The European press has been having a heyday with headlines that deride the astonishing havoc that has resulted from the American presidential elections. London's "Daily Mail" declared that it was a clown-like way to run a country and that the US was going to become the laughing stock of the world. "Die Presse" in Vienna declared that the elections were more reminiscent of what one expects from a "Banana Republic" than from the "country that claims to be the mother of all democracies." Rome's "La Repubblica" called it a "comedy of errors," "Il Corriere della Sera" entitled one of its editorials "The Great Impotence," and Turin's "La Stampa" headed one of its commentaries with "The Democracy Game."
Political cartoonists in Italy have been amusing themselves with variations on the theme of the American Seal and its Latin motto "E pluribus unum" (One made out of many). "Il Corriere" published the emblem with the American eagle sustaining Gore on one wing and Bush on the other with two heads sprouting from the bird of prey and the motto "E pluribus duo" (Two out of the many)! The cartoonist at "La Stampa" created a seal bearing a headless eagle with the motto "E pluribus nemo" (No one out of the many)!
Europeans love an opportunity to make fun of Americans. However, humor and envy aside, the more serious editorialists get beyond the catchy headlines that sell their newspapers. "Il Corriere's" Sergio Romano believes that if the present deadlock finishes in a judicial crisis, then it means that the anachronistic Electoral College system has broken down and is in need of repair.
Some of our own editorialists, like The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, decry the need to "scrap this system" that allows "the fate of a nation" to hang in suspense over an "arcane local electoral dispute." This is more a criticism of a system that permits each county of each state to design its own ballot and a call for a unified ballot format for the entire nation.
Nineteen thousand voters in Palm Beach County feel that they have been disenfranchised due to a confusing ballot layout. Most of those voters were probably supporters of Al Gore. However, I am sure that if the tables were turned, if the confusion on that ballot had been between Bush and Buchanon, the Republican Party would use all the means at its disposal to defend the basic rights of its constituents. They would call it their "moral" responsibility. The Republicans were appalled last year at the declining moral mores in this country that allowed its citizens to be indifferent to the sexual indiscretions of its president. Now they seem to feel that there is something immoral in the lack of indifference of the citizenry for the destiny of the vote they cast for their president.
Of all the opinions that I have heard and editorials that I have read, it is that written by Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, which most thoroughly examines all the consequences of the entanglement in which we find ourselves. On the one hand, he reminds us that a "scorched-earth strategy of winning the election at all costs could be too much for the nation to endure." On the other, he recalls: "as a people who celebrate voting rights as the cornerstone of democracy worldwide, we can ill afford to dismiss a bit of disenfranchisement here and there as par for the course." He concludes by warning that notwithstanding everyone's desire for closure and a name and face for the new American president, "the price of a premature closure might be a cloud of illegitimacy that we would long regret."
For La Stampa's Barbara Spinelli, "the Americans can allow themselves this extraordinary luxury - the luxury of roaming about in total perplexity, taking tons of time, mockingly postponing the moment that all the nation's of the planet are waiting for - because they have that granite foundation of certainties, of rules, under the torrents of indecision and turbulence. The solid ground that they have under their feet allows them the time to transmit some essential messages to the elite in command: the voters would like to have a head of state, but that doesn't mean that they have any strong convictions about who that leader should be."
We are living a very special moment in our country's history. A nation-wide lesson in civic responsibility is taking place that is without precedence and it is up to every citizen to take a stand according to his or her own conscious. Certainly, the present confusion is unsettling to the financial markets and the to citizens of the free world who have come to regard the President of the United States as their own.
This moment will pass, but what is important is that we take advantage of the lessons that it teaches us. For one, there seems to be little doubt that institutional changes are indeed in order. The country representing the world standard for democracy can no longer be burdened by a sentimental attachment to a system of counting votes that favors the federal powers of the state over popular sovereignty represented by the sum of every citizen's individual vote.
Secondly, a universal nation-wide ballot of the utmost simplicity must be designed for the office of the President. What the states and counties do with their other ballots is their business. And thirdly, some reflection is due not only about the technical flaws that brought on this quandary, but about the political environment that has brought about the exclusion of quality from the echelons of those who offer us their leadership.
I am not always a fan of "New York Times" columnist Maureen Dowd's predilection for flippancies, but she has made a few recent observations that ring with truth. We expect fervor in our presidential race. The stalemate produced by our vote is indeed a tepid answer to two lusterless alternatives. Americans didn't express a "decision" regarding their preference, but rather a "default" reflecting "the terrible extent to which we were dispirited by the choices."
My question is now as it was before the elections. Why is it that the greatest nation on earth is unable to come up with a candidate with the capability to inspire? The answer came quickly in a conversation with a friend and publisher in Washington. After last year's charade of public scrutiny of the private life of our country's first citizen, what "good" man would be willing to risk the raking of himself and his family over the pangs of such dissection?
November 2000
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