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The Eternal Campaign Stop Whining and Let the Lawsuits Begin. By Susan Zakin "PEOPLE ARE OVERLOOKING the Shakespearean angle," my friend Steve announced in one of many shell-shocked post-election conversations we all had last week. The Shakespearean angle? Steve's IQ is high enough to put most people in a straitjacket, so I figured I'd better listen. "Yeah. Don't forget George Bush was CIA director under Nixon. Bush senior was on the border of Turkey and Iran around the same time Ollie North was telling the Iranian government not to release the hostages until after Reagan won. Bush could've been North's contact." The CIA is known for fixing elections all over the globe. The Bush family might have some hard-to-pin-down track record on election fraud. But Shakespeare? "Remember how George W. swore he'd get revenge for Poppy's loss to Clinton? Avenging the father is very much like Hamlet," Steve said. "Of course, you can't go too far with that one because it would involve Clinton knocking off Bush so he could sleep with Barbara." "How about Henry the Fourth? Dick Cheney could play Falstaff," I suggested, trying to be helpful. Enough already. Personally, I'm a believer in the theory that most conspiracies boil down to ineptitude. Campaign 2000 hasn't shaken this belief very hard, even if the Bush campaign beat Gore to the courthouse by suing to halt a manual recount in four Florida counties, which did make it look a tad like they had something to hide. What really mystified me was why a Democratic honcho like former Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta would caution against taking this recount business too far. Was Panetta a turncoat or merely attempting to be statesmanlike? Either way, I felt like telling Panetta to put a sock in it. I'm rooting for Gore to take it to the mat. It's not just that I'm horrified by the prospect of a drunken frat-boy oil company shill running the country, although I certainly want to grasp at any straw that might prevent this. But I simply can't wrap my mind around the idea of someone--anyone--being president who actually lost the election. That's why I thought Jim Lehrer on PBS finally showed his true bias--no, not toward center-right politics, a tilt that lefties have complained about in the past, but toward center-right old school emotionally repressed WASPhood. Virtually every talking head on the show, including Lehrer's own, seemed to be pressuring Al Gore to concede "for the greater good." The show must go on, was the tone. Status quo at all costs. The only sane pundit-speak seemed to be coming from Wendy Kaminer, a contrarian pseudo-intellectual who I usually find appalling. Kaminer said, look, it's not Al Gore's rights that may have been violated. It's voters' rights. Let's fix that. We might even find out who won. What a novel idea. In fact, polls are showing that 70 percent of the American public also believe that it's more important to get an accurate vote count than to hand over the presidency in a manner that seems disturbingly random. The problem is, Kaminer's prescription may be politically naïve, or at least hard to carry out. Because what campaign veterans may be worrying about is how the public will react to the disturbing news that we need Jimmy Carter to oversee our elections almost as much as Haiti does. Local pundit and former Tucson Weekly automatic weapons editor Emil Franzi says that election 2000 has merely exposed a system fraught with inaccuracies and opportunities for fraud. Absentee ballots are the easiest way to rig a vote, says Franzi, who works as a political consultant when he gets a break from his duties as Charlton Heston's brain. In Pima County, Franzi points out, we have a system that almost begs for a crooked vote because absentee ballots aren't counted until the polls shut. This gives politicos an opportunity to figure out exactly how many boxes they need to stuff. Of course, the only example of such vote-rigging that Franzi remembers harks back to a time comfortably outside the statute of limitations. Franzi recalls a 1962 race in which Etta Mae Hutchinson, a longtime Democratic member of the state legislature, was trailing until 3 a.m., when a posse of deputy sheriffs arrived like saviors, carrying ballot boxes that miraculously contained enough votes to put Etta Mae back in office. Franzi also told me about six ways to cheat on the computerized ballots that have come into vogue since the days of Etta Mae. (Not that he would ever engage in such behavior himself, of course.) The bottom line: Machines are inaccurate and people are both partisan and fallible. So the machines messed up in Florida, and hand-counting ballots can be full of pitfalls too. The best we can hope for is a lot of scrutiny so people will think twice (instead of voting twice) before giving their candidate that extra bit of help. Like Kaminer, I believe that all of this tumult and uncertainty may be positive, despite the well-bred PBS head-shaking. From a campaign marked by nothing so much as stunning boredom, election 2000 has morphed into the equivalent of a major California earthquake. Vaguely traumatized people are actually talking about politics. In complacent millennial America, this must be a good thing, even if we'd prefer to live without the accompanying vertiginous feeling. The stress is even getting to notoriously laid-back Bush, who sported a boil on his cheek that detracted slightly from his attempt to look presidential last week. Gore just kept playing sports, a traditional prep school remedy for both puberty and angst, which are synonymous anyway. The one rock amid the mayhem was Hillary Clinton's victory over Rick Lazio in the New York Senate race. My burned-out journalist friends talked about Hillary's televised acceptance in a tone that was amazingly consistent. As one pointed out, Hillary's sound bites had a strangely generic, even statesman-like feel. I agreed. "Yeah, it was really ..." "Presidential." Hey, at least someone is.
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