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| HISTORY ON HOLD | |
 November 15, 2000  |
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Gwen Ifill speaks with a group of cultural scholars as they assess the election deadlock.
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GWEN IFILL: With me is Rodolfo de la Garza, vice president of the Tomas Rivera, Policy Institute and professor at the University of Texas; Abigail Thernstrom, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and co-author of America in Black and White; Dinesh D'Souza, author of the new book The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno-Affluence; and Ethel Klein, author of the book Gender Politics and president of EDK Associates, a public opinion and research firm. Ethel Klein, we have been hearing all the different permutations tonight of this interesting American crossroads we are at. How would you characterize this moment in American history?
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| A wake-up call for both parties | |||||||||||
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GWEN IFILL: Mr. de la Garza, how about that? Do you think that the parties in this case have behaved well? RODOLFO DE LA GARZA: No, I don't think they've behaved well at all. I think the way they've behaved both in this particular event and the election generally, is evidence and explains why voters are turning off. We had a slight increase in voting this year over 1996, but lower than '92. So the parties haven't done their job at all.
DINESH D'SOUZA: I think the reason the election result is so close is because the American people are very divided about prosperity. We all agree that prosperity is a good idea and we have enjoyed the prosperity of the last decade, but in the campaign slogans when Gore says prosperity for all, what he is saying is prosperity is a good thing but many people have not had it, so I'm going to focus on expanding it to reach others. And when Bush says prosperity with a purpose, what he means is that prosperity is a good thing but it needs to be channeled to serve larger moral goals. And the American people aren't sure about that. So they disagree about what prosperity should be used for, but they agree that prosperity is a virtue. GWEN IFILL: That explains why the election was so close, but it doesn't explain what we see unfolding before us in Florida, does it? DINESH D'SOUZA: Well, there is an old joke about academic politics that it's bitter because the stakes are so low. The irony here is that these are two candidates that are not that far apart ideologically. By and large, Gore is a moderate Democrat, Bush is a moderate Republican. But what has happened is American politics has become polarized in the sense that one party wants to use prosperity for egalitarian purposes to bring in -- if you will -- the have nots, and the other party wants to use prosperity to liberate us for, to liberate us from government intervention. Bush wants prosperity to flourish in the private sphere. That's the difference.
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| If things had been handled differently | |||||||||||
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GWEN IFILL: Abigail Thernstrom, what -- is this debate, this obsession we have, at least for now, with this incredible drama in Florida, is this in the end healthy or unhealthy for us?
GWEN IFILL: But if you think that the problem here is the lawyers getting involved in the case, how else should this have been resolved? ABIGAIL THERNSTROM: Oh, this should have been handled very, very differently from the beginning. I mean election morning, it wasn't night anymore -- it was morning. After the Vice President called Governor Bush and said congratulations he should have come before the American public and given that concession speech and said I congratulate Governor Bush -- it does look as if he has won the election -- but of course under Florida law, given the closeness of the vote there will be a recount and Governor Bush understands that, and we will abide by that recount -- and then it wouldn't have turned into a circus. There would have been a simple and quiet recount. It would have been a machine recount -- nobody holding ballots up to the light to see whether the chads were dimpled or hanging or what have you. And it would have been resolved in a way that gave the American public confidence. I think this is a disaster. GWEN IFILL: Let me go to Mr. de la Garza first and ask him to respond to that.
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| A divided country | |||||||||||
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GWEN IFILL: What does that tell us? RODOLFO DE LA GARZA: Well, that tells me that you have a variety of additional divisions -- one of which is a racial division that is very, very -- an ethnic racial division that is very, very powerful. GWEN IFILL: Wait. Everybody stop. Ethel Klein.
GWEN IFILL: I owe Dinesh D'Souza a response.
GWEN IFILL: Abigail Thernstrom, if you had to speak to one of these guys -- whoever is the winner -- and he takes over on inauguration day, what should his first step be, assuming that he is coming out of this incredible, as was said here, divided nation, divided process? ABIGAIL THERNSTROM: Well, obviously his first step should be to try to heal those divisions, to reach out to the other party. I would like to see a cabinet that includes members of the other party and I have to say that Governor Bush has a terrific record in Texas of reaching out to Democrats and he has run a campaign precisely on that platform, that he is a conciliator and somebody who brings people together. The Vice President has run a much more ideologically combative campaign, and it seems to me is much more hard-edged himself. GWEN IFILL: You wanted to respond earlier to Mr. de la Garza's comments about the racial divide.
