Franklin Delano Roosevelt was first elected President in 1932. The United States of America was in the worst depression it had ever experienced. The world was in economic collapse. Herbert Hoover, who preceded Roosevelt as President, had been a miracle worker on behalf of feeding a greatly depleted Europe after World War I, but he did not have the political or economic insights necessary to avert the Great Depression or to inspire the country for the tortuous road which lay ahead when the Depression began.
Once FDR was elected, he concocted an alphabet soup of laws, agencies, and projects which gradually lifted the USA out of the Great Depression and prepared us for our unavoidable involvement in World War II. There was the WPA, the CCC, the NRA (not the one you’re thinking about), the AAA (not the one you’re thinking about), the NLRB, the SEC, the TVA, and so on. Despite fairly well concealed declining health, Roosevelt spearheaded the nation’s optimism throughout the war. When Franklin Roosevelt died in April of 1945, Harry Truman ascended to the presidency.
Truman was relatively unknown, and certainly untested. It was during Truman’s nearly eight years as President that the nation recognized the Soviet Union as its greatest threat. Once again we pulled together in a joint effort with our allies to contain the growth of communism. The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan prevented a Soviet conquest of southeastern Europe and any further movement toward western Europe.
Dwight Eisenhower became President at the beginning of a widespread economic expansion and period of prosperity. It was also a time of growing anti-communism, led by the populist Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.
The years 1932 to 1960 displayed unusual national political cohesion, even though there were significant differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. The Great Depression, World War II, and the Soviet menace united the American people. By the time the two parties settled on John Kennedy and Richard Nixon as their candidates for President in 1960, there was less inter-party political goodwill than there had been previously.
John F. Kennedy was everything that Richard Nixon was not: young, good-looking, optimistic, a centrist, a gifted speaker, and an eastern Brahmin. Nixon was perceived to be a very conservative anti-communist Californian: ultra-political, untrustworthy, foreboding, impenetrable, inscrutable. Their first television debate visually depicted the personality divide between the two men as did nothing else. For those of us who watched it, we observed suave unruffled confidence in contrast to a perspiring political meltdown, and it all transpired in living black-and-white. The sight was nevertheless colorfully memorable.
Politically, Nixon and Kennedy had somewhat similar credentials going into the presidential election. Both had been Congressmen and US Senators. However, Nixon had been Vice-President for eight years under Eisenhower, and thus had been around high-level Washington powerbrokers much longer than Kennedy. Therefore his curriculum vitae was perceived to have considerably more substance.
The election campaign of 1960 stretched both candidates to the limit. Nixon and Kennedy had not been friends before the campaign, and they became even less friendly as the marathon dragged on. Nixon was by nature a jealous man. He envied Kennedy not only for being born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but also a silver tongue. He knew he could not match the Massachusetts orator in speaking ability, and it galled him. Kennedy saw the Californian as a political schemer who played by bare-knuckled rules. Being Joe Kennedy’s son, JFK was not totally averse to numerous dubious machinations himself, but his smooth demeanor never conveyed that subtle message..
The candidates’ personal animosities were reflected in inter-party rancor that deepened as the months wore on. It could be argued that the seeds of the political paralysis that has descended on Washington half a century later were sown in the historic election of the nation’s first (and amazingly thus far only) Roman Catholic President.
When the votes were tabulated, Kennedy won by 120,000 votes out of nearly 68,500,000 votes cast. The Electoral College vote, however, was 303-219. The Nixon team claimed that Kennedy operatives subversively altered the numbers in Illinois and Texas in order to win. Had that not happened, they said, Nixon would have won the Electoral College vote by 270 to 252. These allegations were never definitively proven, but they never completely disappeared either.
Democrats have always believed the 1960 election was won fairly by Kennedy. Many Republicans have never stopped believing that it was stolen from Nixon. Almost certainly the absolute truth will never be known.
