" A theater of distraction and misdirection" -- Henry Hyde's elegant phrase, originally used to describe the fatuous defense mounted by President Clinton's lawyers during his impeachment trial, kept echoing back to us last week. In all but its particulars, the case presented by Vice President Gore's operatives, in the matter of the Florida vote, employed exactly the tactics developed by the president's men during the unpleasantness of 1998 and 1999.
The tactics are easy to summarize. Use time as a weapon; delay is your friend. Trivialize the weightiest questions into chat-show fodder. Exploit the public's (and the press's) ignorance of, and impatience with, constitutional procedure. Play the race card whenever possible (and it's always possible). Stake out the most outrageous position you can and force your opponents to respond; the more they do so, the less outrageous your position will seem, until it appears almost plausible, and then, owing to constant repetition, inevitable. And before too long, bring out the professors.
And here they were, making their grand entrance on Friday last week, with the publication in the New York Times of a full-page ad. "THE ELECTION CRISIS" screamed the headline, and from there the tone grew more portentous, not to say hysterical. We go on to read: "There is good reason to believe that Vice President Gore has been elected President by a clear constitutional majority of the popular vote and the Electoral College."
Actually there isn't a very good reason to believe this at all, especially in light of the striking intellectual solecism, "constitutional majority of the popular vote." There is no such thing, as anyone with a passing knowledge of the Constitution would recognize. Even more remarkable is the advertisement's closing clarion call for new elections in Palm Beach County.
The ad, in short, is merely a full-throated reiteration of Democratic talking points -- a piece of propaganda -- capped by a proposal (new elections) that even the Gore campaign hasn't yet dared make explicit. No wonder that at the bottom of the page one finds such signatories as Bianca Jagger and Rosie O'Donnell and Robert De Niro -- this is intellection Hollywood style. But what of the other names? What of Bruce Ackerman of Yale, and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago, Ronald Dworkin of NYU, and -- could it be? -- Michael Walzer of Princeton?
Not so long ago, these were considered by some serious people to be serious men; liberals, to be sure, but liberals of a moderate bent, open to reasonable and deliberative argument, not totally susceptible to the contagions of academic fashion. And in truth it is not academic fashion they have succumbed to here, but the grossest sort of partisan politics. With this ad, they stake claims well beyond those made by most sensible liberals -- by (for example) the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the Times itself. They descend to the level of party hacks, doing the work of desperate and irresponsible pols. Surely there's a less dishonest way to audition for a Gore appointment to the Supreme Court.