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Public wiser than pundits in post-election uproar

During the first several days after the election, many of America's leading pundits were very distressed. Some even appeared to be on the verge of freaking out as they vented major anxieties: It's upsetting that we still don't know who the next president will be! The financial markets could plunge! Other countries won't respect us!

Fortunately, cooler heads -- namely, the public -- prevailed. With the United States in its second post-election week while complicated legal proceedings unfolded in Florida, national opinion polls clearly indicated widespread patience rather than panic. Apparently, most Americans didn't mind waiting for final ballot tallies and court rulings -- despite all the agitation from media commentators frenetically projecting their own attitudes onto the body politic.

These happy days

"Public happiness," Hannah Arendt once wrote, "is not isolating, but shared. It is the happiness of being free among other free people, of having one's public faith redeemed and returned." Never have I known such intense public happiness. If the Lewinsky affair was good dirty fun, this is good clean fun. Walk down the street and you hear "Gore" or "Bush" or "Florida" on every gleeful lip.

Now that the supposedly democratic "mandate" is being reduced to farce, Americans are having their instinctive lack of faith in the political process rousingly vindicated. Everyone knows that what's true of Palm Beach county -- incompetent technology, human frailty, willful obstruction of inconvenient voters -- is true across much of the United States.

It’s not a recount -- it was actually a re-tally

AUSTIN -- Bliss it was in that very dawn to be alive. Of course, we all need to behave like grown-ups -- the fate of democracy, great principles and all the money that these people have spent are at stake here. But this episode also has the virtue of being incredibly entertaining, thus providing us with national drama headed for the history books.

Jokes are flying on the Internet. Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat have offered to mediate the election for us. Slobodan Milosevic called to suggest that Palm Beach County become an independent republic of Serbia. The late-night comics are in heaven.

The political high road is clear, for at least a while. Of course, Al Gore's camp was entitled to demand a recount in Florida. The race was so tight that the recount was triggered automatically under state law anyway. For George W. Bush's camp to sigh impatiently and pretend that the D's are out of line is ridiculous.

Why did 2.7 million greens stick with Nader?

Democrats rage against Ralph Nader for cutting into Al Gore's vote. They stigmatize his supporters as irresponsible spoilers. If it hadn't been for Nader, they say, Gore would have romped home in Florida, New Hampshire and still-contested Oregon, and thus captured the White House.

Insults about "irresponsibility" and "reckless sabotage" don't get us very far. What were the big issues for greens in Florida? The Everglades. Back in 1993, the hope was that Clinton/Gore would push through a cleanup bill to prevent toxic runoff from the sugar plantations south of Lake Okeechobee from destroying the swamp that covers much of south-central Florida. Such hopes foundered on a "win-win" solution brokered by sugar barons and the real estate industry and accepted by Clinton and Gore.

Arrogance of TV Networks: Compounding a national crisis

A few hours before dawn, the nation's TV networks foisted their second outrageous blunder of the night on the American people. After "calling" the state of Florida for Al Gore earlier in the evening, the same networks announced that George W. Bush had won Florida -- and the White House. With a typical flourish, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw declared: "George Bush is the president-elect of the United States."

But before the sun rose on the East Coast, the networks were correcting themselves again, acknowledging that Florida was too close to call. By then, the arrogance of the television networks had compounded a distressing specter: The Electoral College might end up giving the presidency to someone who came in second in the country's popular vote.

Twenty-four hours after the polls closed across America, the reporters and commentators on the airwaves and cable channels seemed to be reeling from the succession of extraordinary events. Surely, millions of Americans were also stunned, as if the previous long night had been a vivid and protracted bad dream.

The arch-Druid passes: David Brower, 1912-2000

Nature's mightiest defender in these United States died Sunday in Berkeley, Calif., 88 years after he entered the world in that same city. His life thus briefly intersected with that of the greatest green champion of the nineteenth century, John Muir, who died in 1914. Thus, the aged Muir and the infant Brower were both alive at the moment of an event that profoundly shaped the imagination of American environmentalists: the flooding of the Hetch-Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park in 1913.

