Misanthrope's Corner - 2000 presidential election - Brief Article - Column

National Review, Feb 19, 2001 by Florence King

The beauty of coming out for the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment is that I am now at liberty to say "I have a feeling something is going to happen" without worrying about compromising my feminist credentials.

There's a lot to be said for casting off the shackles of logic and reveling in the freedom of female intuition. When men do it they call it "listening to your gut," which allows them to feel tough and realistic as they work in mysterious ways, but women have no compunctions about letting the psychic vibes rock on without restraint, so I'll follow suit.

I waited until after the Inauguration to write this to see if it would shake me out of my mood, to no avail. My sense that the Bush presidency is star-crossed did not budge.

I've had it since election night, when the first hints that something was wrong emerged as though from a script crafted by a master dramatist who has foreshadowing down to a science. Why wouldn't Gore get out of his car? What was making Bush late for his victory rally? And then there was that bleak autumnal rain that began falling in Austin after we learned what had happened. The deserted plaza littered with soggy abandoned signs was nothing less than film noir.

Florida provided just enough comic relief to heighten the tension. As Gore, already established as an odd duck, moved closer to obsession, we had nightly debates about what he would "do" if he lost-"do" being a euphemism for going insane or committing suicide. And if it happened, what of his enraged "base," who gave him 93 percent of their vote? What would they "do"? Nobody spelled that out either, but it was taken to mean what it usually means.

After the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recounts and W. won the Electoral College, I started a count of my own to see how many times the words "Gore won the popular vote" would be spoken and written. I lasted all of two days before it became clear that I couldn't keep up without a full-time staff of elves.

Letters to the editor, talk radio, the-man-in-the-street, and political shout-show regulars all pounded it home. "Gore won the popular vote by 500,000" was given in thousands at first, until the bigger-sounding "half a million" took hold. Then it was reversed to "Bush lost the popular vote by half a million." Liberals questioned his "legitimacy," nicknamed him "President-select," coined "Hail to the Thief," and vowed never to accept him as "their" president.

Then Bill Clinton publicly proclaimed Gore the real winner and thanked Bill Daley for running a victorious campaign. After that, Tom Brokaw could pull out all the stops in his snide interview with W., needling him about losing the popular vote, asking if he wanted to hide under the bedcovers on Inauguration Day, and warning darkly, "No president can govern without the consent of the people."

Commentator Tony Blankley characterized this pummeling as "brutal disdain" and predicted that unless Bush strikes back, "we will face the most vehement political disorder since the years leading up to the Civil War."

I don't know whether Blankley was listening to his gut, but he was certainly listening to mine because I have a feeling that all hell is going to break loose.

Blankley's Civil War comparison is an apt one. A measure of just how close to the edge we are is the sudden rebirth of the Abolitionist movement. You know it can't be long now when the attorney general-designate states under oath that he wouldn't dream of joining the Confederate army, while over in the other hearing room the Interior designee is denying that slavery is the jewel in the crown of states' rights. If you did a freeze frame of the entire Bush team at any given moment, every third member would be caught in the midst of saying "Slavery is abhorrent"-the 21st century's first administration posing in a living tableau of William Lloyd Garrisons and Harriet Beecher Stowes.

Calling slavery abhorrent is the last way left to refute liberal charges of racism, but it is leading them into a trap. If they keep on saying it they will be forced to back reparations; otherwise they will be accused of believing that slavery isn't so abhorrent after all.

Only Houdini could get out of this one, but he's not about to help because it was Houdini who got them into it in the first place. Bill Clinton intends to hang over W.'s presidency like the sword of Damocles, waiting for a chance to be the Comeback Kid. Maybe he can't be Mr. President again-maybe-but the big cheese by any other name would smell as sweet. A former president, like a deposed monarch, is a rallying point for discontent. In the past, newly crowned kings understood that deposed monarchs had to be gotten rid of, but democracy is a poor substitute for lettres de cachet and iron masks. Clinton is now in the same position as the Duke of Windsor in the 1930s: ungone and not forgotten. The unemployed duke was much on the mind of Hitler, who had the idea of restoring him to the throne as England's first Nazi king. But Americans are citizens, not subjects. We don't do royal titles, so if all hell does break loose on W.'s watch and Clinton mounts the Short March from Georgetown to take power, we will have the first warm, friendly Director of Public Safety in history.