by Dean Hartwell
The last President
of the United States never even got to take the oath of
office.
When Al Gore announced recently that he would not run
for president in 2004, it closed the door on the
possibility our nation could right the wrong it allowed
to happen in 2000. During the time period from
Election Night to just recently, there have been many
more questions raised than answered about the legitimacy
of George Bush’s election.
How many votes would Gore have received from people
wrongfully deleted from the voting rolls? As
has been reported by Gregory Palast, the documentary Unprecedented
and others sources, the state of Florida (run by
Bush’s brother) contracted with a private company to
“update” the state voter records. This update
consisted of deletion of several thousands of people
lawfully registered to vote. The fact that the
overwhelming majority of them were in racial groups that
mostly vote Democratic cannot be dismissed as a
coincidence.
Why didn’t Katherine Harris recuse herself from her
position of Secretary of State? She was the
Florida Chairperson for the Bush Campaign and she
oversaw the counting of the votes for an election
involving Bush. Anyone with even a remote sense of
legal ethics knows that she had a conflict of interest.
Yet she did it, anyway and she got away with it.
Where did the Supreme Court get its authority to
intervene in the election? The Constitution
certainly does not give them any say in a presidential
election. It leaves the decision of selecting
electors to the states, with Congress having the final
say in approving them. The Supreme Court, in
stopping Gore’s legal request for a hand recount of
votes, destroyed any chance that Bush could be
legitimately elected.
Why has President Bush never acknowledged doubts over
his election? He said nothing at the time of
his inauguration nor about a year later when several
newspapers counted the ballots from the election
statewide and found that Gore really won. He could
have borrowed a page from two other presidents who won
disputed elections: Rutherford Hayes in 1876 and John
Kennedy in 1960. Hayes pledged to serve only one
term and kept his promise. Kennedy said he would
not impose great initiatives on a slender majority and
didn’t.
With no recount and now no Gore candidacy, this
situation now becomes a problem without a solution.
But the problem goes much deeper than Al Gore or even
the millions of people who voted for him. The
problem is that the United States has become what it
accuses so many other nations of: a “banana
republic.”
Since Bush's inauguration, the United States has simply
taken a wrong turn and continued in the wrong
direction. From now on, the public should have no
confidence that its leaders will heed its desires.
If we want a nation with leadership that reflects our
votes, we will have to take it back by demanding answers
to these types of questions and refusing to settle for
anything less than the truth.