Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Roger Ebert, David Horowitz, Andrew Sullivan, Noam Chomsky, Bianca Jagger and other Salon panelists panelists look ahead to the Bush years.
Dec 14, 2000 | Bianca Jagger is an internationally famous political activist.
I was born in Nicaragua, in a country where we had a dictatorship for 43 years. I grew up as a child not knowing what free elections meant. I longed through those years to be able to live in a country that abides by the principles of democracy. I used to think that America was a place where the will of the people elected a president. Having observed elections in third-world countries and having observed the irregularities that took place in the elections in America, I saw similarities. If a parallel situation had taken place in a third-world country, we would have called it fraud. We would have called for reelections or a recounting of the votes.
This is not a shining moment for American democracy because, in the end, Americans have opted to preserve the institutions rather than to preserve democracy. Vice President Gore was pushed into a wall. From every side they urged him to be gracious and to come out and concede defeat. But the truth, which we all know, was that this election was won by Gore, and that President-elect Bush is usurping the position of the presidency. He has stolen the presidency from Gore. I think a lot of people are frightened and too cautious of using plain English. The American media is afraid to use the word "fraud." Why? It is important for Americans who believe in democracy, its principles and independent legal institutions to speak up.
Electoral reform is imperative, but that comes after. Why are we not talking about today? Why are Americans so willing to accept an election that is fraudulent?
George W. Bush will never have respect or legitimacy. I do hope that someone -- a newspaper or institution -- will under the Freedom of Information Act count the votes so that there will be no doubt that Gore was the winner, and that Gore's victory was stolen from him and that a president who did not win the race is in place in America. America has to address and face up to that because the rest of the world is already speaking about it.
In America, people are using conciliatory language about how we need to unite the country. But no matter how conciliatory the language is, you cannot erase the fact that these elections were fraudulent, that there was intimidation and that the vote of minorities was constrained. In any other place where I have been an observer to the elections and have seen that, we have cried foul.
The time will come when this travesty will have to end and people will face up to the fact that the will of the people was not respected in America, and that the president-elect is not the president that the voters wanted in place.
Roger Ebert is a film critic.
For me the great symbol of the Florida recount does not involve Bush or Gore, Daley or Baker. It involves the three election commissioners of Palm Beach County, holding open meetings in the bright Florida sunshine. Their names were Judge Charles Burton, Carol Roberts and Theresa LePore.
It was possible, we thought at the time, that they held the outcome of the election in their hands. Yet the world could see them debating the issues and taking their votes, right there on live television. There were no commissars or dictators lurking in the shadows. No jail cells or exile in their future--not even for Ms. LePore, who designed the ill-fated ballot. Meanwhile, our current president, far from planning a coup, was on the other side of the world, visiting our former enemy Vietnam.
These three citizens, plucked from obscurity by the chance of a close vote, performed their civic duty as if they were born to it. Like all Americans, they were. They assumed they had the right to try their best to figure out this thing.
Later, we had the sight of hundreds of citizens performing the hand count. The sight of ordinary people, holding a ballot up to the light, trying to ascertain the will of every single individual voter, was a powerful image in the service of democracy. How much light is allowed to fall on the ballots in many of the world's elections, and how much scrutiny does each one ever receive?
The Florida affair also dramatized the role that women play in our democracy. In many nations women do not have the vote, and in some they essentially have no rights as all, except to be property. At times during the Florida recount process the whole struggle seemed to come down to two women: Secretary of State Katherine Harris, hell-bent to stop the recount, and Election Commissioner Carol Roberts, steel-willed that it continue. Roberts told her fellow commissioners, "There are three remedies under the law for us to choose from," and in her voice you heard democracy speaking from the people up, not from the top down. As the process entered its endgame, a third woman appeared: Judge Nikki Clark, calm, firm and sane as she guided two overheated legal teams through the Seminole County case.
There was a lot of talk among the pundits about how impatient the people were getting, questions about how long the process could or should be drawn out. I heard none of that talk. Did you? The average citizen, fascinated by the process, wanted it to continue until a winner was made clear.
Of course a winner was not made clear. One was selected by judicial default rather than elected. But to stubbornly look on the bright side, even this was done in the full light of day: Anyone who cared enough could figure out, in the words of the immortal limerick, who did what, and with which, and to whom. The Florida episode may have shaken my faith in a lot of things, but I still believe it concealed no conspiracies or plots: What was done, for good or ill, was seen to be done.
We should take that image of an election volunteer peering intently at a single ballot, and put it on a postage stamp. A stamp with the correct postage for international mail.
Todd Gitlin is professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University and the author of "The Sixties," "The Twilight of Common Dreams" and a new novel, "Sacrifice."
These felt to me like high-school-level consolation talks in which each tries to persuade the followers of the other that the result isn't so bad. The term "presidentiality," which has spread like an ooze to cover the emptiness of what mainstream politics has to offer, has deservedly been invoked to describe what these men had to offer, demonstrating nothing more than the reasons why so much of America was not ignited by either of them.
There's not much that I have to say about these talks as such. They were written for the pundits as rituals to soothe, but I doubt that they will deliver much soothing -- nor do they deserve to -- to those who doubted the stature and merits of the candidates in the first place.
Once again we were treated to the spectacle of the commentary chorus heralding the forthcoming "bringing us together" theme. I thought the pundits outdid themselves in blather. Chris Matthews [of MSNBC] spoke of Al Gore's "sublime masculinity." I think we need more investigation of what that might have meant.
I heard that Al Gore made a beautiful speech. I don't know where I was when that speech was delivered. I heard a labored and forced incantation, vastly less eloquent than the look on Joe Lieberman's face, which in its gravity spoke of social consequences that will likely be considerable.
To me this was a grave anticlimax. The country has been subjected to an appalling abuse of democratic rights, in particular the right to vote. It's a trauma that has to be faced squarely and not smothered in empty unity talk, and I profoundly hope that Democrats will not forget why they received 50 percent of the vote.
David Horowitz is a Salon columnist.
Gore's concession was as good as it could be. I can't say he redeemed himself, but he certainly positioned himself for the next run. I think it was what was needed. For the moment, he's effectively isolated Jesse Jackson, which is a good thing.
Bush was a lot more relaxed than he has been. People are going to be very surprised. He has it in him to be a great president. It's going to be hard to resist the charm. His agendas are very much where the American people are. He's been tremendously underestimated, and I'm looking forward to this presidency.
Bush should take steps on Social Security, education and healthcare. He needs to do a few bipartisan things. This was a brutal campaign. He's been attacked as a moron and a racist -- both of which are ridiculous. He's going to have to take some time to establish himself. In the sense that he's a people person, he's a true leader. He has the ability and the patience to bring people along with him.
He's going to give the African-American community a chance to take a look at their absurd voting postures and their absurd attacks on him. For the African-Americans of the inner city, I sure hope that the leadership gives him a chance and reciprocates his gestures.
I'd like to see them reform the electoral system. I don't care how much money they spend to get the decent machines. They need to ensure that people don't vote two and three times and to make sure that the voting procedures are standardized and that the counting is more objective and not subjective.
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