Bush vs. Gore: Ten Years Later
10 years ago, the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore pulled the plug on "The Election That Wouldn't End."
The mainstream media called it “The Seinfeld Election”, the “show about nothing.” An election at a time when the Internet 1.0 fueled-economy was considered by some to be “recession-proof”, after the Cold War but before the War on Terror. An election so uninspiring to the great American middle that barely half of all eligible adult voters even bothered to show up, marking (along with 1996 before it) the lowest postwar electoral turnout in history. "Who cares? It doesn't make any difference anyway. What-ever!"
What a difference a decade makes. As we look back on the 10th anniversary of what is – no matter which side you were on – perhaps the Supreme Court’s most controversial and important decision this side of civil rights and Roe vs. Wade, one can't help but appreciate the ironies. The "silent majority" may have been fat 'n happy (or just suffering from ennui) in ways that are near-unimaginable in today's Age of Uncertainty, but the "f*ck-nutsville" antics (as Rahm might say) of both the liberal and conservative bases turned Election 2000 into "performance art" worthy of Lady Gaga or Madonna.
Even as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter continued the narrative that Bill Clinton was a flag-burning hippie radical from the '60s, the Democratic party's base was telling a very different story. After NAFTA, near-total deregulation of the media, welfare reform, Glass/Steagall's repeal, legalized credit-default swaps and derivatives, the globalized 1999 G8 summit in Seattle, Defense of Marriage, and reappointing Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan (while pointedly ankling Brooksley Born and Robert Reich), the hard-left was ready to scream. Especially after Clinton failed to add (open) gays in the military and health care reform to his sizable tally.
No surprise then that the McGovern/Jerry Brown set almost swooned at the thought that their old boyfriend from back in the '60s, their first love, was finally coming back for them, as Ralph Nader (and Winona LaDuke) entered the fray. They further energized themselves with "D2K" and "R2K" convention protests in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, featuring primitive-art posters, cries for "Justicia Social", and blistering anti-global rhetoric. Stars like Barbra Streisand and Alec Baldwin even tossed that they might leave the country if it was stupid enough to elect someone as 'evil' as Bush.
On the "right" side of the street, fundies spent the 1990s watching in helpless horror as TV, movies, music, and threats of partial-birth abortion and gay marriage ensured the culture slipping even further from their grasp. Frosting the cake was Bill Clinton's total, in-your-face victory over those who would have impeached him for his "sexual immorality." As the decade ended, the mood on the Religious Right was near apoplexy – the notorious John Hagee accused Hillary Clinton of practicing “Witchcraft in the White House” on television, while their founding mother Phyllis Schlafly summarized things in a 1999 essay bluntly titled, “I’m Fed Up!” But never fear -- the ultimate Culture Warrior, Pat Buchanan, had re-formed Ross Perot's Reform Party, and added an almost RuPaul level of camp when he nominated a black woman (and hard-right activist) named Ezola Foster as his most valuable VP. (Foster did the near-impossible of topping Buchanan’s provocative statements about the Holocaust, when she said that "her people" were better off under the iron hand of Jim Crow himself than they were under LBJ’s Great Society.)
Amidst this already Camp Snoopy atmosphere, both Bush and Gore only added to the stand-up comedy, while pointedly avoiding content. One minute Bush was going to Bob Jones University, speaking Evangelical-ese, and talking to prominent neoconservatives. The next, he was kissing Oprah, sending perfumed notes to Log Cabin Republicans, and promising never to "nation build" or go to war without an up-front "exit strategy." Meanwhile, the famously stiff, prep-school educated Gore tried in vain to abandon his usual impersonation of a headache-prone Richard Nixon or Ed Sullivan, “preachin’” and “signifyin’” in Gospel churches (complete with hand gestures) and tossing word-salads that would make Sarah Palin cringe as he read flat, unaccented Spanish from the Teleprompter or lectern. And who can forget – no matter how much they might want to – his open-mouthed tongue-kiss of Tipper on the convention floor?
Now for the million-dollar question: If both parties' bases were this ready to burst a blood vessel when the “recession-proof” economy was in surplus -- and nobody had ever heard of rolling blackouts, Hurricane Katrina, "too big to fail", or Mohammed Atta -- what might happen if things actually took a turn for the worse?
The answer came swiftly on November 7, 2000, when the media learned that it didn't “just have egg on its face -- it had an omelet” (as Tom Brokaw humorously put it.) The Election That Wouldn't Die was supposed to finally be over, but the long national nightmare had only just begun. Behind Door #1, there was Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, with her garish makeup and fashion faux pas. Behind Door #2, there was Al Gore haughtily upbraiding Bush not to get "snippy" as Gore recanted his concession speech, to what Anna Quindlen said must have been Bush's "utter incredulity."
And just as both the Republican and Democratic establishments had feared (and as the third- and fourth-party supporters had dared hope), Nader and Buchanan did decide the election. Whichever way things went, the margin of disputed votes teetered between about 300 and 1000 in Florida. Nader won 97,000. Even Pat Buchanan toted up 3,000-plus votes just in Palm Beach (some of which may have been miscast by elderly voters confused by the infamous "butterfly ballot.") Black and Latino voters said that they had been racially profiled and harassed. I personally remember reading a report of an octogenarian, clearly suffering from Alzheimer's or a severe stroke, being led into a voting booth by his adult daughter and hand-guided to punch the ticket for (the candidate he thought was) Franklin Roosevelt, having reverted aloud to his youth during World War II.
It was an all-too-fitting end for the decade of OJ Simpson, Monica Lewinsky, and Jon Benet. What had been the Seinfeld Election had finally degenerated into Ricki Lake or Jerry Springer. The near-half of voters who'd stayed home finally realized the heart-attack horror of an election (and an electorate) this inconsolably divided by social class, region, and religion, but not until the patient was already being carried away in an ambulance, not until it was already too late. A London newspaper superimposed Gore and Bush on Forrest Gump-bodies and his park bench, with the caption "Elections Are Like a Box of Chocolates -- You Never Know What You're Gonna Get!", followed by "US Humiliated by Election Disaster."
After five interminable weeks of this mishugas, plus all the conniving courtroom theatrics of a classic Law & Order, on December 12, 2000, the only people left anymore who had the power TO actually decide things, decided them. As weeping and yelling protestors booed Bush's limousine at his inauguration a month later, with picket signs saying "Bush Stole the Election" and "Hail to the THIEF", the political calculus for both sides was clear. For the next full decade – from Cheney, Rove, Palin, and Rush to Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Maher, and Michael Moore, there would be no more uniting. Only dividing.
It was supposed to be a "Seinfeld election", where America could go blissfully along on auto-pilot, where the only people making noise were pesky far-right wingnuts and the "professional left." Yet it was the doctrinaire firebrands in both parties who were the biggest victors ever since, with the moderates on both sides soon silenced. (At least 2004 and 2008 set new modern records for voter turnout and participation, on all sides.) Perhaps the greatest lesson of Bush vs. Gore was something that great game-show philosopher Allen Funt might have said on a classic Candid Camera. That mayhem can strike "sometime, somewhere, someday when you least expect it" tomorrow -- no matter what things might look like today.