The inundation of Yosemite's most beautiful feature taught Brower's generation of conservationists that without uncompromising defenders, the industrialization of the West would obliterate everything in its path; even the designation of a national park was no guarantee. As Brower famously put it, When they win, it's forever. When we win, it's merely a stay of execution.

But daddy, you said I could be president!

AUSTIN, Texas -- In the long view of history -- always a consoling perspective at a time like this -- the 2000 presidential campaign most likely will rank as a giant waste of time.

Our future depends on The Stuff They Wouldn't Talk About -- economic globalization, global warming, the spread of AIDS, the need for some social control of new technologies and the corruption of our political system. Al and Tipper Gore's big smooch got more ink.

Having set the proper tone of superiority here -- it is now obligatory for journalists to drip disdain on the democratic process as we assist in deforming it -- may I say that I'm mad as hell? Not only has this been a stupid campaign, but it has been a deceitful one.

Gore's reputation as a fibber and an exaggerator is apparently set in stone -- despite the fact that he never claimed to have invented the Internet (although he assisted at its creation), that he was in fact a model for the lead character in "Love Story" (the stiff), that he never claimed he had discovered Love Canal and that he did in fact have to work hard on his father's farm in Tennessee when he was a boy. That's the way it goes in Medialand.

New Democrats: Maybe the jig is up

The New Democrats may have outsmarted themselves.

A couple of months ago, the current Democratic Party leadership seemed to be firmly in control. The succession was orderly. The party's new ticket of "moderates" -- Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman -- gained momentum. If all went according to plan, President Lieberman would be wrapping up his second term in 2016.

The longstanding game plan kept boosting people who fervently embraced "the center." Why defend low-income mothers when you can brag about dumping them off the welfare rolls? Why make trouble for Wall Street when you can curry favor and rake in larger contributions? Why put a brake on the drug war when you can keep building prisons and filling them with more dark-skinned poor people?

Applauded by countless reporters and pundits, the New Democrats grabbed hold of the national party apparatus in 1992 and never let go. Journalists concluded that all the major policy issues within the Democratic Party had been settled. The mood was similar among most of the Democrats on Capitol Hill as they kowtowed to the party's hierarchy.

The poor kids are screwed again

AUSTIN, Texas -- In Texas, the state where you have a right to a lawyer who sleeps through your murder trial, we are familiar with life under George W. Bush's concept of justice for all.

The recent "Hey, a sleeping lawyer is still a lawyer" decision came from the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on a 2-to-1 decision agreed to by the ever-charming Judge Edith Jones, who was on the short list for the Supreme Court when Bush pere was president and will certainly be so again under Bush fils.

Under Judge Rhesa Hawkins Barksdale and Judge Jones' remarkable legal reasoning, "It is impossible to determine whether ... counsel slept during presentation of crucial exculpatory evidence, or during the introduction of unobjectionable, uncontested evidence." Therefore, they voted to fry the guy.

Actually, the top candidate for Supreme Court under Bush, who is looking for judges like Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, is Judge Emilio Garza, the Clarence Thomas of the Hispanic world (without any known sexual peccadilloes).

Get Nader!

A political culture is under siege. Hear the panic as the waters pour into Atlantis.

Jesse Jackson cries out that, "Our very lives are at stake." Paul Wellstone quavers that George W. Bush will "repeal the 20th century." Martin Peretz, owner of the Gore-loving New Republic, writes furiously (and foolishly) that, "Naderism represents the emotional satisfaction of the American left at the expense of the social and economic satisfaction of women, blacks, gays and poor people in America."

Back in 1992, Jackie Blumenthal, wife of White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, was asked why she and her husband were such rabid supporters of a con man from Arkansas called Bill Clinton. "It's our turn," she hissed at once, as though that settled the matter once and for all.

And so indeed it was: the turn of that whole class that had endured the 12 long years of Reagan/Bush time to take their rightful place in Washington. Of course, in terms of substantive change, America remained a one-party state, under center-right government.

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