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The Big Debacle
by Joseph C. Hinson
Wednesday
November 8, 2000

Suddenly Bill Clinton winning with 43 percent of the vote in a legitimate three man race is looking a lot better. For the first time in my life and the lives of a lot of us, the presidential election is all but tied some 24 hours after the last poll closed. Gore has more of the popular vote and, as I write this, more of the electoral vote. However, the race is all but tied as Florida basically tries to get their shit together.

Basically it comes down to this -- whoever wins Florida moves into the White House next January. The other fellow hopefully goes back to Texas.

Yes, I said it. I hope Gore wins. My heart was with Harry Browne but logic and common sense dictated that he would not play a pivotal role in this election. So we go to a race where we can only hope the lesser of two evils win.

I have to say, however, that as I watched Jeb Bush's press conference this afternoon, I got the distinct feeling that the wrong son of George the Elder was running. It's one thing not to be the smartest man in your college graduating class to run for leader of the free world, but when you're the least smartest man in your family, that's another matter entirely.

Ah, but George the Younger knows how to raise money from his daddy's rich friends.

But now this rant is sounding a lot like the last few I've written.

Back to last night, it will be interesting to see how this thing plays out. There are so many variables that it's almost pointless to even try. But here I go --

Gore wins the popular vote, but Bush the electoral college:

We get a president with shit for brains while Gore plans his next move. He didn't exactly lose the election out right, so he has to be considered the front runner for the Democrats in 2004. Of course, Hillary Clinton, the new senator from New York, throws another wrench into things, but let's cross those bridges should we come to them.

Bush wins the popular vote, but Gore the electoral collage:

Al Gore goes to Washington not with a mandate, but rather with the slimmest margin of victory in many years. Couple that with a Republican controlled Congress and we're likely to get four years of gridlock in the Beltway. In other words, the norm.

Gore wins the popular vote and the electoral college:

Limbaugh spews his paranoid-delusional bullshit about how "the liberals" stole the election and how we are becoming a Socialist country.

Bush wins the popular vote and the electoral college:

Limbaugh spews his paranoid-delusional bullshit about how "the liberals" almost stole the election and how we were becoming a Socialist country until W. rode in on his white horse.

Hmm. White horse. Interesting symbol to use in regards to George W.

Somehow, I never thought that two weeks after I started this rant, we still would not know who the next president is going to be. A lot has happened since the election. And there is a lot I do not understand about what is going on. To be honest, I have not paid close attention to this since maybe the Thursday after the election. See. I have a job. And a life. Well, I have a job anyway. And that job has been keeping me pretty busy preparing for the holiday season. I was also preparing for the district manager's visit. But now I'm getting away from the point of this rant.

Suffice it to say, I've not been keeping up with the whole sordid mess.

Here's what I do know. The next president, whoever he may be, is going to have a hell of a hard time getting anything done. He won't have been elected with a mandate to say the least. And it's possible that he won't be elected with a majority of the popular vote. I mean, if W. wants to be president bad enough, maybe he should be allowed. If he wants to take that oath of office with the clear appreciation that if everyone who meant to vote for Gore actually did vote for Gore, then I say we let the rich boy get his way. Don't make yourself at home though, because you'll only be in the White House for four years. It's that simple.

For that matter, the same may be said of Gore. But I think that clear thinking allows most of us to see things from his perspective. He should be president-elect now. Regardless of the ballots, I do not think that anyone really believes all those old people in Florida really wanted Pat "the Nazi lover" Buchanan to be the next president.

But at the same time, they did vote for him. Forget for a moment that they didn't mean to. What do they expect us to do? Vote over?

See. There are endless stories at work here. And I'm not sure any of them have a happy ending. But one story that somehow gets lost in this is something that I think should be crystal clear. While the pundits are talking about the historical perspective of this election, how it's the smallest margin separating two men since 1960, what they're not saying is what I think the American people were really voicing. And it's simple. Instead of not being able to decide which man to vote for, I think what we should take from this is that we didn't want either of them. I tend to think that people were voting for the party, not the man. This goes against what most polls show however. But it's the only way I make sense of this election.

