Al Gore should hang it up. And then he should hang his head in shame. In a great irony of which he may someday become aware, Gore proved at the end of his presidential campaign what he had spent most of that campaign trying to disprove. In words and deeds, in photo ops and tactical decisions, he kept trying to demonstrate that he was not Bill Clinton. And now at the end, by putting the country through a terrible trauma to serve his own needs and retain personal power, he shows that if he is not a complete Clinton clone, he is at the very least a man who has absorbed and accepted the central ethos of Clintonism: "We'll just have to win, then." No matter what.
To briskly review: there was a presidential election, and it was close. It came down to the state of Florida. They counted the votes. Mr. Bush won. But it was very close, so they had a recount. They counted the votes again--from the top of Florida to the bottom, from the east, where former Queens Democratic precinct captains paper the condos with Gore flyers, to the west, to the Panhandle, where Republicans stayed home after being told by the networks that it was over, Gore had won. (If Jesse Jackson liked these people, he'd call them "those who were cruelly disenfranchised by the media.") And even the recount showed Mr. Bush the winner.
You know what followed. Democratic operatives file suits claiming badly designed ballots; the Republicans go to court to stop the suits; three counties begin hand counts; the Florida secretary of state certifies the election based on the recount, pending the overseas absentee ballots. Those ballots are counted: again Bush wins.
A Democratic state supreme court misreads the law to declare the election can't be certified until the hand counts are in. The horrifying stories come out about what is happening in the hand-counting rooms: the changing standards, the interpretations of dimples and dents, the cheating; the ballots misplaced, used as fans, taped up, dropped; the throwing out of military absentee ballots. Newly assertive Republicans begin to protest, to march on Palm Beach in suits and ties. It goes to the U.S. Supreme Court.
And that is where we are. And we are here because Mr. Gore couldn't do what Richard Nixon did: announce, the morning after the election, that he would accept the official outcome. Great harm has been done by Gore's decision, and more is no doubt coming. If he manages to finagle his way to the presidency, his Administration is likely to prove true a dark saying: When you want it bad, you get it bad.
I know a number of people who are sitting back in fat chairs saying they find all of this quite comic. "It's a farce, and I don't care who wins." Really? We have reason to believe a presidential election is being stolen and we don't care? It must be hard to achieve that level of equanimity; maybe it's God's way of telling you that you have too much and have grown soft, and the softness has made you cynical. They've caught some of this Above-It-All virus on TV, on the news. On cable they obsess on the story, but shallowly. Television has both inflamed demonstrators and ignored what is behind their demonstrations. They inflame by showing hot pictures in constant rotation; they ignore by not letting the demonstrators speak their views at length. It's as if TV reporters have cameras but no microphones.