Bush league

How a passive media helped Bush win

by Dan Kennedy

As the Phoenix went to press on Wednesday morning, it appeared that the post-campaign was, at long last, over. But before Al Gore makes his final disappearance, it's worth thinking about how the media helped legitimize George W. Bush's outrageous -- and ultimately successful -- effort to stop all the votes from being counted and thus claim an unearned victory.

Despite the 24/7 treatment on the all-news cable channels, the Florida fiasco was not, at root, a media story. It was too big, too important, and too fast-moving for the media to be able to shape (and distort) events. That made it very different from such past spectacles as the Monica Lewinsky saga and the O.J. Simpson trial.

Yet it was the media's very passivity that worked to Bush's advantage. The past five weeks' mess was created, at least in part, by the Bush campaign's exploitation of the media's institutional need to be perceived as evenhanded.

The Gore forces, cynical and hypocritical though they often were, nevertheless focused nearly all of their attention on the need to examine legitimately cast ballots that may or may not have contained clearly expressed votes. The Bush strategy was to stop that effort at every turn, lest the 65,000 ballots rejected during the machine counts turn out to reveal victory for Gore. Sort of gives a whole new meaning to "get out the vote."

Worshipping, as always, before the false god of objectivity, the media reported on these dueling efforts as though they were equally reasonable, equally moral, equally part of the accepted political game. But think about how different this all might have been if Bush had had this to say after the second machine count:

"I agree with the vice-president that all of the ballots have to be counted. You know, in Texas I signed a law that when an election is this close, the ballots have to be counted by hand. That's the law in Florida, too. So let the counting begin."

If Bush had taken such a step, he wouldn't have been seen as any great statesman; he would merely have appeared to be bowing to the inevitable. And all this would have been over weeks ago. The Bushies' most startling insight was that the inevitable wasn't inevitable -- that is, that they could brazen it out, and that no one except a few commentators on the left would cry foul.

As Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman put it during his WRKO Radio (AM 680) talk show on Tuesday, before Bush came along it had never even occurred to anyone that there was something wrong with hand-counting ballots. Not only did Bush get away with that unprecedented assertion, but it was Gore who was generally painted as the obstructionist, simply because he was unwilling to shut it down and go home until all the votes had been counted. A "sorehead," CNN's Bill Schneider called him on Tuesday evening, describing the most recent poll findings.

Yet polls cut both ways. According to this week's Newsweek, an overwhelming 72 percent of survey respondents supported the hand count ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, which began on Saturday morning only to be halted by the US Supreme Court that afternoon.

The public knows fair play when it sees it, but not the pundits -- especially those on the Bush side, some of whom appeared to have lost their minds. The Weekly Standard, usually the voice of sane Republicanism, ran a cover illustration a couple of weeks ago of Gore dressed up as Aaron Burr, blowing the smoke off a freshly shot pistol. MSNBC.com columnist Jay Severin regularly refers to Gore as "Al Crack Whore." Last Friday, shortly after the Florida Supremes gave Gore an unexpected, temporary victory, Severin called on the Army to move in and expressed the view -- seriously, I think -- that Gore should be shot for treason.

I disagree with Gore supporters who are denouncing the US Supreme Court as a cabal of political hacks. Serious concerns were raised about equal-protection standards in hand-counting ballots (of course, those concerns could have been addressed weeks ago if the Bushies hadn't been such obdurate obstructionists), and in any case the post-campaign couldn't have gone on forever. The good news is that the Court's ruling may well ensure fairer, more democratic elections in years to come.

Then, too, there are some harsh realities that liberals should enter into their calculations. If Gore had won, his presidency would probably have been a disaster. The Republicans had already signaled that they would have made it impossible for him to govern, and Gore utterly lacks the political skills to rally the public to his side. If we are to have a weak, one-term president, by all means let it be Bush.

But that doesn't change the central reality of the post-campaign. Bush was willing to grab victory despite having lost the popular vote and despite the strong possibility that he lost Florida, and thus the electoral vote, as well. By covering Team Bush's maneuvers as though they were nothing worse than politics as usual, the media are complicit in this theft.