Stop This TrainWho decides this election—you or Al Gore?
Updated Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2003, at 1:42 PM ET
Listen to this story on NPR's Day to Day.
What was that again about counting every vote?
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StumbleUponThree years ago, Al Gore, trailing in the Florida recount, urged the nation to wait until all the votes were tallied. "There are some who would have us bring this election to the fastest conclusion possible. I have a different view," Gore pleaded.
Gore's view was that the urge to unite and win must never shortcut the electorate's verdict. "What is at stake is more important than who wins the presidency," he argued. "What is at stake is the integrity of our democracy, making sure that the will of the American people is expressed and accurately received."
That will must be expressed "without any intervening interference," Gore insisted. Elections should be determined "by the votes cast by the people, not by politicians."
That was then. This is now.
Now the presidential candidate Gore prefers is ahead. Not in the vote count—the first votes haven't been cast yet—but in Democratic polls and money. In Iowa, Howard Dean leads his nearest competitor by eight points. In New Hampshire, he leads by 14 points to 25 points. Financially, he's blowing the field away. He has already renounced matching funds, allowing him to ignore the customary spending caps and outspend his opponents with impunity in the early primaries.
Should Democrats fight it out and see who wins? Not if Gore has his way. "Democracy is a team sport," he declared as he endorsed Dean in Harlem this morning. "All of us need to get behind the strongest candidate."
Who decided Dean was the strongest candidate? Not the voters: They haven't voted. Not the polls, either: They've shown Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, and Wesley Clark scoring better than Dean in hypothetical match-ups with President Bush. The person who anointed Dean the strongest candidate is the same intervening politician who complained three years ago about intervening politicians.
"I respect the prerogative of the voters in caucuses and in the primaries, and I'm just one person," Gore allowed in Harlem. Please. If Gore were an ordinary person, he and the national press corps wouldn't have been there. The whole point of the endorsement was, in the words of Gore's former campaign manager, to "lock down" the nomination for Dean.
No ordinary person would presume to tell other presidential candidates to stop criticizing Dean. But Gore did. He instructed Democrats to "speak no ill" of anyone in their party. "We can't afford to be divided," he said. Why did Gore deliver that message this morning? Because tonight Dean's rivals will get their last chance to confront him in a debate until nearly a month from now, at which point the Iowa caucuses will be just two weeks away. Gore is trying to stop anyone from stopping Dean.
In case anyone missed the point, Dean underscored it. He thanked Gore "particularly [for] those words that said that the 11th Commandment now also ought to apply to Democrats. As you know, I've been picking buckshot out of my rear end in some of these debates, and we're going up to New Hampshire tonight and see if I do some more."
It's one thing to endorse a candidate. It's another to suggest that criticism of that candidate undermines your party—particularly when you've got such stature, as the party's most recent presidential nominee, that no other candidate can afford to rebuke you.
"This campaign is not about Howard Dean going to the White House. This campaign is about us going to the White House, all of us," Dean told the crowd. "We will open the doors to the White House and let the American people back in." That's great, Howard. We'd love to go to the White House. We'd just like to go to the polls first.
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Remarks from the Fray:
At what point, Mr. Saletan, did anyone in the Dean camp or on Al Gore's team, in any way suggest that we ought to either forego the polling in the primaries, or the general election?
Gore's and Dean's comments are fairly typical front-runner commentary calling for the uniting of the party to face the common opponent.
I for one have found much of the criticism of Dean, particularly from John Kerry, off-putting in the extreme, and I went into this campaign expecting to work for, give money to, and otherwise strongly support Kerry.
In fact, I did some Kerry meet-ups here in Baltimore, but backed away from the Senator when I found Kerry's and Lieberman's criticisms of Dean hurtful to the positioning of the party in the general election.
Vigorous debate, sure. I would urge Democrats to bring their ideas to the forum, and let's hash 'em out. But I would also urge decorum and restraint: let's focus on policy, what we want to do as a party if elected, and not on personality.
--Jack_Baltimore
(To reply, click here)
…As Kerry himself has mentioned, at this point he is closer to Dean in NH than Bill Clinton was to Paul Tsongas in '92. Super Tuesday looms as the great unknown, and nobody knows how well Dean's going to play in the South. All points worth keeping in mind.
Gore's endorsement, and the general Democratic consensus forming behind Dean, may not be as positive as it seems now. Given Kerry's candidacy, it is interesting to note that Gore's gambit may be remarkably like one of John Kerry's Vietnam exploits. In the oft-cited Kerry war story, Kerry turned his gunboat towards ambushing VC attackers and charged so as to create as narrow a target as possible, successfully so.
If I'm not mistaken, this is not dissimilar to what Gore (and most of the coalescing Dem coalition) might be doing with Dean--focusing all their attention on Dean, putting him and only him forward as a "narrow target", knowing that they probably can't win the battle outright, but they will at least live to fight another day, and that Dean will absorb almost all the damage if he loses.
Which of these two possibilities is the right one depends on what you think Al Gore's viewpoint is. If you believe this endorsement is simply an uncalculated Dean love-fest, then you must believe that Gore et al. view Howard Dean as something akin to the Golden Child. If the "narrow target" explanation is to hold, then Gore and most of the people now backing Dean must see the odds of defeating Bush next year as being prohibitively long, and see Dean as a nice hedge.
Myself, I'm applying Occam's Razor and going with explanation #2.
--CaptainRonVoyage
(To reply, click here)
There is a world of difference between miscounting votes after they have been cast and influencing voter opinion before the polls. The former is subversion of democracy, the latter is its very core. A political correspondent who mixes the two up is like a sports reporter who thinks three strikes and a home run amount to the same thing.
If Gore has clout, that is not his fault, and this is not an unfair way to use it. He is using it not through backroom deals but by appealing directly to the voters. If there is a cleaner use of political capital, I would love to be enlightened on it. And if Saletan thinks that Gore is playing the pied piper simply by making an endorsement, his idea of free will and basic intelligence of primary voters must be absurd. An endorsement is just like campaigning, only on behalf of someone else. Is campaigning immoral?...
--Sissyfuss1
(To reply, click here)
…I'm no big Dean fan. While I am on the subject, I'm no big fan of Al Gore either. But, I actually took the trouble to read the complete statements which Saletan has completely stripped of context.
It's one thing to argue that votes already cast should be counted and not manipulated by the political process (e.g. Katherine Harris, the Florida Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court). I make this point with full knowledge that the political in-fighting in Florida was a 2-way street.
It's quite another thing to endorse a candidate. Gore's statements had everything to do with the Florida vote counting and cannot be logically applied to the political process writ large. At least not by anyone who can engage in critical thinking.
Saletan appears to be arguing that Gore is a hypocrite by endorsing anyone in any election, ever. After all, even if Dean is selected, wouldn't Gore be interfering by endorsing Bush over Dean in the general election? Let the votes be counted first!
This article is simply silly. People? It's an endorsement, nothing more, nothing less.
--JCormac
(To reply, click here)
(12/9)