Scrapbook
Scrapbook The Professoriat: The Second Oldest Profession "A theater of distraction and misdirection"—Henry Hyde's elegant phrase, originally used to describe the fatuous defense mounted by...
...Even so, the future of conservative politics in Vermont, if there is one, will depend on how they govern over the next two years...
...Immediately after the law's passage, "Take Back Vermont" signs popped up around the state...
...Dwyer won only 39 percent, failing to match the 41 percent she won against Dean when she challenged him in 1998...
...Goons were hired to threaten goody-goodies and rough up malcontents...
...delay is your friend...
...I think we did as well as any group of people could have done," she told supporters on election night...
...Trivialize the weightiest questions into chat-show fodder...
...In fact, during the tenure of Daley's father, so few irregularities occurred that many precincts routinely reported Democratic vote percentages topping 95 percent...
...Chances for any striking redirection in the state's political culture seem slender, though...
...And in truth it is not academic fashion they have succumbed to here, but the grossest sort of partisan politics...
...Stake out the most outrageous position you can and force your opponents to respond...
...Graveyards were canvassed, too, of course...
...Actually there isn't a very good reason to believe this at all, especially in light of the striking intellectual solecism, "constitutional majority of the popular vote...
...The irony that Bill Daley is overseeing Al Gore's continuing campaign has not, it seems to us, been sufficiently remarked...
...In these pages last spring, Geoffrey Norman and David Orgon Coolidge detailed the various depredations inflicted on the state by a progressive political class—not the least of these being a "civil unions" (read: gay marriage) law rammed through the state legislature over the explicit objections of a majority of Vermonters...
...Election judges were bribed, when bribes were necessary...
...With this ad, they stake claims well beyond those made by most sensible liberals—^by (for example) the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the Times itself...
...But the people of Vermont clearly don't believe what we believe, and we've got to accept that...
...Cook County, Illinois, where Daley was raised, had a long tradition of "four-legged voting...
...We go on to read: "There is good reason to believe that Vice President Gore has been elected President by a clear constitutional majority of the popular vote and the Electoral College...
...Republicans gained at least 12 seats (maybe more, pending recounts), to form a solid majority of 80 members in the 150-seat state house of representatives...
...Less dramatic but still substantial gains were made in the state senate, where a Democratic-progressive majority has fallen to 16-14...
...Now that's regular...
...Surely there's a less dishonest way to audition for a Gore appointment to the Supreme Court...
...There is no such thing, as anyone with a passing knowledge of the Constitution would recognize...
...In four-legged voting, a polling official will physically walk an aged, infirm, confused, or merely reluctant voter into the voting booth to ensure that the vote is correctly cast—or, as Bill Daley might put it, that no "irregularities" occur...
...Advanced Electoral Law his isn't about some numbers game or just simply counting up the ballots...
...Use time as a weapon...
...What of Bruce Ackerman of Yale, and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago, Ronald Dworkin of NYU, and—could it be?— Michael Walzer of Princeton...
...Gore campaign senior adviser Ron Klain, Nov...
...And here they were, making their grand entrance on Friday last week, with the publication in the New York Times of a full-page ad...
...And before too long, bring out the professors...
...The ad, in short, is merely a full-throated reiteration of Democratic talking points—a piece of propaganda— capped by a proposal (new elections) that even the Gore campaign hasn't yet dared make explicit...
...As we go to press, Governor Howard Dean has avoided a runoff against his Republican opponent, Ruth Dwyer, by barely clinging to 50 percent of the vote...
...Take Back (Part of) Vermont The Scrapbook has cultivated a particular interest in Vermont this year...
...Da Son o' da Mare Is Shocked THE Scrapbook thinks it knows why poor Bill Daley shows such distress over those voters who "miscast" their ballots in Palm Beach...
...Exploit the public's (and the press's) ignorance of, and impatience with, constitutional procedure...
...Even more remarkable is the advertisement's closing clarion call for new elections in Palm Beach County...
...9, 2000...
...Play the race card whenever possible (and it's always possible...
...Transient hotels were canvassed for names that could be used as "voters...
...But what of the other names...
...Scrapbook The Professoriat: The Second Oldest Profession "A theater of distraction and misdirection"—Henry Hyde's elegant phrase, originally used to describe the fatuous defense mounted by President Clinton's lawyers during his impeachment trial, kept echoing back to us last week...
...Daley continues to insist, as a loyal son should, that his father was a great man, but it's useful to recall in what precisely the Daley greatness consisted...
...THE ELECTION CRISIS" screamed the headline, and from there the tone grew more portentous, not to say hysterical...
...sophisticates are supposed to remember the Daley era with fondness...
...The new biography of Richard J. Daley, American Pharaoh, offers an interesting summary of the routinized fraud that Daley's machine imposed on his Chicago fiefdom for two decades...
...Not so long ago, these were considered by some serious people to be serious men...
...And so on—all this and more was documented in the Chicago Tribune's famous 1972 expose of local vote fraud, and most of these tricks were used in presidential campaigns, too, including in 1960...
...Nowadays, of course, voting in Chicago as elsewhere is a much more antiseptic exercise, and these "irregularities" are considered merely quaint in retrospect...
...the more they do so, the less outrageous your position will seem, until it appears almost plausible, and then, owing to constant repetition, inevitable...
...This is a technique perfected by employees of Daley's late father, who was himself once active in Cook County politics...
...liberals, to be sure, but liberals of a moderate bent, open to reasonable and deliberative argument, not totally susceptible to the contagions of academic fashion...
...In all but its particulars, the case presented by Vice President Gore's operatives, in the matter of the Florida vote, employed exactly the tactics developed by the president's men during the unpleasantness of 1998 and 1999...
...The members of the new Republican majority in the house might have cause to dispute that assertion...
...She accepted her defeat with characteristic candor...
...That Richard J. Daley's youngest son and most talented protégé can say such a thing with a straight face is perhaps a testament to how far we've come—or, more likely, to how far Bill Daley will go...
...They descend to the level of party hacks, doing the work of desperate and irresponsible pols...
...No wonder that at the bottom of the page one finds such signatories as Bianca Jagger and Rosie O'Donnell and Robert De Niro—this is intellection Hollywood style...
...Voting fraud began on registration day," the biographers write...
...Not that a runoff would matter...
...Republican poll watchers who asked too many questions were detained by police...
...Many pro-civil union legislators lost unexpectedly during the primary in September, and the trend carried into Election Day...
...The tactics are easy to summarize...
...And remember it we should, especially when Bill Daley calls the suddenly famous "butterfly ballots" an "injustice unparalleled in our history," as he did last week...
Vol. 6 • November 2000 • No. 10
