- Included among the Political Analysis Posts List.
- I wonder how a Presidential resignation and the Supreme Court decision like the one in the 2000 Election would be viewed in today’s political climate.
Martin Winfree
December 14, 2018
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Shared with Public
POLITICAL ANALYSIS, PART IX:
Anytime a national election appeared on the horizon, we in the College Republicans would get each other all worked up with fears that “this could be our last free election” if so-and-so isn’t elected President. Even though we didn’t think much of Richard Nixon, at least he wasn’t Hubert Humphrey (Nixon defeated him in the 1968 election) or George McGovern (Nixon defeated him in the 1972 election).
By the time 1976 rolled around, Nixon had resigned, and Vice President Gerald Ford had ascended to the Presidency. I was drifting away from the Republican Party at that time, and even though I liked Ford, kind of, Jimmy Carter didn’t scare me at all. I began to think that the whole “this could be our last free election” thing was kind of silly.
By the late 1980’s, real estate appraisers like me had sophisticated computer software available that helped us value complicated properties. We would make 10-year projections routinely if doing so made sense; I remembered how the year 2000 marched up the list of years until all of the years started with “20”. The republic seemed to be safe from whatever politicians were running it, and our future seemed to be secure.
Anyway, I had seen Gerald Ford when he appeared at a 1966 rally for Republican Congressional candidate Fred Steele in 1966 while I was in high school – I believe that he was the Minority Leader of the House at that time – and I got his autograph on one of Steele’s pamphlets, consciously or unconsciously, so that the signature could be dated. I guess that I have always thought like a collector; when I went to college, Mom had a stamp pad that she used to start applying my name to the front covers of my record albums. I reacted with horror with how it looked after awhile and made her stop; if I lost some of my albums, so be it, but I didn’t want them to be defaced.
Until I looked it up just now, I had thought that the Fred Steele / Gerald Ford rally happened a lot later; at this point (1966), I was in the Teenage Republicans. I remember that rally very well, although otherwise, I don’t recall too much about my years as a “TAR”. One of the members of the club was a high school friend named Karen Nielsen. She was in the Miss Winston-Salem pageant around that time (I haven’t been able to pin down the exact date); and because of that, and also because there was a rock band who would perform there that I had heard of called the Royal Guardsmen (of “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” fame), I decided to go to my first and last beauty pageant, where Karen was named Miss Congeniality.
I have written about the concert appearance by the Royal Guardsmen in one of my Under Appreciated Rock Band posts – that is where my real passion lies. It can be found on my now fully indexed website: https://underappreciatedrockbands.com/chronicles/underappreciatedrockbands/home.html (shameless plug! 
).
Another thing I remember about being a Teenage Republican is that the 1966 Congressional Elections represented a banner year for the Republican Party – just two years after Lyndon Johnson had defeated Barry Goldwater so handily. I felt vindicated by the news, and I went to the trouble of looking up every Republican member of Congress who had won election that year – I am pretty sure that it was all of them, not just the new ones.
Over the course of my life, I have often started a variety of projects that ballooned into something much more massive than what I had envisioned. Creating, linking and indexing 10,000 webpages in my website – imagine what that was like! Usually I just keep it up no matter what, until I run out of money or just get completely overwhelmed.
When my Mom showed me how to use her Royal typewriter (I was probably 8 or 9 years old at the time), I was having such a good time typing (two fingers at that time) that I decided to type up the telephone book! I never went that far, but I did type up the listings for the small town of King that were given in a separate section; about all I remember is that many of those people were living in a place called Tobaccoville, which struck me as being a funny name for a town. Mom loved to tell this story about me and then add that we didn’t know anybody who lived in King! Many years later, in 1986, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company constructed its largest cigarette manufacturing plant in Tobaccoville, containing 2 million square feet.
Anyway, there was no Internet then of course, so I guess I went to the library and found the information somehow. I created little freehand tables listing the Republicans in Congress that won in 1966 by state (and probably with the states listed alphabetically – that sounds like me! ), and I am pretty sure that I provided their opponents in the races and the percentage vote totals. By the time I was through, I had pages and pages of information. And I didn’t have any idea what to do with them. Maybe I was able to get credit in my social studies class somehow, but I kind of doubt it. My best recollection is that I showed them to my one of my favorite members of the high school faculty, math teacher Linda Farrar; and she asked me if she could keep them. Copying machines were pretty primitive in those days also, so I guess I didn’t even keep a copy for myself.
Watergate was a major betrayal of trust exhibited by our nation’s leaders, and there have been several more since then. While I don’t think they said this publicly very much, I heard Republican operatives talk about how the parties spied on each other all the time, and that this was no big deal. I swallowed it a little back then, but definitely not now.
The idea that Russia, of all nations, might be attempting to sway the 2016 Presidential election – and actually had developed the technology and the skills to have a shot at making that happen – was terrifying to me. From the beginning, Trump has taken the idea that someone ought to look into this as a personal affront. I never really understood that; as far as I know, no one was saying that Trump had somehow stolen the election – and after all, no matter what someone thought they had proved or demonstrated about collusion or anything else, who is going to be able to apply that to how the votes were cast in X county in Y state? There is sure not going to be a do-over. At some point, I said in a Facebook post that I wished that there was no talk at all about any collusion, so that Trump would take this more seriously.