And I must wonder: if people didn't think the two boys running for president were qualified before this quagmire, has their actions since really changed anyone's mind?

On the flip side though, one must wonder why, if America didn't want either of these two idiots in Washington, did the third party candidates not get more of a share of the vote? I honestly feel that if Harry Browne had gotten a reasonable amount of airtime on the major networks, that he would have pulled a greater share of the percentage. And with all the hype over Ralph Nader and the Green Party, one must wonder why he was barely able to capture one fifth of the vote that Perot got in 1992. Perot was a fucking nut job. Of course, he had an ass of money.

Of course as I write this, that begs the question: If Ross Perot can get nineteen percent of the national vote, why can't Steve Forbes get at least that in the Republican primaries? Perot is insane; Forbes has crazy eyes. Hmm. That could go either way.

Of course, I am getting off point here. And while I'm not sure what the point of this rant should be, let me make it up as I go along. No matter who is crowned president, my life won't change much. Nothing will be accomplished in Washington. Meanwhile, I've just recently started a new job that I really like. Since I started a little over two months ago, I got a raise, then a promotion and now another raise. I also have a daughter that might be born before we know who the winner is in this race. And my son continually amazes me with every new thing he does.

So I say we give this election to Bush. And get your Harry Browne 2004 bumper stickers ready. Maybe the Libertarians can get one percent of the vote next time.

Is this fucking thing not over yet? Jesus H. Christ. I feel like I'm watching a soap opera where the storylines keep going and going and going.....

I got something in an e-mail the other day that I thought interesting. My sister sent it to me, but I'm not sure where she got it from. I'd e-mail her and ask. But she wouldn't reply until tomorrow and after more than three weeks, I think I may be almost ready to post this here rant.

Of course, closer perusal of the e-mail tells me where it came from:

John P. Deever
Publications Program Assistant Editor
ISAR: Initiative for Social Action and Renewal in Eurasia
1601 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite #301
Washington, DC  20009

I'm not sure if this came from his desk or if he found it somewhere on line. (That's one thing about the internet. You never know where the information you are looking at really came from. For instance, most of my rants are taken verbatim from some deaf kid's web site from Nowhereville, Montana. I figure he'd never know.)

But as I was saying, the e-mail:

Imagine we are in Africa

A history professor from Uppsala University in Sweden called to tell me about an article she had read in which a Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should study this event closely for it shows that election problems are not only a third world phenomenon:

1. Imagine that we read of an election occurring in a third world country in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister, who was himself the former head of that nation's spy network.

2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but stood to win based on a holdover (electoral college) from the nation's past.

3. Imagine that he claimed victory despite several local governments saying that they weren't yet confident about their own vote totals.

4. Imagine that the self-declared winner's victory turned on disputed votes that were cast in a province governed by his brother.

5. Imagine that the provincial official in charge of ruling on those votes (the Secretary of State) was also the provincial campaign manager of the self-declared winner - ruling on the outcome of his or her own campaign.

6. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate, but the campaign manager didn't want those ballots to be reconsidered.

7. Imagine that members of the nation's most despised race turned out in record numbers to vote in near universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy.

8. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most despised race said they were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother, while no members of the majority race reported being stopped.

9. Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and that the self-declared winner's margin was only 327 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines' margin of error.

10. Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party nonetheless opposed a more careful manual inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.

11. Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor of a major province, had the worst human rights record (by international standards regarding child welfare and executions) of any province in his nation, and led the nation in executions by a factor of 4.

12. Imagine that those executions were skewed 14:1 toward that most despised minority race.

13. Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded people to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation.

Any questions?

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P.S. There would have been a couple of jpgs with this rant, but my connection was bad at the time, so I gave up. This rant has been delayed long enough anyway. Besides, who gives a rat's ass?