What is known is that the 303-219 Electoral College vote would seem to suggest indicate Kennedy won by a landslide. Obviously he didn’t. In the popular vote, he won by seventeen-hundredths of one percentage point. For Richard Nixon, bygones were never bygones. They were festering sores which he nursed for the rest of his life. In that regard, he might put voters in mind of a more recent President.
November 22, 1963 ended the Kennedy presidency, and Lyndon Johnson went on quickly to wrestle into existence the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Bill of 1965. In so doing, as he himself ruefully admitted to a close associate in the Democratic Party, the Democrats would lose the South to the Republicans for a generation. As it turned out, the Old South has largely been blood red on every election map since 1980, when Ronald Reagan took office. Since the so-called Reagan Revolution, in general the Northeast is blue, the Midwest is mottled, the West is red, the Pacific coast is blue, and the South is red.
As a transplanted Hawaiian to the Midwest and Chicago said after winning the presidential election of 2008, “Elections have consequences.” One of the consequences of the very close election of 1960 is that it initiated partisan polarization from which America has never fully recovered. Furthermore, that polarization presently shows signs of deepening rather than easing.
Despite Richard Nixon declaring that the press would never again be able to kick him around anymore after he lost the California gubernatorial election in 1964, Nixon managed to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 and to defeat Vice- President Hubert Humphrey in a close race. Nixon then trounced George McGovern in the Watergate election of 1972. Having lost to Kennedy in 1960, and having squeaked by Humphrey in 1968, the always insecure Nixon took extreme measures to ensure victory in 1972. Nevertheless he huffily declared that he had no part in “a third-rate burglary” in what soon became known as “the Watergate Cover-up.”
During his years in political office prior to being elected President, a goodly number of historians and political pundits thought Richard Nixon had the qualities to become a great President. In foreign policy, he truly was masterful. In other matters, especially the War in Viet Nam, he was not so successful. And he was certifiably woeful in trying to stem the tidal wave he created for himself by the tsunami of Watergate events. His impeachment appeared to be a congressional certainty.
Hindsight is pretty squinty. It never is really twenty-twenty. The personality of Richard Nixon will always render him suspect to millions of Americans because of Watergate and all that it connoted. The Watergate scandal transpired because Nixon daily lived with paranoia as closely as he did with a brilliant if also warped political mind. He was not about to lose in 1972, having narrowly lost in 1960 and narrowly winning in 1968.
Nixon being the psychologically complex man that he was, had he won the election of 1960, he might have felt sufficiently validated to go on to do truly great things. As it was, he continued to feel unappreciated and unloved. In a pathological personality, that is a dangerous mixture.
The Election of 2000
From the time Ronald Reagan was elected President, we have had four two-term Presidents: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Two of those men were Republicans, and two were Democrats.
If the nation is relatively cohesive politically for eight years at a time, historically national politics have proven to be reasonably collegial. That was basically the case for TR, FDR, HST, and Ike, although Teddy Roosevelt had slightly less than eight years, Franklin Roosevelt slightly more than twelve years, and Harry Truman slightly less than eight. The point is this: up to 1980, the Members of Congress and the President had essentially a good relationship with one another.
That has not been true since 1980. The Presidents, the Congress, and the American people have been at one another’s throats. Collegiality vanished. Partisanship took over. The recent four two-term presidencies have exacerbated the partisanship. Partisans of Messrs. Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Obama adored their champions, but those who opposed them opposed them fiercely. Anti-presidential feelings have become much stronger, and anti-the-other-party sentiments also have become much stronger.
This situation applies as much to the American people as it does to our elected politicians. It isn’t that only American politicians are seriously divided; the American electorate is also badly divided.
Two recent presidential elections have been major factors in that division. In both of those contests, the winner had a smaller total number of votes than the loser. In 2000 George W. Bush, the winner, had 50,556,002 votes, or 47.9% of the votes cast for President. Al Gore, the loser, had 50,999,897 votes, or 48.4% of the total presidential votes. Bush ended up with 271 Electoral College votes, and Gore had 266 Electoral College votes.
