1. There is sure to be partisanship and gridlock in Washington like nothing you have every seen before. If Bush pulls out the Florida vote, he will be a president who lost the popular vote, and will be presiding over two houses of Congress which will be nominally Republican, but are as evenly divided as one could possibly imagine. The Senate may even be 50-50, and it certainly will be more liberal than the last. [One of the great poetic justices of last night was that Neanderthal Ashcroft losing to a dead man!] If Gore pulls out the Florida vote, he will not be much better off; whatever he gains in terms of legitimacy vis-a-vis his victory in the popular vote, will be more than offset by having Congress in the state it is. It is hard to conceive of conditions under which either candidate would have much of a chance of enacting his legislative program. Nonetheless, if it should happen, the Republican seizure of the White House would be significant because of Supreme and Federal Court appointments, as well as control of important regulatory agencies -- NLRB, OSHA, etc. [The organization of grad student unions would almost certainly, for example, take a massive hit as the recent NLRB ruling would be overturned.] Look for a big mid-term Congressional gain for whichever party looses the White House -- maybe even bigger than the Republican 1994 sweep.
2. Precisely because the election was so tight beyond imagination, it is crystal clear that Bush could not win without Nader's presence. In Florida alone, Nader took 96,000 votes, with the gap between Bush and Gore hovering around the 1500 mark at last count. Hell, if only 1 out of every 10 Florida Nader voters had voted for Gore, the election would be already decided for Gore. Similarly, Oregon is now in play only because of the Nader vote, and although the numbers are not yet completely definitive, Nader may have tipped a number of very close states, such as Nevada and Tennessee, to Bush.
While no one expected that the election could be this tight -- clearly the closest in American history -- thus creating even greater possibilities for a spoiler to do damage, Nader had a strategic perspective of acting as a spoiler, of defeating Gore to punish the Democrats for having, in his view, sold out to corporate power. Thus, while his vote total fell far short of his own 5% goal, he was still able to play the role of spoiler with a fairly small base. In an election this close, any one of a number of things could easily have tipped the balance in favor of one or the other side, and the Nader presence was one decisive factor in favor of Bush. It was not, of course, the only factor, and this was an eminently winnable election for the Democrats -- which a less than sterling candidate did not win. But unless one happens to think that the defeat of the Democrats and the victory of Bush is a positive development, as some on the sectarian left have argued, one can not be pleased about the possibility that Nader contributed to that end.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20001108/c619a760/attachment.htm>