapist fare for me. In a scathing indictment of Ralph Nader, Carville suggested that no Democrat should ever speak again with the Green Party's standard-bearer.

This from a man who is married to and has children with Republican strategist and noted reactionary talking head Mary Matalin. To James, it's fine to mate and raise children with vicious right-wing blowhards, but there is no way anyone should ever forgive Ralph Nader for introducing dozens of legitimate issues to a corrupt campaign.

Ever since the election, Nader has been labeled a spoiler. And Carville really piled on Sunday morning. Well, get this, Jimmy: you can't spoil what's already rancid.

Al Gore obviously agrees with Carville. He refused to confront Ralph in the debates, in part because he didn't want to give Nader the opportunity to seem lifelike and charismatic, but mostly because he didn't want the Green candidate to illustrate the dreadful political similarities between Bush and Gore.

The Gore campaign made almost no political hay of the well-documented sleaze that permeates Bush's private and public lives. Even George W. has acknowledged "youthful indiscretions" that by his own admission lasted until he was 40. Anyone who reads Molly Ivins knows about W.'s fleecing of family friends in bad oil deal after bad oil deal, and his looting of Texas taxpayers to build the Texas Rangers a new baseball stadium.

But instead of running against Bush, Al Gore and his people chose to smear Ralph Nader. Rumors circulated that Nader was gay and a Red. Come to think of it, maybe Nixon was a good role model for Al. The Gore camp threatened Green voters with the notion of what would happen to the judiciary under Bush. And they took away a lot of Ralph's votes in the process.

But how many of Nader's 97,000 Florida votes could have been Gore's if just once he'd gone after Bush with an honest assessment of the candidate's faults? And how many more would he have gained if he'd sided with Nader and the people on any number of crucial issues?

At the moment, I favor Gore because I don't think the thieving Republicans should be allowed to steal the election by accusing their opponents of thievery. If he survives, maybe Al will forget Carville's bad counsel and seek to restore the progressive wing of his party -- if only out of political expediency. Perhaps, but I doubt it.

A Bush presidency would be fine with me too, because it would be tainted as hell. Let the baby have his arsenic-laced bottle. The political ugliness would be a thing of beauty. And with both sides sniping away at one another, we might be able to shame them into some sort of campaign-finance reform. Then maybe the Dems would abandon the Democratic Leadership Committee's habit of Lewinskying Big Business and leave corporate whoredom on the capable knees of the Grand Old Prostitute.

For now, the corporate world has more influence on our government than all the voters combined. Politicians sell out to huge money to amass enough funds to mislead voters about their true identities. Just convincing people that Joe Lieberman is a Democrat cost the party in the low eight figures this year.

Debate commissions with corporate-sponsored events on multinational networks are happy to exclude anyone but brand-name candidates. Thus an entire presidential campaign passed without people knowing there are sensible alternatives on crucial issues.

NO MATTER how this shakes out, the power elite are already assured that the next president is a signed-on participant in the drug McCarthyism that is being used to destroy sacred freedoms. The search-and-seizure laws have turned police departments from protecting and serving to looting and pillaging. Cops confiscate property so shamelessly these days that they'd make the Sheriff of Nottingham blush.

Both finalists claim to care about the environment, but neither's ever met a military appropriation he wouldn't sign. Without doubt, the gravest threat to the environment is our rotting stockpile of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Did either major candidate mention this inevitable nightmare even once?

Then there's the matter of humongous agribusiness and the litany of environmental, public-health, and animal-rights offenses it commits. All Al and W. know is that Big Agribiz checks always clear.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the sanctions that the Clinton administration carried over from the Bush administration. Saddam Hussein hasn't missed a meal or an aspirin as a result of this needless cruelty. But needless cruelty is the rule of the day, whether in Iraq, the Texas death chamber, or the homes (if they have them) of America's poor, who are losing food stamps and other minimal life-sustaining benefits as a result of Clinton/Gore's so-called welfare reform.

This fall, the big health-care debate concerned how to finance the overmedication of our seniors so that drug companies can continue to profiteer at the expense of the vulnerable elderly. If seniors really need drugs, they should be available for free in a single-payer national health-care system. But neither candidate would ever have the courage to work toward such sanity.

So even if my boy Al Gore wins Florida, we have already lost the election of 2000 save for the fact that Ralph Nader and thousands of committed Americans brought some idealism back to the campaign trail. With luck, the situation in Florida has opened some eyes, and I believe that if handled correctly it can signal the return of winning political progressiveness to the American scene.

Like I was saying to Yoko the other night: power to the people, right on!

Barry Crimmins is Boston's most fabled social commentator, now living in self-imposed exile in the Midwest.