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| ELECTION FALLOUT | |
 December 15, 2000  |
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An analysis of post-election America
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JIM LEHRER: Now, thoughts about post-election America, and to Margaret Warner. MARGARET WARNER: For those thoughts, we turn to Michael Novak, who
holds the George Frederick Jewett chair in religion and public policy
at the American Enterprise Institute, Stephen Carter is professor of
law at Yale University. His latest book is titled "God's Name in
Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics." Wendy Kaminer
is a scholar at the Radcliff Institute for advanced study and a columnist
for the "American Prospect Magazine," and Alan Wolfe, a professor
of political science at Boston College and author of "One Nation
After All." Welcome to you all. STEPHEN CARTER: Well, I said to someone recently this is a good time to be disillusioned. But in fact I'm glad it ended without getting into a fight between the courts and the legislatures. As bad as the U.S. Supreme Court opinion really was, and I don't think it has a lot of fans, it's better to end that way than to end with the court saying one thing, the legislature saying something else and this ending up in the House of Representatives. I also should say that for all the rancor of this period, that the speeches that both Vice President Gore and Governor Bush gave the other night, I thought were really a good job of trying to reach out, trying to be conciliatory toward each other and get us on the path to healing. But there is a lot of work in that regard left to be done. MARGARET WARNER: Alan Wolfe, how do you see it? Do you think it has had a sort of lingering impact? Is this just sort of an isolated political event and we move on, or is there a residue? ALAN WOLFE: I think there is going to be a residue with respect to some of our institutions. The Supreme Court really damaged itself very, very badly. That residue is going to leave a sour taste whenever a new Justice is nominated by a president of the court, when a question of a new Chief Justice comes up. All of this is going to come back up. It's very, very hard, it seems to me, to forget what happened here, which is essentially that the Supreme Court, five members of the Supreme Court, overstepped their role. For the rest of it though, we tend to forget, for all the bitterness of the campaign after the campaign, that the campaign itself, the two candidates were pretty close to one another. Republicans and Democrats were equally divided, but the overwhelming majority party in America is the party of moderates. Most Americans are moderate. That's going to continue, whatever the bitterness and whatever the struggles that go on in Washington. MARGARET WARNER: How do you see it, Wendy Kaminer? WENDY KAMINER: Well, I think it is true that Supreme Court has certainly
lost a lot of standing among liberals, among activist lawyers and academics,
though this court never had much standing among liberals to begin with.
Now liberals will look at the Rehnquist Court the way conservatives
used to look at the Warren Court. I don't think the general public's
opinion of the court will change all that much one way or another. I
actually found these much-heralded speeches by Gore and Bush the other
night rather smarmy, and I found all the rhetoric, all the therapeutic
rhetoric about healing completely misplaced. I don't think we need to
be healed because I don't think we've been terribly wounded. You know,
listening to Gore, you would think that we had just been engaged in
an actual civil war, not a metaphoric one between activists and political
elites. MARGARET WARNER: Michael Novak, how do you see this, the lingering impact? MICHAEL NOVAK: Let me begin with something Wendy just said. I think
in the political class among political activists, both Republican and
Democratic, there were very raw feelings. I have never seen Republicans
so angry, ever, as they were in the 34 days leading up to the last day.
And they thought that Al Gore had done something quite dreadful, and
that there was a quite visible move to steal the election and so on
and so forth and the Florida Supreme Court had way over stretched its
bounds. But I agree with Wendy that on the whole I suspect the American
people, really a wonderful people, kept on with their activities. They're
used to terrific arguments. Thanksgiving Day dinner around the family
table certainly has people who don't dare talk of politics for fear
of driving the other half of the family away and several other subjects,
so they know what argument is like. But they lived through it pretty
well I thought. MARGARET WARNER: Well, Stephen Carter, that gets to the question of really, one, how divided is our nation? We hear all this talk about Bush has to lead a divided nation. If so, what is the nature of the divide? STEPHEN CARTER: I'm not sure that we're divided as a lot of the rhetoric
suggested. One reading of course of this down-the-middle election, so
down the middle that even the courts were all split by one vote is that
these are hopelessly divided parties. But I think there is another possibility.
The reason the vote is so close is precisely because people, during
the campaign, were unable to get passionate about these candidates.
