Sunday, December 17, 2000

By Dennis B. Roddy, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

For generations, the two-party system in Washington had operated much like the Viking conception of Valhalla: fight by day, drink together at night.

No scholar of government expects the per capita consumption of alcohol to decline appreciably during the next four years, but neither are there any illusions that the next federal budget will include appropriations for a mead hall where daylight foes can relish the camaraderie of happy warriors.

	The White House Awaits / George W. Bush will be inaugurated president of the United States on Jan. 20, 2001. Robert F. Bakaty, Associated Press)

"If they do drink, it's not with people across the aisle. They don't just oppose one another; they really don't like one another," said Bert Rockman, a political scientist from the University of Pittsburgh.

The partisan rancor of the past 25 years began with the bitterness of the Watergate scandals, polarized into ideological warfare in the Reagan '80s, and seemed to culminate in an almost otherworldly pursuit of President Clinton in an impeachment trial that pivoted on public lies about sex.

Then came the presidential election of 2000, which brought power battles to a new and litigious level unmatched even in the bumptious days of Andrew Jackson. The discrepancy between the popular vote and the Electoral College results has put public faith in our democratic system to the test, and offered a display of the major parties battling over who gets the prize.

"What politics is all about is a struggle for power, not a struggle between different ways of doing public policy. I think voters will come away from this more cynical. The way it's been handled has not been good," said Paul Beck, an expert on the presidency and elections at Ohio State University.

The inconsistencies in each side's argument over what ballots should have been counted in Florida gave the clearest signal that Election 2000, in the end, was less about democracy than about winning, say political scientists.

Republican George Bush, for instance, had insisted that hand recounts of punch-card ballots stepped outside the mandated rules of using machines to tally those votes. At the same time, Bush's forces sued to include overseas ballots that failed to meet the election code requirement of having a postmark.

Democrat Al Gore spent a month insisting solemnly that the point of elections is to make certain every vote is counted. Yet he did not intervene or publicly protest Democratic lawsuits aimed at throwing out not only some overseas ballots, but every absentee ballot in two counties, because Republican election workers might have fixed incorrectly filled-out applications.

"We're in the 30th day of 'Boys Behaving Badly,' " said Curtis Gans, director of the non-partisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. "It does something to how Americans view partisan politics. They can come out of this experience with a unique insight into how things work. But they can't come out of this experience with any positive feelings."

One term president?

George W. Bush arrives as president of the United States as a runner-up in the popular vote, with a deep need to establish a mandate not only with the electorate, but also with the Congress his own party ostensibly controls.

Rockman, an expert on the presidency, was the first to author an appraisal of the presidency of the elder George Bush -- a tome that examined the president's first two years and his prospects for the future. With Bush's son, George W. Bush, set to ascend to the nation's highest office, Rockman is already set to offer an appraisal of his presidency:

"One term."

That prognosis has nothing to do with the younger Bush's party or lineage or program. Rockman had the same assessment for an Al Gore presidency.

The sense among experts in and out of government, scholars and ward heelers alike, is unmistakable: The presidency has arrived late and has been damaged in the shipping.

After eight years of trench warfare in which Democrats and Republicans stalled on executive appointments, let ambassadorships go empty, impeached a president and, at one point, managed to close down the federal government, the presidency won in 2000 was unlikely to produce either landmark legislation or enough momentum to propel its winner into a second term.

Because the election will now make governance more difficult, the experts say, it will only add to the deepening disillusion by citizens toward politics and democracy.

Even some political partisans viewed the results with such trepidation that they weren't certain whom they wanted to win.

"You don't know what your prayers ought to be," said Robert Keenan, a Republican from Mt. Lebanon who worried that a Bush win would merely be a presage to a discredited presidency. "You pray for the country."

Need for compromise

One scholar of the presidency, Emmett H. Buell Jr., a political scientist at Denison University, said an evenly split Senate and a House with a pencil-thin, nine-vote Republican majority will likely leave the president unable to win approval of major legislation.

Both Buell and Rockman say Bush will need to reach across party lines to put any of his agenda into motion. And even though Bush continues to emphasize his bipartisan legacy in Texas, the remaining bitterness from the struggle between die-hard supporters on each side during the electoral challenge may undermine his goal.

Both Bush and Gore needed to reach out to the other party early in the post-election challenges if either wanted to arrive in office with a working agenda that had a chance of succeeding. But to reach out would have required the language of compromise, and that could have undercut their strength with the party advocates they needed to pursue their challenges.

Historians point to previous "runner-up" presidencies, noting that John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison all served in weakened presidencies and did not get re-elected.

