Twas election night all over again. The halls were decked, the pundits were quacking, Democrats said Florida was still too close to call. By the Sunday 5 p.m. deadline, the counting still wasn’t done, but in a dramatic signing ceremony at 7:30, secretary of state Katherine Harris certified George W. Bush the winner by 537 votes. But even as Bush asked Dick Cheney to head a transition team and named Andrew Card his chief of staff, the Democratic faithful were primed to fight on–especially after Harris decided to leave out the results of the hand count Palm Beach canvassers stayed up all night to produce. “How can we teach our children that every vote counts if we are not willing to make a good-faith effort to count every vote?” asked Al Gore’s running mate Joe Lieberman. “Vice President Gore and I have no choice but to contest these actions.” But the Bush team was determined to seize the moment. “At some point there must be closure,” said Bush adviser James Baker. “At some point the lawyers must go home. We have reached that point.” The Sunday deadline had lost some of its magic power to conjure a President, because by that time both sides had loosed upon the world armies that were hard to call back. It was eye for an eye, lawsuit for lawsuit; the candidates were fighting on every front because at different times during the week each found his back against the wall. Optimists in both camps still talked about how they would reach out to the other side when it was all over, like the World War I infantrymen who played soccer on Christmas Day before going back to their trenches to try to kill each other again. But neither side had any idea how to reach an armistice. As for the rest of us, Americans had been patient, understanding that a close race may take time to sort out. But by last week the conduct had become so reckless that patience required some courage and faith; reasoned arguments about fairness were drowned out by angry mobs charging that Gore was “the Commander in Thief,” a “chad molester,” even as Democrats charged that Bush would burn down the White House before he’d let Gore live in it. The uniform code of conduct in a democracy–the assumption of good faith that allows politicians to quarrel one day and compromise the next–was sacrificed to the reality that only one of these men can be President, that there is no middle ground. Each man was so sure he was right that he had a duty to try to win at all costs. And so the costs kept rising.
