The US Political System In Crisis:
How Sweet It Is

by Burton S. Blumert

Everyone wants to take credit for, or put the blame on someone for Al Gore’s agony.

"It was Nader, he was responsible," say some diehards. "He should be in the back seat of a Corvair."

Even Pat Buchanan brags that it was his 17,000 votes in Florida that did Gore in. Pat doesn’t know that his name appeared on the ballot in southern Florida as Buchananberg, and the elderly voters in the area thought they were voting for a nice Jewish boy.

In Bruce Shapiro’s article, "How the Drug War Cost Al Gore the Afro-American Votes in Florida" (Salon.com: November 9, 2000), he makes his case. My first reaction was that Shapiro was being satiric. I was wrong.

Let me save you the trouble of reading the piece. It seems that Florida law prohibits convicted felons from voting in elections. Since one-third of Florida’s Afro-American males have suffered from "felony disenfranchisement," and are legally prohibited from voting, candidate Al Gore was the victim.

Truth be known, I, me, Burt, personally, was responsible for Gore’s woes in Florida. On election eve, I called a friend in Boca Raton, and although I don’t quite remember the message, every member of his poker group was so persuaded by my argument they switched their votes from Gore to Howard Phillips and his Constitution Party. Those votes tipped the scale.

Paul Gigot, upper echelon talking head, on the razor-thin difference in vote total, pronounced on Jim Lehrer’s show on November 8: "The next time someone tells you that your vote doesn’t count, remember the election in the year 2000," blah, blah, blah.

Former President Jimmy Carter, at a press conference on November 9, repeated the mantra, and we will hear it ad nauseam.

What garbage. How does the closeness of a political race add importance to the individuals vote? If we can find him, let’s award a lottery prize to the fellow whose single vote determined the result of the election.

American elections are a referendum on indifference.

The remarkable dead-heat distribution of the one hundred million votes indicates how difficult it is to distinguish between the two parties.

Voting is like being part of "the wave" at a sporting event. No one will ever notice if you don’t participate. But if more than fifty per cent don’t partake, the whole futile exercise disintegrates.

Third parties that truly threaten the two-party system are unacceptable. They are tolerated only when they are irrelevant. ( The Libertarian Party’s Harry Browne received 381,000 votes, typical of the parties’ vote totals in presidential elections since 1984.)

When Ross Perot was spearheading the Reform Party, he exceeded the amount of influence that could be tolerated. That party has now been marginalized, and Perot has found peace, presumably back in the fold as a Republican supporting George W. Bush. (The Reform Party’s Pat Buchanan received 441,000 votes).

The Green Party is on the cusp of being regarded as either a mounting threat or irrelevant. We will know in the next two to four years. (The Green Party’s Ralph Nader received about two and a half million votes.)

When a third party movement becomes a potential dagger in the heart of the established political order, all niceties are forgotten, and "contracts" are let out to solve the problem.

In 1968 American Independent Party candidate George Wallace won fourteen per cent of the vote and almost elected Hubert Humphrey over Richard Nixon.

Wallace’s performance in the 1972 Democrat presidential primaries stunned the established order. He won the primaries in Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, Maryland, and Michigan and was a close second in Pennsylvania and Indiana. Wallace was no longer winning just the southern states; he was a national candidate.

On May 15, 1972, George Wallace was gunned down and almost killed while campaigning in Maryland.

The sober leaders of the present two-party regime will not allow the "shock of voter irregularities" to exist too long. At this moment the Democrats are presenting two faces, one strident and aggressive, implying they will go all out to contest the vote in Florida. The other face, represented by Warren Christopher, is committed to order, continuity, "respect for the Constitution," and reassuring the world that this is an example of American democracy at its best. Translation: We are scared to death that our house of cards will be seen by all. Let’s get back to business as usual as quickly as possible.

When the power elite decide on the identity of the next president, that will be it. Any lawsuits will fizzle and hysterical minority voices eventually muffled (See Waco). The losers will be reminded that, okay, you lost this time, but you’ll be back in two or four years, so cool it. And here’s some pocket money to tide you over until then.

The power elite message continues: "And to any of you rogue states that may be watching and listening, you had better know that American internal squabbling never diminishes our ability to unleash our military might. So, if you are considering any mischief, don’t even think about it."

Sadly, neither Al Gore nor George W. Bush would dissent from this position.

November 10, 2000

Burt Blumert is owner of Camino Coins, president of the Center for Libertarian Studies, and publisher of LewRockwell.com.