November
6, 2000
Democratic Death Throes
By Tom Bevan
Like a body in its final convulsion before succumbing to death,
the Gore campaign and its surrogates are flailing away frantically
as they watch the election slip from their grasp. Frankly, it's
painful to watch. It's also more than a little revealing of how
addicted to power Mr. Gore and company have become and how willing
they are to use whatever means necessary to retain their hold
on our nation's government.
We have learned to expect vitriol from the likes of Jesse Jackson,
who yesterday made the ridiculous assertion that George W. Bush,
who quit drinking at 40, "drank longer than Dr. King lived,
at age 39."
And we expect, though we are still offended by, ads from groups
like the NAACP who won this year's award for the most divisive,
race-baiting commercial by implying that George Bush's failure
to support hate crime legislation was the moral equivalent of
killing James Byrd "all over again."
And though we brace ourselves for harsh rhetoric, especially
from a candidate with the track record of Mr. Gore, we are still
shocked by his willingness to frame the election, as he did the
other day at a prayer breakfast in Memphis, as a choice between
"good and evil." Some of us can't help but find it offensive
that Mr. Gore would go so far as to say, as he did to a black
congregation in Pittsburgh, that Governor Bush would appoint Supreme
Court justices that subscribe to the pre-Civil War view that African
Americans would be "considered three-fifths of a human being."
Under other circumstances, anyone uttering such nonsense would
be immediately castigated and forced to issue an apology. But
this is an election year and we are engaged in a war of profound
consequences. The American public has been trained to shrug off
such hyperbole and discount it as "politics as usual."
One of the things we weren't prepared for, however, was to watch
honorable men like Joe Lieberman and Bob Kerrey disfigure their
reputations on behalf of Mr. Gore by hurling personal attack after
personal attack at the Governor of Texas.
In particular, this year's campaign has taken it's toll on the
reputation of Mr. Lieberman. Three short months after his selection
as the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, Lieberman is a
mere shell of the man he was, stripped of intellectual honesty
and completely gutted of the principles he spent years espousing
in the Senate. Unfortunately, his role in Gore's campaign these
last two weeks has centered on disparaging the intellect and experience
of Governor Bush rather than arguing the merits of his ticket's
agenda. For this, Mr. Lieberman will most likely return to the
Senate a permanently diminished public figure.
And Senator Kerrey, an exceptionally well respected man who will
retire from public office this year, has taken it upon himself,
it seems, to educate the country as to what a miscreant the Governor
of Texas is. For the past two weeks Kerrey has chased television
crews all over Washington D.C., repeatedly assaulting the Governor's
intelligence and questioning his experience to anyone who would
listen. Last week, the Senator even felt compelled to air charges
last week (as yet unsubstantiated) that Governor Bush went "AWOL"
while in the Texas National Guard.
It's enough to make Americans fall to their knees and thank God
there are less than 24 hours left in this election. It has been,
for the most part, a relatively clean campaign. But, as is always
the case when the incumbent party finds itself behind in the polls
toward the end of an election, desperation makes politics an ugly
business very fast.
If there is to be a "November Miracle" for Mr. Gore,
it will come in the form of huge turnout by the African American
community - the group to which a large portion of his invective
over the past week has been directed. More likely, however, is
that George W. Bush will be elected the next president and America
can give Al Gore's candidacy and the Clinton adminstration the
proper burial it deserves.
Tom Bevan writes for RealClearPolitics