Buell, the Denison political scientist, warned against drawing this conclusion. While Bush will face a bitterly partisan atmosphere in Washington, Buell said, the presidency during the days of Adams, Hayes and Harrison was a far different institution, with neither the bully pulpit of instant communication, nor being chief executive of the world's preeminent nation.

"You can't just pluck things out of historical context and assume there will be a weak executive," Buell said.

There are opportunities

Buell's thoughts were echoed by Gilbert Robinson, executive director of the non-partisan Center for the Study of the Presidency in Washington.

The center earlier this year drew up a first-ever blueprint called, "A Report to the President-Elect," explaining the failures and successes of past presidencies. The hope was to overcome what the center sees as a lack of institutional memory in the office of the presidency, where leaders and staffs change wholesale and one administration often repeats a precursor's political and administrative errors.

The problem the center had last month was whom to mail the report to.

"We were going to present it the day after the election," Robinson said. "We eventually decided to send it to both of them."

Robinson is convinced that, if Bush is able to focus on an obvious public yearning for "this thing to be over," he can fashion a popular mandate and move at least some modest legislation through Congress.

"There's a lot of talk about how crippled the guy's going to be, but there's a lot of opportunity for leadership," Robinson said.

One bit of entree to legislators for the new president was laid out by a Democratic moderate, Louisiana Sen. John Breaux, who suggested Bush step forward with an education reform package. The topic appeals to the public in general and might be routed around hardline partisan bickering.

Modest foreign policy

Foreign policy, which has operated largely in the shadows of economic issues during the eight years of the Clinton presidency, is an area in which a new president will have little choice but to act.

But the current Republican foreign policy agenda is in some ways non-interventionist. The GOP has eschewed a continuing American troop presence in the former Yugoslavia, has demanded a limit to military actions in other arenas and appears less enthusiastic than Gore was to force a settlement in the Middle East.

So foreign policy, at this juncture, does not seem to be the formula for an activist presidency.

Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate spent the final days of the election challenge assembling the leaders of their respective caucuses and talking bravely of the future.

Barbara Mikulski, the Maryland Democrat, referred to the Bush win as "a TKO" -- boxing language for a technical knockout, a contest halted by a referee after a subjective assessment of irreversible damage.

Whether such damage has been inflicted on the public's faith in elections remains to be seen.

Gans, who has studied voter turnout most of his career, noted that about 51 percent of the eligible public voted in the 2000 general election. That is up from four years ago, but given the fourth-closest popular vote in this century, the numbers are hardly encouraging.

"It doesn't speak to an engaged electorate," he said.

Robinson, a former ambassador, said individual states may consider updating the mechanics of their voting. A constitutional amendment would be required to enable nationwide voting reforms.

He noted that one nation cast nearly 100 million ballots recently and managed to assemble a credible, electronic count within hours. It was Brazil.

While recent events have thrown doubt on the usefulness of the Electoral College system, it is likely to remain.

Changing it would require a constitutional amendment, approved by two-thirds of the states, and the scholars said smaller states would hesitate at giving up their disproportionate influence on the process.

Voting reforms

"We really need to dedicate ourselves to cleaning up the administration of elections, and not just in Florida, but everywhere," said Beck, the Ohio State scholar.

One solution would be technological. Punch-card voting has now shown itself to be vulnerable to error. Some experts have suggested federal funding to upgrade the technology of the nation's polling places.

A broader solution to assure that future presidents go into office with at least a plurality of the popular vote has been advanced by Gans and several other scholars, and it could be done without constitutional amendments.

Two states, Nebraska and Maine, already distribute their electors proportionally. Under one reform plan, a state's electors would be awarded by congressional district, with the winner in each congressional district getting that elector. The state's two additional electors, one for each senator, would go to the popular vote winner statewide.

But, warns Gans, "it isn't going to happen unless there is a degree of bipartisanship."

After Florida, the omens are not good.

In 1943, a moment of uncertainty far greater than the interlude that visited Americans this fall, the War Writers Board asked E.B. White to give them a few lines on "the meaning of democracy."

The request came less than 100 years after Americans' perception of their republic had shifted from the modified aristocracy of the Founding Fathers to a certainty that presidential electors were meant to be chosen by popular vote.

White had little patience with easy answers, and his reply was as intuitive as it was tart:

"Surely the board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the word 'don't' in don't shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time."

No one knows for certain precisely how many people voted for the new president, or how right they might have been.

What is certain is that amid the shoving in the hallways outside the Dade County elections office and the legalisms poured out before courts by lawyers for Gore and Bush, the top-hat of the Republic has taken a dent.

How deep the damage is will only be known after George W. Bush and his successors have a chance to try it on, and the nation can judge how well it fits.

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