In 2016, Donald Trump, the winner, had 62,984,825 votes, or 46.1% of the total presidential ballots. Hillary Clinton, the loser, had 65,853,516 votes, which was 48.2%. Here was the Electoral College result: Bush – 306; Clinton – 232. That Electoral College vote, in particular, is as noxious an illustration of the fundamental injustice of the constitutional institution of the Electoral College as can be found. The loser won the popular vote by nearly three million, but lost the Electoral College vote by 306 to 232.
Those numbers do little to build confidence in American democracy. Actually, if the truth is told, those numbers do wonders for the confidence of those who are much more republican (.lower-case “r”) than democratic (lower-case “d”) in their political philosophy. Not surprisingly, they are the ones known as Republicans. On the other hand, the numbers are highly dismaying for those whose political party’s name is the Democratic Party, and whose political instincts tend toward democracy, literally, rule by the people, rather than to representative or republican government.
Republicans are generally leery of democratic government (rule by the people), but they love republican government (representative government). Democrats try to appeal to the broadest percentage of the populace as possible. Pure democracy is demonstrably impossible in a nation of 320,000,000 people; nobody can vote on every issue to be decided, although theoretically that is what historically happened in New England town meetings. So representative or republican government is a practical necessity. Greatly to over-generalize, Democrats want as many people as possible involved in the political process, and Republicans want as few as possible. A strong case can be made, and has been made, for both positions.
The people’s candidate did not win the right to rule by either of the elections in 2000 and 2016. The people lost those two elections. A political party won in both instances, and it was the Republican Party. It won because the Electoral College awarded those two elections to the Republican candidates.
However, technically neither of the victories in 2000 or 2016 was won by the Republican Party, nor is any presidential election won by any party. Instead those two elections were won by the electors of the Republican Party. It transpired by means of the 1787 constitutional compromise which deliberately, even cynically, favored small states with fewer voters. Representative (republican) principles gave the two elections to the major candidates with fewer votes, and majority-rule (democratic) principles were thwarted.
Next week we will further investigate why the Electoral College is inherently unfair by concentrating on the Election of 2016. This week we shall mainly observe its injustice by closely focusing on the Election of 2000.
The primary reason why the Republican candidate won his party’s nomination for the presidency in 2000 is because his father’s name was George H.W. Bush. There certainly are other reasons why George W. Bush received the nomination, but to discount or ignore the identity of his father and how important it was in his son receiving the nomination would be an exercise in electoral legerdemain.
In retrospect, many voters in both parties probably would have been much happier had the Republican candidate been Jeb Bush rather than George W. Bush. Had Jeb Bush won the presidency in 2000 rather than his brother, it is hypothetically conceivable there would have been no wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, despite 9/11. Dick Cheney would not have been the Vice-President, and Donald Rumsfeld would not have been the Secretary of Defense. Were they not in those positions, it is dubious that Jeb Bush would ever have opted for two wars in one presidency. I choose to believe that Jeb was more subject to his father’s advice than was George W., and surely George H.W. would have warned Jeb not to engage in two wars, and perhaps not even in one. That, of course, is all un-requested, unsubstantiated speculation. What was, was, and the electorate was confronted by the necessity of making our peace with it.
Very few people who are old enough to remember the details of Election 2000 will forget that both the Electoral College outcome and the election itself hinged on the outcome in Florida, which is where Jeb Bush had served as governor.
None of us even knew what a “chad” was until thousands of them were discovered to be hanging from ballots in Palm Beach County, Florida. Remember? Palm Beach County voters were presented with an election “booklet ballot” that listed all the offices and candidates up for election on the two sides of each “page.” They were instructed to turn to the first page, take the provided punch and thrust it through an indicated perforated circle in the center of the booklet to select their choice of candidate.
If you voted for Mr. Bush, you may not recall exactly what the problem was. But if you voted for Mr. Gore, you will never forget the lethally damaging and --- you should pardon the expression --- “Gory” details. Without question, many hundreds of Palm Beach voters thought they were punching their perforated circles for Al Gore, when in fact they punched their chads for Reform Party candidate and perpetual conservative gadfly Pat Buchanan. Sadly, they mistook exactly which perforation they were to punch, because the ballot was badly printed.
