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The Clinton Legacy:
Rule or Ruin
By ROBERT L. BARTLEY
With its unerring sense of drama, fate
has provided the perfect capstone for the Clinton Presidency. We always
should have known the Clinton legacy would be rule-or-ruin politics, as
now waged in Florida by his putative successor.
The Florida words may be new, but the melody is hauntingly familiar.
Doesn't "dimpled chad" sound a lot like "what the meaning
of 'is' is"? An official trying to do her duty, Secretary of State
Katherine Harris, is smeared as "partisan," just as Whitewater
investigator Jean Lewis was. Meanwhile, of course, partisan votes
allocate ambiguous ballots to Al Gore.
Mr. Gore's echelons of lawyers run from court to court trying to bend
the law into victory, mouthing claims as brazen as the "protective
privilege" Mr. Clinton had his legal eagles invent. All this is
cloaked in pious high-mindedness -- we only want to count all the votes
(except the military ones and maybe Seminole County absentees).
Victimization -- the "vast right-wing conspiracy" -- cannot be
far behind.
On these pages we started eight years ago to write about
"Arkansas mores." The citizens of that lovely state tended to
take an offense we did not really intend, but they also took the point.
In the post-Clinton era they've moved decisively to clean up their local
politics. But the nation learned, and has even come to expect, a new
style of politics, the "permanent campaign" -- if the truth
won't work, "we'll just have to win it then."
The corrosive effect of this was neatly captured by our new
OpinionJournal (www.opinionjournal.com)
columnist, former Delaware governor and presidential primary candidate
Pete du Pont: "The result of all this dissembling, obfuscation and
lying is that the law becomes what you can get away with. Smear the
opposition; eradicate the evidence; turn on your own if you must; attack
the opposition as biased and partisan, and argue every point to the
bitter end regardless of the consequence to anyone but yourself. The end
justifies the means."
The mores Bill Clinton brought from Arkansas distort the formal rules
of the game, but utterly shred the informal ones that have long made
politics work. You may disagree with your opponent, but you don't try to
destroy him. You may fudge, but at some point the outright lie is
restrained by a sense of shame. Especially with the presidency, there
has been a residual sense that you hold the office in trust. That you
have a duty not to damage the Republic or our institutions, not to
debase the terms of our debate.
Thus you had Lyndon Johnson declining to stand for another term
during Vietnam; he probably would have won, but at bitter cost. You had
Richard Nixon agreeing to resign rather than force a Senate impeachment
trial. And of course, you also have Mr. Nixon in 1960, holding reasons
to contest a presidential defeat, but seeking to suppress them rather
than pressing them to the hilt.
I have to wonder what Mr. Gore expects to win. Does he really want to
prevail by imaginative counting of dimpled chad, as his lawyers now
argue in court? He could also perhaps prevail through an over-the-top
hypertechnical ruling by Judge Nikki Ann Clark, a protege of Florida
Attorney General Robert Butterworth, who was instrumental in getting Al
Gore to reverse his election-night concession to George W. Bush. Judge
Clark is hearing a suit brought by a local plaintiffs lawyer asking that
Seminole County absentee ballots be thrown out because the correct
information on the applications was entered by the wrong people.
In either event, Mr. Gore would "win" by dint of clever
lawyering to overturn three vote counts, certification by state
authorities and a national feeling that Gov. Bush has won. Along the
way, he would also have to overcome a certain vote by the Florida
legislature asserting its right to name electors and a battle in
Washington to decide between competing sets of electors. If Mr. Gore ran
this gauntlet and became president, it might be a victory in the Johnnie
Cochran sense. But would this be good for the Republic? Would it be good
for Al Gore?
These questions have seldom if ever been asked in the Clinton era.
For that matter, while Mr. Clinton brought war-room politics to new
heights, the initial dam-break was the campaign against Robert Bork's
nomination to the Supreme Court. While "to Bork" became a
verb, at least some Democrats tried to staunch the trend. But as the
Clinton years progressed, Democratic dissent has been squelched. In the
impeachment proceedings, the more brazen his defense, the more solidly
his fellow Democrats united behind him.
So today Mr. Gore follows the "just win it" script in
Florida. And other Democrats offer at most sotto voce reservations. Sen.
Joe Lieberman, in particular, will have to spend a long time recovering
his piety after serving as Florida point man. And Republicans, given
their recent experience, suspect the Gore challenge is a kamikaze dive
to denigrate the Bush presidency and set the stage for the next
elections.
At the very least, the Florida imbroglio is an ill omen for Mr.
Bush's proclaimed intention to seek bipartisanship and act as a unifier.
Having tied the Republicans at 50 seats, Senate Democrats are talking of
power sharing, but would they use their share of the power to seek
common ground or to obstruct? The rule-or-ruin tactics in Florida are
scarcely reassuring.
Conceivably, indeed, the presidential results will themselves be the
first test of the new Senate balance. The new 50-50 Senate convenes on
Jan. 3, and counts the electoral votes on Jan. 5, a Friday. As ultimate
judge of the electoral vote, the Congress may yet have to decide between
competing sets of Florida electors. Until Jan. 20, Al Gore will remain
vice president, and have the deciding vote in the Senate. As it happens,
Hubert Humphrey turned over the gavel under similar circumstances in
1968. And Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has recused himself from the current
vote-counting there. But on current performance, can anyone doubt that
Al Gore would take great relish in breaking a tie to make himself
president?
Legally this would not be decisive, because the House would have to
agree (and in case of disagreement the nod goes to electors certified by
the executive of the state involved). Politically, though, a Gore
tie-breaker would be poisonous. The decisive act in creating the 50-50
Senate split was Sen. John Ashcroft's decision not to offer a legal
challenge to his loss to a dead man, Mel Carnahan. Rather than argue
votes for an ineligible candidate are null and void, he stepped aside
and let Missouri's Democratic governor appoint the widow. If Jean
Carnahan's vote sets up mischief in the presidential selection, Mr.
Ashcroft's kind of gallantry will be gone from American politics. Rule
or ruin will be firmly established as the universal standard. |
