I have a feeling I should know who Peggy Noonan is, but I must confess I don't. I am running her excellent essay on grassroot activism in response to what is happening in Florida - a three-part ZGram - and I shall christen it ". . . and all because of Holocaust survivors", for that is how it started.
The essay is a beauty - low-key, intelligent, responsible, and self-restrained. She calls it "The Greenwood Position":
Now we must fight for our country.
BY PEGGY NOONAN
Friday, November 24, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST
We must fight. And we all know it. And it's fine.
We like to complain, those of us of a certain age, that history has never given us the gaudy challenges it gave our parents and grandparents. But we've had our traumas, and from the time we were children: assassinations, riots, Vietnam, Watergate, the ayatollah, a stuck economy, the fall of the wall. We've had our moments.
And now we face a great trial.
And we're up to it.
So let's go.
There was a national election on Tuesday, Nov. 7. The presidential race was close, and would be decided by the state of Florida. The state's votes were counted. At the end it was close, but George W. Bush won.
A statewide recount was immediately and appropriately called. At the end it was close, but Mr. Bush won.
But the higher reaches of the Democratic Party had a game plan for what to do in case of a close vote in a key state, and their machine went into motion while Republicans slept. Even before the recount was over the outcome was contested.
On the afternoon of Election Day a Texas telemarketing firm is hired to call Democratic voters in Palm Beach County and gin up a protest. They had been disenfranchised. By Wednesday there are charges that a "butterfly" ballot, designed and approved by Democrats and published to no protest in the press, was confusing and thus unfair.
Jesse Jackson is dispatched to Florida, where he charges that Holocaust survivors have been denied a voice. Elderly widows announce they never meant to vote for anyone but Al Gore. An army of Democratic lawyers, political operatives and union members is dispatched; they land in Florida and fan out, immediately assisting in demands for a hand count. Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile announces blacks were kept from the polls with racial harassment and, when that wasn't enough, dogs.
Three Democratic counties in Florida announce they will hand-count. But the rules of the hand count change and change again.
The Florida secretary of state, a Republican elected official, calls a halt. She notes that hand counts are called only when there have been charges of broken machines or vote fraud. Fraud and breakdown were not charged, and did not in fact occur. She says she will certify the election's outcome based on the original vote count and the recount that followed, plus overseas absentee ballots. Mr. Bush will be the victor.
She is immediately smeared by Democratic operatives and in the press. She is a political "hack," a "Stalinist," a "commissar"; she is a vamp, a lackey. The Washington Post, a great newspaper, publishes this description of Mrs. Harris: "Her lips were overdrawn with berry-red lipstick--the creamy sort that smears all over a coffee cup and leaves smudges on a shirt collar. Her skin had been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat. And her eyes, rimmed in liner and frosted with blue shadow, bore the telltale homogeneous spikes of false eyelashes. Caterpillars seemed to rise and fall with every bat of her eyelid, with every downward glance to double check--before reading--her latest 'determination.' " Her mouth is "set in a jagged line." She has "applied her makeup with a trowel." "One wonders how this Republican woman, who can't even use restraint when she's wielding a mascara wand, will manage to . . . make sound decisions."
At the same time the Democratic operative Paul Begala writes his now-famous essay suggesting Republican candidates draw their political strength from murderers, sadists, racists and the killers of innocent children.
Soon a Democratic operative in Washington is revealed to be gathering information on electors who will vote for Mr. Bush in the Electoral College. Why? To use the information to pressure them to vote Mr. Gore's way. It would be surprising to hear that the famous Democratic Party private eyes are not on the electors' trail.
The mainstream press, watching, thinking and facing deadlines, issues its conclusion: Conservatives are guilty of inflammatory rhetoric. Those columnists, writers and public figures who have come forward to oppose what they see as an attempt by Clinton-Gore operatives to steal the 2000 presidential election are denounced as hotheaded and extreme, dismissed as partisan.
The hand counting continues. From the first it is completely open to mischief. In walks mischief.
Ballots for Mr. Bush are put in Gore piles. Scads of chads on the floor. Vote counters can count a partly removed chad, and then an almost-removed chad, and then a mark, a dimple, an indentation, a "pregnancy." Standards are announced, altered, announced and altered again. Questionable ballots are decided by Democratic-dominated canvassing boards.
Sworn statements under oath begin to emerge: Ballots are found with taped chads; ballots are sabotaged, used as fans, found bearing Post-It Notes, dropped, misplaced. Eyewitnesses say there is clear and compelling evidence of distorting, reinventing, miscounting votes. The vote counters--many exhausted and elderly, some state workers dragged off lawnmowers, work 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. shifts in badly lit rooms. A woman from Broward County whose husband is helping the recount writes, "He said it's also frustrating because what we are seeing on the news is quite a bit different from what is actually going on, little chads everywhere and they have no idea where they are coming from."
From the Associated Press, Nov. 18, datelined Palm Beach: "On Saturday [one vote counter] whispered in a pool reporter's ear as she was leaving [the hand-counting room], "I've had it. I'm not coming back. There are some real games going on in here."
And not only in there. From the Miami Herald, Nov. 18: "At least 39 felons--mostly Democrats--illegally cast absentee ballots in Broward and Miami-Dade counties. . . . Their convictions range from murder and rape to drunk driving. One is in the state's registry of sexual offenders."
In the first two weeks there is not a single charge of Republican mischief in the counting rooms. Not a single person comes forward to charge that a Republican has done a single thing that is dubious, untoward or wrong.
How could this be? With hundreds of people making thousands of decisions, is it possible no Democrat would even make up a charge that some Republican had done something wrong? One can't help but infer that Democratic discipline is, as usual, operative. If they add to the charges of corruption, a fair-minded judge might say: Then we must protect both sides and stop the hand counting. But if they stop the hand counting, Democrats will not be able to find 930 votes for Al Gore. And 930 is what he needs.
So no Democratic charges of corruption are leveled or dreamed up.
There is no evidence that the absentee ballots of felons have been challenged.
But the absentee ballots of members of the military were challenged. Many were thrown out.
In the most shameful and painful act of the hand counts, the Democrats on the ground, and their operators from the Democratic National Committee and the state organization and the Gore campaign, deliberately and systematically scrutinized for challenge every military absentee ballot, and knocked out as many as they could on whatever technicality they could find or even invent.
Tomorrow: Part II
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Thought for the Day:
"Fraud is the homage that force pays to reason."
(Charles P. Curtis)
Back to Table of Contents of the Nov. 2000 ZGrams