December 8, 2000

I don’t talk about political issues very often with friends or colleagues. I’ve found it’s an exercise in futility that can lead to hurt feelings and long-term grudges. So I’ve avoided discussing the ongoing mess in Florida as best I can, except to continually say I’m sick of hearing about it, which I am. As a result, very few people know where I stand on the political graph.

That will end now. I’m a liberal Democat. I have been ever since I was old enough to form my own opinions on issues. I believe in affirmative action, a woman’s right to choose, reasonable gun control, and lending a helping hand to struggling people across the world.

My parents differed from one another (Dad was a Democrat, Mom is a Republican, following their families), but they never urged their individual views upon me. After trying to defend my opinions in college (my best friends weren’t liberal arts majors, but engineers, so it wasn’t a case of preaching to the converted), I slowly learned to keep my mouth shut. I’m not an arguer or debater; it just isn’t in me to get hot and bothered over these issues.

It hasn’t always been this way. Karen, my wife, and I discuss politics fairly frequently, but we agree on almost everything. (If anything, she may be more liberal than I.) I allowed myself a few debates as a high schooler attending Presidential Classroom at American University in Washington, D.C. in 1979, but they usually trailed into a series of insults against Ronald Reagan (an easy target at the time). Four years later, attending A.U. again for something called Washington Journalism Semester, I struck up a friendship with a young lady from Minnesota who was pretty much my right-wing equivalent. This developed into a correspondence for many years (and the fact she was absolutely gorgeous had nothing to do with it – well, almost nothing), discussing politics and other issues. Although our views were diametrically opposed, we both agreed early on we would never agree on much, and wound up listening to each other far more as a result, sometimes surprising each other with our open-minded views.

This brings me back to Florida. It’s apparent no one wants to listen to each other here (including me, I suppose; I’ve shut off the radio and avoided television news for the most part); we’d rather scream “Count all the votes!” and “Get out of Cheney’s house!” to one another. (I feel both sides are wrong here; it seems ridiculous to nitpick over a chad with a slight indentation when there’s no way of knowing how that particular voter really intended to vote, and Dick Cheney has no right to the vice-presidential mansion until January 20, even if he had been elected unanimously across the country.)

The fact is, of course, Florida will never get a completely accurate count. Take all the thoughts about pregnant chads and absentee ballots and whatnot out of the equation, use the current difference between the two candidates (537 votes out of over 5,000,000 cast), and realize the difference is 1/100 of 1 percent of the vote – a statistical dead heat, far more so than any pre-Election Day poll. Given a slight margin of error of, let’s say, .05 percent of the votes counted inaccurately to begin with, it’s possible Bush’s lead is far more commanding than we think, or Gore actually did win.

I don’t blame Gore for pressing his case, nor do I blame Bush for pressing in the opposite direction – after all their working leading to the election, it would hardly make sense to toss in the towel. (The folks protesting outside Gore’s residence in Washington, however, need to do something constructive with their lives.) I do have some places I take issue with:

· The Electoral College. I believe it’s finally lost its purpose. It was one thing in 1787 to conceive of the system when the Founding Fathers wanted to give a certain amount of separation to the individual states, but the country has clearly come together as one since then, and sees itself as a nation, not as a collection of nation-states. Those who cite the Founding Fathers as an untouchable source of genius must realize much of the Constitution was written as compromise to avoid long haggling (like we have today), and that’s what amendments to the Constitution are for. One person, one vote, throughout the country, and this mess would have been solved a long time ago.

· Florida. It’s not clear to me there was an organized movement to deprive African-Americans of their right to vote, but it is clear there were voting irregularities throughout the state, the punch-card voting system is full of flaws, and the elected and appointed officials who should inspire confidence have instead repulsed many within the state and without. (And before someone mentions this is just like Illinois being stolen from Richard Nixon’s column in 1960, a simple check of the electoral vote will remind everyone Nixon still would have lost the election even if he did carry the state.) I personally plan to avoid the state and all businesses within it for an indefinite length of time. (I don’t know how this will affect my plans to go to the Kane Country Cougars’ ballgames next year; they’re a Florida Marlins farm team.) Indefinite can be a long, long time for me; I can count the number of Exxon stations I’ve used since the Valdez incident on one hand and have a few fingers left over.

· Ralph Nader. In The New Yorker, Roz Chast hit the nail on the head with a bunch of mock-thank you cards to Nader, ending with the sentiment “Way to go, jerk” or words to that effect. Nader’s ultimate goals weren’t terribly dissimilar from Gore’s (and anyone who thought Gore’s platform was identical to Bush’s is either blissfully ignorant or stubbornly so), but Nader made a point of making Gore a specific target for his ire. He failed on all counts: the Green party (which has several platform points Nader didn’t agree with at all) failed to garner five percent of the vote, thus failing to get matching funds, and he gained the enmity of enough Democrats to make sure he’s a marginalized figure for a long, long time. (The Republicans weren’t listening to him anyway.) And consider what would happen if Nader stayed out of Florida: assume of his 96,000 votes, a third don’t vote at all or vote for other third-party candidates, and the rest between Gore and Bush 52-48 (and that’s certainly lowballing it). That’s enough for Gore to win by about 750 votes.

Ultimately, the person who wins the job is not important. The House is nearly a 50-50 split, and the Senate is an even 50-50 split. The two sides are so angry at one another it looks like another four years of very little substantive legislation passing anyway. What this whole mess will mean is no one has an excuse to say, “My vote means nothing.” If you really care about your future, you’ll vote every chance you get. From the lowliest municipal election to the presidency, your opinion and vote can make all the difference.