There was a lot more passion in the month and a week after the election,
during all the brouhaha about who really won, than there was leading
up to it. MARGARET WARNER: Wendy Kaminer, your thoughts on that last point…that Stephen Carter made about what makes people cynical and realm... and really was there much of a divide in the election or the post-election controversy? WENDY KAMINER: I'm not sure there was that much of a divide in the election because a lot of the people saw the candidates as being very much alike. And I think that we've been seeing these red and blue maps of the United States for the last month, which are very misleading because some of the red states and some of the blue states could very easily have gone the other way. And we're hearing a lot also about the need for more bipartisanship, which I'm also quite struck by because I think that we've had too much bipartisanship and not enough partisanship in the last several years. We certainly need less viciousness and more civility in politics. But in some ways, I think if we want to engage people, if we want people to be less cynical, we need more partisanship -- if by partisanship we mean people standing up and fighting for differing ideals. What worries me about all of these calls for bipartisanship is that it will mean more cautious centrism. And cautious centrism is not going to solve some of the terrible problems that we face, especially the problems that we have been ignoring during this campaign like pervasive racism and other gross inequities in the criminal judicial system. MARGARET WARNER: Okay. Let me get Alan Wolfe in here. Alan Wolfe, we have got a couple threads of conversation going here, but go back to this question of divide and pick up on Michael Novak's point, which Frances Pukiyama also made in the "Wall Street Journal" recently, that the real divide in our country is cultural, it's not really over the kinds of issues that were talked about in the campaign, and maybe isn't the kind of divide that can be healed by a President in any event? ALAN WOLFE: I think that there is almost an inverse relationship between the consensus in the country, Michael Novak said Americans are pretty nice people -- I agree with him completely -- and the divisiveness of the intellectuals. I heard Michael Novak say for example, a couple of minutes ago on this program, that church going people voted Republican and people who don't go to church overwhelmingly voted Democratic. It sounds almost as if he is suggesting that God is on the side of one of the parties. Sociologically it is completely untrue. African Americans are overwhelmingly among the most church going people and they of course voted overwhelmingly for the Democrats. What Michael Novak was actually referring to is the fact that people who say they go to church in surveys vote one way or another, but sociologists know a lot of people say they go to church and don't actually go to church. We don't need that kind of rhetoric. We don't need to claim and make claims like that. We saw an awful lot of that. For Mr. Novak to say that Republicans were angry, it seems to me the Democrats were the ones who had the cause to be angry over and over and over again at the complete intransigence of the Republicans. But it's that kind of debate that most Americans don't engage in and I'm glad they don't. I'm glad they don't feel like me; I'm angry. I'm glad they're not angry. MARGARET WARNER: So you're agreeing with the idea that it is really the political class or, as you put it, the intellectual class that has this great divide or raw feelings but not ordinary Americans, you don't think? ALAN WOLFE: That's right. I almost people there are people I've known for a long time, many conservatives and good friends, I barely want to talk to them right now given the anger that I feel. But I'll repeat that's not the way Americans out there in the country feel. Thank God for them, thank God the people are not as passionate about these things as I am and I'm sure as Michael Novak is. MARGARET WARNER: Michael Novak. MICHAEL NOVAK: I like the point about passion but it's not the only thing. I was impressed by the numbers that considerably higher black turnout in many areas, including Florida. That's a very good sign. I don't know how much passion it entails but it entails the determination to go out and do something. That's quite good enough for me. MARGARET WARNER: But then do you think picking up on the taped piece we just ran, given what part of happened and most of the higher error rates were in the black and poorer precincts that going back to how our institutions fair, that our electoral system did not fair as well as it might have? MICHAEL NOVAK: I don't think the electoral machinery faired as well
both human and technical probably. But it's quite striking that nobody
is saying it is deliberate but most of the precincts were in control
of the party who had benefited by the higher turnout. MARGARET WARNER: All right. Stephen Carter, your final thoughts. STEPHEN CARTER: Well, two very quick thoughts. One is on the subject we were just talking about. It is very important I think for the Bush administration to make a very high priority of investigating what went on in the voting in Florida, having the Justice Department look into that. The NAACP is planning litigation under the Voting Rights Act as I think they probably should. But at the same time I think it's very important for whether it's the intellectual class, the elite, or the people in the street, whoever... wherever the rhetoric comes from, I think what has to be toned down on the Democratic and Republican sides is the sense that somebody stole or tried to steal the election. What you had was two people, two parties going at each other passionately, head to head. It got a little out of hand about it now is the time to stop worrying about who stole what and start thinking about the future. MARGARET WARNER: All right. Thank you all four very much.
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