Joe Lieberman committed to no endgame on all five talk shows, waiting serenely for the word from the same court that Friday bought him a bundle of time with the growling Washington Democrats. The vice-presidential candidate still has fight in him, but he's starting to look pretty pleased with himself that he's got a good job "either way."
For the Republicans, Bob Dole, lovable old veteran of both kinds of war, doing a statesman impression for the Sunday hosts. When pressed, he's a conveniently less involved player: "That's a call for Jim Baker and others. They won't consult with Bob Dole on that." Dole quotes extensively from the party line but sounds like an honest Republican and gentleman who's humble enough to riff mutteringly from "dimple or pimple or whatever" to "fold, spindle or mutilate." And sensible enough to poke a hole in the Texas hand-counting-law ironies: "If there's a recount in Texas," he told Wolf Blitzer, "I think that law should apply."
Dole's personal urgency and main party task was to plead for the rejected military voters, for the same understanding visage the Democrats were showing the Palm Beach oldsters. Lieberman, knowing a p.r. hurricane when he sees one (and perhaps thinking that this outcry, with 930 sitting as Bush's number, sprouted too late to bloom) was happy to agree with him. But when the talk turned to solutions, Lieberman would only indicate that Gore's offer of a statewide recount was still on the table. The alternative, an equally apocalyptic legal assault, was still on the table too, no matter what the state Supremes say.
Solutions. The Washington Senators are ready to end it, except for the unruly Chuck Hagel, who wants to hand-count 'em all. Democrat John Breaux and Republican Bill Frist, who's Bush's oracle on the Hill, want to let the Florida Supremes have the final say. Dole leans that way too, and is rooting for Thanksgiving. Democratic lefty Bob Kerrey thinks we need a blessing from Rehnquist to get on with our lives, and it's his party setting the pace of this discussion. The Republican solution, we know about. Nobody seems to want these two guys to do anything unpredictable, like make a deal.
Polls. A CNN poll puts Americans 43 percent with hand counts and 44 percent with Katherine Harris and the machines. Or maybe it was the other way around.
In the Hot Air: Republicans are disowning Jim Baker's invocation of market instability... The media is largely consigning reports of Democrat counting-mischief to the spin basket marked "R." As is Katherine Harris... Pundits are springing to the defense of the electoral college system, acknowledging that at the very least it's a firewall keeping the Florida Flu from spreading... Susan Page of USA Today makes the bold suggestion that Al Gore, as a creature of Washington, may be the likelier to quit.
Some Sunday, somebody ought to get Bill Clinton and Bob Dole at a table together for war stories. The once and current president, a war veteran of the political kind, sat in Ho Chi Minh City and tossed off Jefferson comparisons (that squeaker turned into two terms and the death of the opposition Federalists) as well as some musings on the current two-headed bitterness.
"Advocacy will take place and should take place," Clinton told CNN. "With so much at stake, of course they're gonna be snippy with each other from time to time." And his skirmish, he insisted, could be "sobering" and "constructive" and presage a "new era" of government dominated by centrist nonpartisanship. Imagine there's no extremists, it's easy if you try.
Maybe Clinton, he of the bridge to the 21st century, is just angling to end up as the last big president in American history. But he may also have been tipping us off to what the professional-partisan Washington of the 20th is really worrying about: Public irrelevancy. In throwing an election that nobody won, are the two sides precipitating a meltdown that nobody will consider life-threatening? "Some countries turn to their generals," cracked William Safire on Meet the Press. "We turn to our lawyers."
Or we just watch it on TV. The White House, now in its second donkey-elephant crisis in as many years, is threatening to turn American political stability into a marginal entertainment. The economy chugs on with neither president-elect nor budget, slowing only because the Fed told it to. When Alan Greenspan is still coming into the office, it's tempting to look at the presidency as a silly ambassadorship, head greeter at the most powerful casino in the world.
Congress, an afterthought since Election Day, must feel as far away from the real action in Florida as Clinton is in Asia. Members talk eagerly of the need for electoral centralization — federal election standards and national ballots, and contracting the mechanism of democracy out to the Silicon Valley wizards so we can all watch the count on a Big Board on the Mall. Because it turns out the locals are an embarrassment, and not only that, they're getting all the attention.
The comparison that should scare anybody in politics is that of the 2000 Beltway to the 1998 NBA — drenched in money, peopled with prima donnas, and embroiled in a dragging labor stoppage that has the growing stench of irrelevancy. After the Florida Supreme Court does its thing, one imagines the league owners of Republican and Democratic Washington will be out in force, to try to keep control of their game.
For now it's still fun — and certainly a truer, more revealing campaign than we ever had before Nov. 7. But it's almost Thanksgiving. Bob Dole told Wolf he'd like to see America get a "magnanimous, gracious loser" in time for the holiday. Someone like Bob Dole.
"If they can't work it out," Dole said, "I'm available."