Considering that in every other Florida county except one Pat Buchanan received total county votes only in two or three figures [a hundred or less or less than a thousand per county], and that in Palm Beach County Buchanan got 3,411 votes, logic would insist that Buchanan should have received at most a thousand votes in Palm Beach County and Gore should have received about 2500 more votes than the chads, hanging or otherwise, suggested. The Gore and Buchanan names were so close to one another on the ballot that many voters obviously made a mistake. That is especially authenticated by the fact that Gore won Palm Beach County by a 2-to-1 margin over Bush.
That issue as such was never adjudicated, however. Lawyers and judges in courts are understandably concerned with the breaking of laws, not with incompetence in the preparation of ballots. Furthermore, the Palm Beach County vote was never officially addressed, because a statewide recount was ruled out, ultimately by the US Supreme Court.
When all the ballots in all the Florida counties were tallied, George W. Bush won by a few hundred votes. This required a mandatory recount in some counties, but not in others. An entire state recount was demanded by attorneys for the Democratic Party and was repressed by Republican Party attorneys. For several days there was legal wrestling over whether a recount was legal, but certain counties began their recount anyway. During these legal battles, the United States Presidency hung in the balance, largely because it was unclear whether a recount was legal and secondarily because of hanging chads.
After much harried and hurried vote-counting and legal maneuvering, the Florida State Attorney General, Katherine Harris, finally declared Mr. Bush the winner in Florida by 537 votes. The Florida state legislature, controlled by Republicans, affirmed the victory. The Florida State Supreme Court, led by a majority of Democratic justices, reversed their decision, and declared that a recount must occur.
Surprising no one, the issue was very quickly thrust upon the United States Supreme Court in the famous (or infamous) Bush vs. Gore case, depending on one’s point of view. The court was faced with the question of whether the recounts were valid and whether the decisions of the Florida legislature and supreme court were valid. The nine justices sharply debated those issues in the short time they allotted themselves for their history-making finding. But the real question the nine justices wanted to resolve, regardless of their legal opinions, was this political question: Whom did these nine American jurists want to be the next President of the United States?
Five of the sitting justices had been nominated for presentation to the United States Senate by Republican Presidents, and four by Democratic Presidents. After much legal hair-splitting and lofty legal declarations, the court declared on December 12, 2000, by a 5-4 margin, that a Florida electoral recount could not proceed, and that therefore George W. Bush would be the next President, succeeding Bill Clinton. On December 13, five drama-filled weeks after the historic election of 2000 had actually occurred, Al Gore, in a nationally televised speech, conceded defeat. He feared a constitutional crisis if he or his advisers should attempt to press the rancorous issue further.
*****
The election of 2000 illustrates five vitally important factors.
First, were there no Electoral College (and there should not be one), Al Gore would have won the presidency. He had the greatest number of votes of all the candidates, major and otherwise. Republicans may tell Democrats they need to get over the 2000 loss. However, in more than the century and a half the Republican Party as we now know it has existed, they have never lost a presidential election by winning the popular vote and losing the Electoral College vote, and in the past five presidential elections, the Democrats have lost two elections under those unjust circumstances. And in the election of 2016, the losing candidate won a considerably higher percentage of the total votes than the losing candidate won in 2000. It is an unacceptable ongoing scandal.
Second, there is no justification for Al Gore losing the presidential election of 2000; NONE. Late on election night in that year justifications began to be made by both parties for what they subsequently attempted to accomplish by means of the courts. The legal wrangling that ensued was both fascinating and appalling. In terms of legal justice, the arguments to prevent a recount are objectively unconvincing. What the result of a thorough recount would have been is anyone’s guess. But the Florida legislature and a five-member majority on the US Supreme Court intended to subvert a recount by every conceivable legal stratagem.
