THE COUP CONTINUES

It’s getting to be pretty clear now what some people believe is the upshot of the razor-thin election result: George W. Bush may get to take the oath of office, but he doesn’t actually get to be president. Two liberal polemics highlight the trend. In today’s New York Times, Harvard professor Michael Sandel simply comes out and says it: ‘Even setting aside the dispute over Florida, the fact that Mr. Bush lost the popular vote means he cannot claim a mandate for a conservative agenda, or for the appointment of ideological proponents who would carry it out.’ In the New Yorker, Rick Hertzberg previews this argument. He says that Gore not only won the national vote but the Florida vote and that Dick Cheney only has the deciding vote in the Senate because of the ‘judicial fiat’ of the U.S. Supreme Court handing the election to Bush. (I wonder how many times Rick has used the term ‘judicial fiat’ when it has advanced an agenda he agrees with?) So having tried to use the popular vote argument to rig a vote recount to hand Florida to Gore, some liberals now want to use the same argument to strip the president of his rightful, constitutional prerogatives in picking whom he wants in his cabinet. Yes, the Senate has a say. But the Senate doesn’t have the right to de facto staff a president’s administration without violating separation of powers. And the point of presidential prerogative is not to undermine electoral legitimacy but to deepen it. A president, after all, is accountable to the electorate in four years’ time. So are his party’s congressional representatives in a mere two years’ time. Maybe it’s inadvisable for a president to appoint a fire-breather to Justice after such a close election. But that’s his call. Besides, if you don’t give the president the freedom to pick his own people, how can he be held accountable for their performance? How, indeed, can we have any real democratic accountability? This is what is at stake here and if Bush doesn’t knock this down now, only more trouble will ensue. Part of W’s agenda, in my view, should be to end the notion of a permanent campaign in which electoral politics infects everything in government, and in which special interest groups dominate how that electoral politics is pursued. There needs to be time and space for the man to govern in his own way with his own judgement. Then there will be space and time for the rest of us to judge. That space and time are critical elements in the proper functioning of a republic. More than W’s success is at stake if we let the sore losers extinguish them.