The election of 2000 is likely to be seen – with the benefit of a few years or even decades of hindsight – as one of the saddest chapters in our political history. It’s one of the great sticking points between so-called Liberals and Conservatives, but it says here that the election was stolen and that the true choice of the people way back when was the other guy, Al Gore. It matters not that the electorate’s affinity for the wooden Gore was less than compelling: the reality is that sober evaluation of what transpired back then leads to the inevitable conclusion that the guy who got planted in the White House was a fraud, and – sadly – almost nothing that George W. Bush engineered over the eight years that followed did anything to dispel that notion.
And I am well aware that characterizing the 2000 election as “stolen” is a better pill for Republicans to swallow, so, of course, they don’t swallow it at all (Republicans don’t swallow). But just like so much of what took place during two administrations of George W., the giddy practice of denying that something happened doesn’t alter reality, it merely means that people have made a willful decision to pretend that reality is different than it actually is, which, I guess, is a fairly human – albeit intellectually indefensible – reaction to unpleasant things.
Anyway, the point of this article isn’t to whine about the election hocus-pocus of 2000, but rather to discuss an earlier election that was not technically questionable in terms of voter fraud or other chicanery, real or imagined, but nonetheless was subjected to a similar kind of denial, though admittedly for different rationales.
I speak of the 1992 presidential election of one Bill Clinton, the former governor of Arkansas who somehow pilfered the Democratic nomination that summer and then went on to hit the daily double by snatching the presidency from a seemingly bewildered sitting president. And as a forerunner to what would take place 16 years later with Barack Obama, Republicans far and wide never really conceded that their guy George H.W. Bush could have actually lost the presidency to this, this Arkansas hayseed. And then that very same group of reality-phobes really couldn’t believe it when he pulled it off again four years later. Sort of how I felt when a plurality of Americans decided in 2004 that George W. had earned himself another four years of daydreaming in the Oval Office and clearing brush on his Texas ranch. But I digress.
For the purposes of this discussion it matters not – or at least very little – that Clinton turned out to be one of the most intellectually brilliant presidents ever, or that his speech-making, television presence and his ability to actually think on his feet without clinging to a teleprompter or relying on hours of coaching from anguished handlers was unmatched by any president before or since. Clinton was all of those things, but by the time anybody had figured it out, he was already into his second term, and for virtually every minute of both terms, his detractors cared not a whit about his level of competence or his ability to handle his presidential duties.
To those willing to risk an avalanche of cosmic hee-haws by noting that his successor, George W. Bush, was also supposedly severely underestimated by his opponents, it should be noted that there are a number of major differences. Most notably that Junior Bush didn’t really win that first election in 2000; eight years earlier, Bill Clinton actually did.
And while many Democrats only grudgingly conceded the 2000 election to Bush, a similar armada of the faithful on the other side never truly conceded either the 1992 or 1996 elections to Clinton. And the big difference in the latter case was that the naysayers spent virtually the entire eight years trying to nullify the results of two elections that seemed so unreal to them in the first place.
I wasn’t even a huge Bill Clinton fan in the beginning, but I did take note almost immediately that Republicans were spending almost all of their time – and our money – trying to get him booted out of office. I was horrified at the time, and remain horrified to this day, that elected officials could so gleefully surrender their responsibilities in holding public office to a partisan witch hunt with such questionable underpinnings. Lucky I lived long enough to see Barack Obama elected president, ushering in such a vile era of partisanship that it makes me long for the saucy days of the 1990’s.
I was just as horrified back then that nobody seemed to care much as it was going along. One investigation after another, millions in tax dollars brazenly tossed to the winds, until the usually adroit Clinton made it all worse by actually giving the opposition a morsel so grotesquely salacious to aid in their efforts to bludgeon him into the ranks of private citizen.
I contend that the putrid level of partisanship that we see in political life in 2011 and now seemingly threatens to undermine our national well-being and perhaps the global economy, traces its tawdry roots back to those first days of November in 1992 when Bill Clinton snuck up on a whole country in general and a hapless Republican Party in particular. They were alternately stunned, offended and enraged that it could have happened. They couldn’t believe it, so they didn’t believe it. Still don’t, now nearly two decades later.
That gives you a little historical context about their current kamikaze-like determination to keep Barack Obama from having a second term. Only problem is, they forgot that the rest of us are in the back of the plane.
- T.S. O’Connell
The putrid level of partisanship that we see in political life in 2011 and now seemingly threatens to undermine our national well=being and perhaps the global economy, traces its tawdry roots back to those first days of November in 1992 when Bill Clinton snuck up on a whole country in general and a hapless Republican Party in particular. They were alternately stunned, offended and enraged that it could have happened. They couldn’t believe it, so they didn’t believe it. Still don’t.