http://beldar.blogs.com/beldarblog/2003/09...id_al_gore.htmlWhy did Al Gore agree with Jack Kennedy on the Electoral College?
The single best book I've ever read about politics is probably Master of the Senate, Robert A. Caro's third volume in an anticipated four-part biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, which I recommend without hesitation to anyone regardless of personal politics. However, I'm enjoying another recent biography that I'm about mid-way through — Robert Dallek's An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963.
One can't help but cross-reference anecdotes from this sort of biography against more current events, and this passage from Dallek's book retriggered a question that has lingered in my mind since the Presidential Election of 2000:
| QUOTE |
Jack certainly hoped that Profiles [in Courage, his Pulitzer Prize-winning book from 1956,] would identify him with uncompromising political responses to national dangers. He yearned for a challenge that would give him an opportunity to act like a political hero.
The best he could find was a congressional proposal to reform the electoral system. Jack took up the cudgels against what he described as "one of the most far-reaching — and I believe mistaken — schemes ever proposed to alter the American constitutional system. No one knows with any certainty what will happen if our electoral system is totally revamped as proposed." Jack emphasized how well the existing electoral system had worked to ensure the influence of the popular vote, the two-party system, and "the large-State-small-State checks-and-balances system." The proposed amendment, which he feared could destabilize American politics at a time of grave foreign challenges, was nothing voters had demanded or even knew about. Although Jack gave a lengthy, authoritative Senate speech that contributed to the defeat of the amendment, his opposition hardly registered on the press or the public; reform of the electoral college was an invisible controversy. |
JFK, of course, ended up winning the Presidency in 1960 by a rat's whisker in the national popular vote — 113,000 votes more than Nixon out of the 68 million ballots cast — but by a far more comfortable 303-219 margin in the Electoral College.
I've often wondered, however, why Al Gore and his supporters did not mount a more sustained attack on the Electoral College after the 2000 election, when Gore won the popular vote but lost in the electoral vote. I give Gore considerable credit for resisting this temptation. Indeed, I recall both that he expressed support for the Electoral College system as he was finally conceding defeat, and that he behaved impeccably in performing his own role under the Twelfth Amendment as President of the Senate in opening all the certificates from the various states to permit the counting of the electoral votes that made Dubya the new President.
Still, given the intense personal venom of the Angry Left at Dubya and everything connected with his election in 2000, I'm frankly surprised that MoveOn.org or some other sloganeering and rabble-rousing organization hasn't targeted the Electoral College. In this era of sound-bite politics, even moreso than when JFK was in the Senate, the reasons to support the Electoral College system of electing our Presidents are awfully complicated. By contrast, there is exactly one extremely simple (if simplistic) reason to abolish it — that is, it's anti-democratic (small d), at least in a macroscopic sense.
I certainly don't mean to rule out the possibility that Gore's support, like JFK's, was genuinely principled. But I'm curious: does anyone see any practical and pragmatic reasons why Gore and other liberals (with the exception of the Staten Island Democratic Association) haven't attacked the Electoral College system with great relish and vigor?
The Electoral College was an appeasement to the landowning rich when they wrote the Constitution as a way to dilute the people's vote for President. Very few times in history has a candidate won the electoral college and not the popular vote. There have been dozens of amendment propositions over the years but the Electoral College remains untouched. Gore probably didn't want to seem as if he wanted to change it just for his benefit because of what happened in 2000. Afterall I believe he did win the Electoral Votes in Florida afterall. (As we all do.)
If it had been the Republicans who lost the Electoral College and won the popular vote then there probably would have been an outcry to change it. I remember reading where if that were to happen the Republicans would have tried to impeach Gore.
Actually, my understanding of the origins of the Electoral College are a bit different. At the time, our country was made up of 13 large and small states, each protective and jealous of their own and each other's rights and powers, and each suspicious of a centralized government. The fear was that the most populous states would determine who would be President, or, that states would fall prey to the "favorite son" syndrome (which, of course, still exists today). The Electoral College was designed to balance out some of the inherent inequities in the system.
I agree with Erin, that Gore probably didn't want to appear to be changing things for his own benefit. If nothing else, through his years of service and throughout the nightmare of 2000, Gore showed himself to have tremendous respect for the laws of this land (unlike some people who shall remain nameless). I believe that Gore thinks the system works. He reveres it. And I think it also showed his dignity and pride in not trying to alter something that has stood for hundreds of years, just for his own benefit. No matter how wrong he thought the decision of the Supreme Court was (and he made no bones about that), he said he would respect it, for the sake of respecting the law, and for the sake of his country.
What a guy.