Quite apart from everything else, however, there can be no question that the presidential election of 2000 was decided by what turned out to be a very badly designed means for voters in Palm Beach County, Florida to cast their ballots. This was not a legal but a moral and ethical consideration. Any objective Florida legislator or state supreme court jurist or any objective US Supreme Court jurist should admit that there was an incalculable injustice in anyone concluding that 3411 people in Palm Beach County intended to vote for Pat Buchanan as President. The design of the ballot was a mistake, and an honest mistake, but a presidential election was determined by roughly three thousand improperly punched hanging chads. However, that was never a consideration in the ensuing legal brouhaha.
Forget the fact for the moment that Gore won the popular vote by nearly 450,000 votes. Forget all the other political and legal machinations. Unimpeachable justice should declare that a ballot design error should not be the faulty factor to grant victory to a man who did not truly win the state of Florida, and thus truly should have lost the 2000 election by an Electoral College vote of 291-246, to say nothing about the popular vote. A supreme miscarriage of justice was thrust upon the American people by the US Supreme Court in a 5-4 party-line vote. In essence, George W. Bush won the presidential election of 2000 by one vote. The vote was not cast in any electoral booth anywhere in the country, but in the vaulted hall of the United States Supreme Court. In effect, the vote was Bush 5, Gore 4. Election over. Polarization guaranteed for years to come.
Third, voting matters. Voting REALLY matters. Whether anyone is a Republican, Democrat, independent, or a member of a minority party, every citizen needs to understand that voting is always important. Sometimes, as in the year 2000, it is extremely important. Had Al Gore rather than George W. Bush been the President starting in January of 2001, almost certainly the United States would never have become involved in major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars in which our involvement has not ceased to this day. Our position in the world would be much stronger had the US never initiated those two disastrous wars. There would be much less political polarization had those wars never been initiated.
But of course those observations are all hypothetical.
Fourth, elections have consequences, as has previously been observed. That is what Barack Obama relatively modestly but no doubt happily declared after the election of 2008. (His happiness regarding his observation may have dissipated since November of 2016.) Had Al Gore been elected in 2000, climate change would almost certainly have been A front burner item from then to now, if not The Front-Burner, Number-One political project. Climate change was muted in the George W. Bush administration, and then resurrected in the Obama administration, although not as the primary political project. Climate change has been officially denied by the Trump administration. Elections have consequences.
Fifth, the Electoral College once again showed itself to be a manifestly undemocratic institution. It favors the minority over the majority, which is exactly what the US Constitution intended it to do. It deliberately gives more electoral influence to the less-populated states and less influence to the more-populated states. To put it into modern terminology, it puts more and more people from red states into the driver’s seat and more and more people from blue states into the back seat. The Constitution was written to achieve that specific imbalance by means of the Electoral College, in part.
Clearly the framers of the Constitution could not have foreseen how this would play itself out in late twentieth and early twenty-first century politics. Nevertheless, in order to move beyond the intolerable Articles of Confederation and to establish a moderately strong central government, the signers of the Constitution had to make a very defective compromise with small-state representatives to the Constitutional Convention. They gave the small states more political power than their population warranted. One example of that was the Electoral College. By now you may have deduced that the person writing these words is quite peeved that the Electoral College has last for two hundred and thirty years. It should have been given the political coup de grace when the Bill of Rights was adopted four years after the Constitution, in 1791. Nobody even considered such a reasonable course of action, because the states’ rights state Members of Congress would have refused to pass the Bill of Rights, which would have torpedoed effective American government. Give the little guys the majority, and they will do everything they can to maintain it.
*****.
Sadly, political polarization has come to characterize contemporary American politics. It took more than two centuries to guarantee this result, but the Constitution unwittingly has made that situation inevitable.
Next we shall re-examine how the Election of 2016 provided the best illustration of the worst possible outcome (to date) of the existence of the execrable Electoral College.
John Miller is a writer, author, lecturer, and preacher-for-over-fifty-years who is pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC.