Hundreds of angry people demonstrate in the streets outside a sun-bleached government building. Some wave signs emblazoned “Re-vote Re-vote,” demanding a new presidential election.
Others brandish placards decrying stolen votes and irregularities at the polling place. Surrogates for the two presidential rivals–locked in political limbo until disputed votes are recounted–spew harsh words, threaten lawsuits and lob grenadelike words such as “illegitimate.” Bags of ballots are said to show up belatedly. Prominent citizens begin taking out full-page, bold-faced ads in major newspapers suggesting the Supreme Court may have to come in to settle “THE ELECTION CRISIS.”
Such scenarios are not unfamiliar to Americans. They’re just, well, un-American.
They usually occur in Third World countries, often involving bloodshed and sometimes ending in coups–not on the palm-lined streets of sunny Florida, where the verbal volleys between the warring Bush and Gore camps are escalating and no immediate end to this spectacularly strange situation seems in sight.
For a country that boasts of democracy as its finest export and tranquil transition in top leadership as a model for the world, such an unexpectedly uncertain and uncivil state of affairs has thrown a curve at the American psyche.
How Americans consider their power as voters, how they feel about their political processes and institutions and how they view their country are just a few of the questions this awkward electoral interregnum has raised.
“In terms of the effect on the American psyche–whether it will energize people or demoralize them–it will depend on how the recount works out and the counting of the absentee votes plays out,” said Robert Shapiro, a political scientist at New York’s Columbia University. “I think, at the end of the day, the ultimate effect on the American mind will depend on whether people think the process and the outcome were fair, accurate and legitimate.”
Nearly a week after an election with no clear winner, Americans are bothered and bewildered, but, except for political junkies, hardly bewitched by the ambiguity. Crankiness abounds.
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“I think this election was a big joke. I don’t think I should even bother to vote anymore,” said Rosemary Olson, 61, of Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood.
Olson, who was having a cup of coffee and chain-smoking generic cigarettes at a Bridgeport restaurant, said she had withstood the pain of a “bum knee” while standing in a long line to vote on Tuesday. A supporter of GOP presidential candidate Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Olson said she was dismayed by the lack of a final result.
“It’s very confusing to me,” she said. “I hope my vote made a difference, but I don’t know.”
Peter Palanca, a psychologist at Governors State University in University Park, didn’t know either and fretted about the lack of a swift resolution. “It shakes the notion that if the people vote, we will have an answer–and we don’t need to have that notion shaken,” he said.
He also worried that the situation would further discourage famously apolitical young people from voting. “Rather than make them realize that every vote counts, it has done just the opposite and made them more cynical,” he said. “Their attitude is, `Why bother?'”
Stanley Renshon, a political scientist and psychoanalyst at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, also is concerned about the effects of the current political imbroglio. “It does a lot to us,” he said. “The first thing that comes to mind is that it is deeply and profoundly disorienting. People are bewildered. They are upset. They are agitated. They are shocked, and they are increasingly, I think, getting the feeling that, rather than having been empowered, they are being taken for another long, divisive political ride.”
“I feel very conflicted and out of sorts,” said Leslie Brodie, a mother of two in suburban Long Grove who voted for Vice President Al Gore. “On the other hand, I also think it’s amazing. … In another country, there would be a military coup, but here, the democracy just keeps chugging on.”
Even though the value of a single vote clearly was apparent in this election, Renshon said, “Because the country was so evenly divided, because it was so partisan and because there was such an unclear outcome, any feeling of empowerment people might have had was trumped by those three things.”
Now, like so many other basic institutions and procedures that have come under review and question in this country, particularly since the 1960s, Renshon said, “No longer does an election seem to settle matters, but itself is another institution to contest.”
Linda Draa, of Los Gatos, Calif., hates the tension. “The whole thing is very unsettling,” said Draa, 42, who recalled similar uneasy feelings during her parents’ divorce when she was 8.
“I like knowing someone is at the helm,” she said. “I don’t like the way the Democrats are kicking and screaming. … I just want it to be over. I’m afraid we look foolish to the rest of the world–like we can’t even count our votes.”
Indeed, much of the rest of the world, so often taken to task for political waywardness by a self-righteous America, seems to be wallowing in schadenfreude, glee at the misfortune of another, at America’s expense.
Die Welt, a German daily newspaper, snipped: “A giant empire with 280 million citizens sends voters to the polls to decide who should be the next American president, and both candidates remain in a dead heat in a way we have not seen in elections in Uzbekistan.”
The Mirror, a British tabloid, called America’s electoral dilemma “the sort of thing you would expect from a banana republic.”
On another day, it gloated with a front-page headline “FORREST CHUMPS, U.S. Humiliated in Presidential Shambles.”
Aside from being unflattering, such carping comments are not totally inconsequential because the situation is such an anomaly in modern American politics, Shapiro said. “The one element of danger here is that a lot of allies look to us for a sort of stability and, all of a sudden, at least on the surface, we look uncertain and unstable to them. That might make them concerned about American politics and the ability of Americans to govern themselves and remain engaged in international politics.”
Said Stephen Ansolabehere, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “People are rightly unnerved by this. There’s a lot at stake for Bush and Gore and the people around them. . . . In truth, people don’t know what’s going to happen. We hoped the election would resolve a lot of strife, and it’s not going to do that,” he said.
No matter what happens, he said, “We shouldn’t have any regrets. Come March, we won’t be feeling as uneasy as we do now.”
But not everyone feels uneasy.
“First of all, most people are not that political,” said Neil Wollman, a political psychologist at Indiana’s Manchester College. “Something like 10 percent of the people don’t even know the name of the president at any given time. So, a lot of people are not that concerned.”
For many people, tuning in and out of the televised twists and turns of the proceedings, he said, “is sort of fun. It’s almost like a psycho-drama, in the sense of people supporting one side or another and getting excited about it.”
Moreover, there are plenty of sanguine citizens who have enough faith in the system to sit back and let the chips fall. “Whoever said democracy was easy?” said Ed Kania, 29, a 3rd-grade teacher in Chicago.
“The election has created a lot of discussion, and I think the dialogue is good. In this country things have a way of working themselves out. This will work itself out,” he said at a bowling alley where he and his brothers had just finished playing in a league competition.
Kania’s older brother, Mike, agreed, saying Americans should relax and enjoy the unusual circumstance.
“It’s really the most exciting election ever. I think people are losing sight of that. It’s amazing,” said Mike Kania, 31, a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Although it is too bad that people in Florida weren’t smart enough to figure out how to read the ballot.”
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Jeanne McInerney, a mother of three, is “relishing” the indecision.
“I wish we lived in Florida,” said McInerney, who lives in Flossmoor. “This is history in the making. I love the heightened awareness . . . and the fact that my 9-year-old came home talking about the possibility of a recount in Iowa. I hope it goes on for another week.”