How about calling in UN Observers to monitor the Florida election recount? In any other country in the world you’d call it a coup when the popular choice is undone by the rejection of nineteen thousand mysterious ballots. Not to mention that it happened in his opponent’s brother’s state. Here we call it a representative democracy and the way our electoral system works. But what’s the true test of authenticity and legitimacy in an election like this one where the next president could govern with a permanent asterisk, and when he may not be empowered to do anything more than give Rose garden tours and attend state funerals?
Maybe an illegitimate president is the natural sequel to an unnatural sex scandal in the Oval office, and maybe the price we’ll have to pay is harassment and ridicule from talk radio shock jocks and a nation of nation of angry voters. The curiouser and curiouser election of 2000 is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Jeffrey Rosen, writer on legal affairs for the New Yorker and the New Republic and author of “The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America”
Ralph Nader, Green Party Presidential Candidate
Walter Dean Burnham.