On tuesday at lunch with my theatre workshop colleagues, one of the participants remarked how the election outcome in the states could only be discouraging -- either Gore or Bush. I suggested there was a third possibility: an unresolved dead heat that would result in recounts and legal challenges. It was not a prediction that this _would_ happen, only an observation that if it _did_ happen it would be an event that has the potential to lay bare the machinations and evasions of "the system". It happened. Today, the responsibility of progressives is above all to recognize that a new era has begun. The design of the electoral system in the U.S. has become the issue. As Bush campaign chairman Don Evans inadvertently confirmed, that system has been elaborately designed with the intention of de-politicizing "democracy". Ralph Nader campaigned on the issue of the un-democratic design of the electoral system. The protest against corporate campaign funding and the exclusive two-party debates is a matter of record. On that record hinges the margin of difference between an system-affirming outcome and a critical one. Candidates Gore and Bush were both products of an arcane and manipulative primary circus, designed more than anything else to produce a cypher-candidate whose message could be marketed to a demographic target on an electoral college grid. That process inevitably produces a _massage_ that is (pardon the loaded image) the gestalt of political evasion. The Palm Beach ballot is perhaps an accident, but an accident that expresses the arrogance and ineptitude of the political apparatchiki in the U.S. As Joel Blau pointed out, the obsolescence of voting machines in Palm Beach is symptomatic of a much broader refusal to invest in public infrastructure. What matters in the U.S. system is the manipulation of the outcome, not the counting of the votes. The politically evasive and technologically obsolete electoral system in the U.S. has melted down. Don't be suprised to hear, repeated over and over, that everything is under control. That's what they have to say. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
