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December 31, 2009

Good Riddance to Decade That Began With Theft of the Presidency

By John Nichols

It was the U.S. Supreme Court's unprecedented meddling in the presidential election process -" an intervention that would have horrified the founders of a republic that was supposed to enjoy a separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers -" made the Bush-Cheney interregnum possible.

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Reprinted from The Nation

The British press has taken to referring to the passing decade as "the Noughties" has made quite a big deal of trying to identify the political, economic and cultural trends of period from 2000 to 2009.

It is an amusing pastime that has some value, but only if we're focused on identifying the root cause of what made the Noughties such a miserable decade for the republic.

If we are serious about the task, there is not much mystery.

The original sin of the good-riddance decade came in December of 2000, when the United States Supreme Court intervened to stop a complete recount of the votes in Florida and then declared George Bush to be the president.

This extreme judicial activism was not merely a devastating assault on American democracy. It set in motion the Bush presidency, and with it the pathologies that the Bush-Cheney administration imposed on the country in the form of unnecessary wars, failed economic policies, assaults on civil liberties and crudely divisive and hyper-partisan governance.

Bush, Dick Cheney and aides are surely to blame for much of what ailed America during the 2000s, and for what will ail America for decades to come.

But it was the U.S. Supreme Court's unprecedented meddling in the presidential election process an intervention that would have horrified the founders of a republic that was supposed to enjoy a separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers made the Bush-Cheney interregnum possible.

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Bush, it must be remembered, did not win the popular vote nationally.

In fact, the American electorate favored Democrat Al Gore over Republican Bush by more than 540,000 votes.

Of course, because the United States has a convoluted electoral system that does not award the presidency to the candidate who wins the most votes, the contest came down to a fight between the Bush and Gore camps for Florida's decisive 25 Electoral College votes.

Florida ran a confusing and disorderly election on November 7, 2000, and then conducted a ridiculous review of the close result that followed no standards except those imposed by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Bush campaign co-chair.

When the Florida Supreme Court finally ordered a full and consistent recount of all 6.1 million ballots cast by the state's voters, the U.S. Supreme Court halted the process and then declared Bush the winner of Florida's electoral votes and the presidency.

The problem with this unprecedented move by a conflicted high court was that more Floridians went to the polls with the intention of electing Gore than Bush.

This is not some radical notion, not some conspiracy theory.

It is the reality that was evident to scholars of voting behavior from the start.

As University of California at Irvine political scientist Anthony Salvanto, who conducted some of the first and most exhaustive examinations of contested ballots, noted: "There's a pretty clear pattern from these ballots. Most of these people went to the polls to vote for Al Gore."

Salvanto was not an outlier.

Even the media consortium that tried -- after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the ensuing spike in presidential approval ratings -- to suggest a scenario under which Bush might have won produced more scenarios under which Gore would have won.

Media outlets that looked beyond the partisan spin to the reality of what the ballots revealed acknowledges as much.

As The Associated Press noted, "Under any standard that tabulated all disputed ballots statewide, however, Gore erased Bush's advantage and emerged with a tiny lead that ranged from 42 to 171 votes."

The Washington Post was even more blunt, stating that, "If there had been some way last fall to recount every vote -- undervotes and overvotes alike, in all 67 Florida counties -- former vice president Al Gore would be the White House."

The Palm Beach Post, which conducted its own review of the ballots and also participated in a review by a consortium of media outlets, concluded: "Uncounted ballots and voter confusion cost Gore the election."

Actually, that's not quite right.

The Supreme Court's blocking of the full and consistent recount that could have sorted through the confusion cost Al Gore an election. But the consequences were far greater for the republic, which lost a decade of its promise and possibility to the excesses and abuses of George Bush's illegitimate presidency.

Authors Bio:

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Online Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.

Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent. He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers.

Nichols is a frequent guest on radio and television programs as a commentator on politics and media issues. He was featured in Robert Greenwald's documentary, "Outfoxed," and in the documentaries Joan Sekler's "Unprecedented," Matt Kohn's "Call It Democracy" and Robert Pappas' "Orwell Rolls in his Grave." The keynote speaker at the 2004 Congress of the International Federation of Journalists in Athens, Nichols has been a featured presenter at conventions, conferences and public forums on media issues sponsored by the Federal Communications Commission, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Consumers International, the Future of Music Coalition, the AFL-CIO, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the Newspaper Guild [CWA] and dozens of other organizations.

Nichols is the author of the upcoming book The Genius of Impeachment (The New Press), as well as a critically-acclaimed analysis of the Florida recount fight of 2000, Jews for Buchanan (The New Press) and a best-selling biography of Vice President Dick Cheney, Dick: The Man Who is President (The New Press), which has recently been published in French and Arabic. He edited Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire (Nation Books), of which historian Howard Zinn said: "At exactly the time when we need it most, John Nichols gives us a special gift--a collection of writings, speeches, poems, and songs from throughout American history--that reminds us that our revulsion to war and empire has a long and noble tradition in this country."

With Robert W. McChesney, Nichols has co-authored the books, It's the Media, Stupid! (Seven Stories), Our Media, Not Theirs (Seven Stories) and Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy (The New Press). McChesney and Nichols are the co-founders of Free Press, the nation's media-reform network, which organized the 2003 and 2005 National Conferences on Media Reform.

Of Nichols, author Gore Vidal says: "Of all the giant slayers now afoot in the great American desert, John Nichols's sword is the sharpest."

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