A Day at the Races

A Day at the Races
America veers toward Marxism. If only Groucho were still alive.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, November 16, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST

By now, about the only redeeming aspect of the election furor over Florida is the sheer weirdness of it all. I can't say I enjoy seeing a presidential election reduced to ballot-box burlesque. But if there's no way for most of us to mop up the mess, why not at least have a few laughs about it?

This seems to be the attitude that is getting most Americans through this bizarre stint in what feels like some virtual waiting room of the world's greatest democracy. Electoral war may be raging amid the hanging chads of Florida, but for most of the 94 million or so voters elsewhere, it has become largely a constant background mutter, too important to ignore but too confusing to follow closely. People have been cooking and drinking and driving to the rhythm of legal lingo and recount bulletins.

The past few days have been all about that three-digit lead for George W. Bush in Florida, roller-coasting up and down a couple of dozen votes almost by the hour--but ahead of Al Gore, who with nothing to lose has let loose the furies of manual recounts and court orders and disputes over counts of recounts. All this comes by now encased in TV special reports with the kind of titles I expect at this point to see on next year's roster of Hollywood horror movies: You can run, but you can't hide from The Florida Recount!

Beyond bringing us the basic political tussle, this round-the-clock bombardment has also been bringing out both the best and the worst of the information age. From the networks' premature calls on election night, followed by the past week's fantastic voyage through the minds of the Florida electorate, we can witness every gasp, lunge and logo of what CNN keeps advertising as "Race Too Close to Call." Modern technology lets us hear hourly from the lawyers, writhe over the sight of vote counters squinting their way through thousands of ballots, and live the digit-by-digit suspense of each new vote total. If you have any opinion at all about which gent ought to be president, it is a fascinating new form of torture by numbers.

But the information age also provides its ways for the common man to cope--at least in the short run--with that frustrating sense that we are watching politicians try to hijack what is supposed to be our election. Citizens have been taking to their e-mail, by turns ridiculing, reasoning and offering solutions.

Our office computer system was hit election night by a virus--the "presidential virus," what else?--so I have been wary of opening e-mail attachments. But a few risks here and there have brought such teasers as the parody "dummy ballots." There is a version revised for Republicans, with one arrow pointing straight to Mr. Bush, and an impossible spaghetti of arrows for Mr. Gore, Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader. There is another ballot revised to please Democrats, with all votes defaulting to Mr.Gore.

There are interactive sites. Many computer users have had the option to "slap Hillary." More to the point has been the emblematic site that says, "Tired of the election mess? Distort the future president!"--and offers a chance to drag a mouse across photos of both contenders and stretch them--rather like a manual recount of ballots--into almost any shape you want.

There has also been a steady flow of ideas for ways to get the thing over with. One Wall Street Journal reader wrote in last week suggesting the candidates settle matters with a duel to the death--something that, assuming we get a winner, has not only historical precedent but the advantage that the other guy can't demand a replay. An e-mail message urges that the loser simply form a government-in-exile, in the manner of, say, the Jacobites.

An odd silver lining is that the inventive approach has become a sudden opening for closet history buffs to flaunt their stuff. I'm not talking only about the folks versed in, say, the presidency of Rutherford Hayes. From a computer whiz I know comes the information that the Roman Republic had two consuls, "who shared executive command." Unfortunately, adds this fellow, the system ran into trouble when the two consuls got around to alternating command in battle, as happened in 216 B.C.: "Lucius Aemilius Paulus, the more experienced consul, shadowed Hannibal's invading army, but was wise enough not to engage it. Gaius Tarentius Varro, the younger consul, thought his colleague was a wimp,and on a day he commanded, boldly led the army to its annihilation at the battle of Cannae."

Trying to keep track of who is recounting what, how the numbers add up, and who is suing whom, I start to wonder if we should just list the assorted permutations of recounts and legal actions, and then hold a national referendum on which we like most--though this by now risks something on the order of a 1,000-way deadlock, and then think of the recount possibilities. A friend notes that the real crisis may come if both candidates realize just how damaged a presidency they may be fighting over, change tune and try simultaneously to concede.

Other e-mails urge a parallel recount of baseball's World Series, going back to 1919; and of all previous presidential elections in which fine-tuning in states with close races might have changed the Electoral College totals and produced a different outcome. Most of these past candidates are dead, but then again, so was the winner in last week's Missouri Senate race.

The New York Times weighed in Tuesday with what the editor of this Web site, James Taranto, describes in an in-house note as "some kind of first: a poll asking voters their presidential preference a week after the election." Notes James, "It turns out that a very good predictor of who people think should be president is . . . how they voted."

Out there somewhere are those absentee ballots, wending their way with a Friday deadline toward the fray. The notion that the decisive votes might currently be in the care of the U.S. Postal Service is, frankly, not one that a world looking to America for leadership should find reassuring.

From a British friend in Hong Kong comes yet another solution, entitled, "Notice of Revocation of Independence." The message informs us that "In light of your failure to elect a President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today. Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchial duties."

You know, I love this country. But the way it's going--hey, Liz, lotsa luck.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."