GWEN IFILL: We don't have a lot of time let, but I just wanted to ask you all quickly, have we opened up a Pandora's box here, or are we ever going back to where we were -- RODOLFO DE LA GARZA: In my mind we are not going back at least on these divides to where we were. But it's not clear how we are going to move forward. One of the ironies in this election and it's a regrettable one is that despite a powerful outreach, a genuine, in my mind, outreach by Governor Bush to the other minority Latinos, he only got 33, 34 percent of the vote. He has never done better than. In 1998, he did not do that, and so the question then is if when you try to reach minority voters they still don't respond to you, we've got a major problem in the country. GWEN IFILL: Well, if we opened a Pandora's box, we're just going to have to close it again for tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all very much. |
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ETHEL
KLEIN: I wouldn't characterize it as a crisis, I would characterize
it as a wake-up call because it goes beyond the presidency. Every single
level of elections here have been very close, and I think it tells us
what we've been hearing since the 80's which is that people are dissatisfied
with what the two parties are offering them, or enough people, they
want to see something else. So they are looking to have some other things
talked about. I think what we need are leaders to govern and to really
think about how do we bring this country together rather than to continue
the campaign into the next presidential election. 
GWEN
IFILL: Dinesh D'Souza, what is at fault here? Is it the process? Is
it the incredible division we are hearing about among -- between these
two men-- or is it just what is it? 
ABIGAIL
THERNSTROM: Oh, I think it's potentially a catastrophe for us. I think,
you know, it all comes down to lawyers at this point, and lawyers are
perhaps the least trusted people, professionals in American society.
A ballot has become not something, you know, you cast, and people just
simply read it, but it's a piece of paper that is interpreted. And I
think the level of distrust that is already very high among certain
sectors of the population is about to go through the ceiling. It's about
to skyrocket and trust is the glue that keeps democracy together. Democracy
is extremely fragile. If we don't really trust the processes as being
fair, we are in deep trouble, and there are lots of us who do not trust
what is going on in Florida as fair. And I must say I strongly disagree
with Dinesh D'Souza's characterization of the two candidates. I think
that Governor Bush as much as Governor -- as much as Vice President
Gore, although by different means, wants greater prosperity for all.
That is what his education policy is all about. 
RODOLFO
DE LA GARZA: Well, I don't think that the results that we've seen would
have been any different. They might have been a little slower. Gore
would have looked a lot more statesmanlike had he done that but I think
the point about division that Abigail just mentioned is really important
because in my mind one of the things that stands out is the extent to
which the non-white community rejected Governor Bush. And it's quite
interesting that we are not really talking about that or making that
explicit so there are a variety of kinds of divisions. And that population,
I think, would have protested around this election in a variety of ways.
Let me give an example. There has been talk about the closing of the
polls in St. Louis: the inner city polls. Nobody suggests that those
are essentially black voters in inner city St. Louis who got shut out
of voting. I think that is pretty much the case. If you look where Bush
won his votes -- the white dominated states in the West or states in
the South where the whites have overwhelmed the ability of blacks --
ETHEL
KLEIN: Well, I want to build on this. There is also a class division
which we are seeing for the first time in really much larger numbers
than before but I think we are missing the real historic opportunity
here, which is on the micro level really moving this country towards
a much more election system in which votes get counted in a systematic
way and which a lot of people have actually been talking about for over
40 years but has never had an ear among the public partly because people
know how to win in the current system. Now, both parties are finding
out that, uh-oh, we may not know how to win with the rules staying the
way they are. That is not only how you count votes; that's how you run
campaigns; that's how you articulate your positions. I mean, they both
ran what people are saying are really lackluster campaigns. That's an
easy explanation. The reality is the American public is looking for
something else. And they are also looking for someone to talk about
the future, not in the language of the past.
DINESH
D'SOUZA: Well, the reason this election is so bitterly fought and the
stakes are so high is that American politics only shifts gears every
40 or 50 years. The Democratic Party has been the majority party for
most of the 20th century. Bill Clinton came in in 1992. He was a Democratic
President with a Democratic Congress. We have had eight years of peace
and prosperity. These guys cannot believe that they are going to be
turning not just the presidency but both Houses of Congress to the Republicans
-- signaling a quite momentous shift. And so that is why they're going
to fight tooth and nail but try to hang on and eke out a victory no
matter how many recounts it takes. That is why the stakes are so divided.
ABIGAIL
THERNSTROM: Yeah. I do want to say something about that because after
all, in Texas itself Governor Bush has been able to reach out to both
Hispanic and black voters. You can demagogue issues and that is what
the Democrats have done in this election and scare black voters implying
that, you know, they're going to go back to being three-fifths of a
person and so forth, and it works because for good historical reasons
black voters do get very, very scared. That does not serve our country
well and it has nothing to do with the man that George Bush is or his
record in Texas.