I will say this though: I have mentioned before that there never seems to be any accountability in this country for the people at the top. After Nixon resigned, Ford immediately pardoned him of any and all Watergate-related crimes; while I can see the logic in that, to help the country heal and all of that, the result is that Nixon went back home from the White House with little more than hurt feelings.
Here is what happened another time, with regard to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India, the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, their first prime minister: “On 12 June 1975, the Allahabad High Court declared Indira Gandhi’s election to the Lok Sabha in 1971 void on grounds of electoral malpractice. In an election petition filed by her 1971 opponent, Raj Narain (who later on defeated her in 1977 parliamentary election from Raebareli), alleged several major as well as minor instances of using government resources for campaigning. The court ordered her stripped of her parliamentary seat and banned from running for any office for six years. According to constitution, the Prime Minister must be a member of either the Lok Sabha (the lower house in the Parliament of India) or a member of the Rajya Sabha (the upper house). Thus, this decision effectively removed her from office.”
The story is a little more complicated than how I remembered it; Indira Gandhi refused to resign, even though she had no standing to be prime minister, but she later lost the 1977 elections.
Anyway, Richard Nixon’s resignation from the Presidency on August 8, 1974 – when impeachment was on his doorstep – was unprecedented. Not only had that never happened before, I doubt that there was even anything in the Constitution or in Federal law to cover something like that. I remember news broadcasts at that time where reporters talked about driving by the White House and the Capitol on the day when the Presidency passed from Richard Nixon to Gerald Ford. It was just an ordinary day: no riots in the streets, no protestors demanding this or that, no barricades at the gates (that would come later of course following concerns about possible terrorist attacks on major governmental buildings). Reporters who had had assignments overseas marveled at how unlikely this would be in nearly any other country – that some amount of tension would surely be present, and how it might have been a whole lot worse.
Then there was the rollercoaster ride during the 2000 election, where George W. Bush was eventually declared the winner. While there was and continues to be a fair amount of grumbling about the whole thing, the decision was reluctantly but graciously accepted by Al Gore and his supporters. This is one of several elections recently where the electoral vote and the popular vote were at odds. It was probably my high school paper on the 1964 election and the upcoming 1968 election where I talked about this – I forget the name of that one; it was something boring like The Republican Party: 1960-1968, unlike the catchier Who Will Win scrawled across a simple map of the states that I used in junior high school.
The idea is that the electoral vote allows a close election to look like more of a mandate than using the popular vote. I looked back over the Presidential elections going all the way back, and there had only been a handful of times where the popular vote was won by one nominee, and the electoral vote was won by a different nominee.
Also, with respect to the popular vote, there have also been several elections recently where no one got a majority; if that happened in a Senate race or an election for Governor, there would usually be a runoff. No one wants to see that on the Presidential level.
Al Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election, and if he had carried his home state of Tennessee, we would not be talking about that election so much. Not for the first (or last) time, Florida was the key state; and actually, all of the major networks had awarded the state of Florida to Gore early on based on exit polls. In summary, Al Gore narrowly won the popular vote, 48.4% to 47.9%; and George W. Bush narrowly won the electoral value, 271 to 266 – but only because the famous Supreme Court case of Bush vs. Gore halted the recount in Florida on December 12, 2000, just over one month after election day.
The official voting margin in Florida was just 537 votes, or 0.009%. However, voting recounts were still in progress in several heavily Democratic counties before the 5–4 Supreme Court decision. And you no doubt remember the “butterfly ballots” and “hanging chads” that both complicated the Florida recount and cast doubt on the results.
Here is something that I hadn’t known (or at least remembered): One of the third parties in 2000 was the Reform Party, with Pat Buchanan being the nominee; and one of the other candidates for that nomination was Donald Trump. Buchanan himself weighed in on the butterfly ballot controversy by saying that his vote totals where those ballots were used had been much higher than he could really believe were votes that had been intended for him. There was controversy about the Florida ballots in the 2018 Elections also, where in some areas, the section listing the candidates for the Senate race was buried after the voting instructions, where many voters evidently overlooked casting a vote in that race.
The personalities involved made the 2000 Election look like something that had happened in a “banana republic” rather than the United States. The Governor of Florida at that time, Jeb Bush was the brother of the man who won the disputed recount, George W. Bush. Also, Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State of Florida, who was in charge of running the election machinery, was also the head of the Bush campaign in Florida. This is the first time in my memory where a State Secretary of State had an overt political role, but it certainly hasn’t been the last. In the contentious Georgia Gubernatorial Election of 2018, where a lawsuit is pending, the sitting Georgia Secretary of State, Brian Kemp was running as the Republican Nominee for Governor.
While I am still not really worried that the next election might be the last free election or something, I do wonder how a Presidential resignation and the Supreme Court decision like the one in the 2000 Election would be viewed in today’s political climate. Somehow, I don’t think it would go down nearly so smoothly as occurred in 1974 and in 2000.