LET him have it.
First assume for a moment that Al Gore’s attorney, Laurence Tribe, somehow manages to slide Justice Sandra Day O’Connor or Justice Anthony Kennedy into his camp during oral arguments tomorrow and the re-re-recounting is allowed to continue. Then let Gore have it.
Let him have it by the terms laid out by the Supreme Court of Florida and by Judge Terry Lewis, according to which observers may not speak their objections as the four teams of two judges apiece attempt to “discern the will of the voter” according to no set standards whatever – itself a possible denial of the right to due process.
Let him have it through the illicit garnering of 568 votes in Broward County by the close study of blemishes on a punch card, a process during which two Democratic canvassing board members repeatedly overruled the Republican judge who took his ludicrous task so seriously he used a magnifying glass to try and discern a dimple.
Let him have it through a tally of the votes from Miami-Dade County in three separate and unequal ways – the original two counts by machine, the 168 votes garnered in the aborted manual recount and now the “undervote” count by judges in Leon County.
Let him have it through the haze and fog of yesterday’s proceedings, as the supervisor of elections in Hillsborough County breezily stated that the eight-hour process of separating out the undercounted ballots may result in “a discrepancy between the number of undervotes reported on Nov. 7 and the undervotes reported today.”
Why? Well, the act of running the ballots through a counting machine for the third time may dislodge chads from the 5,531 known undervotes. If that’s true in Hillsborough, it will be true in the other punch-card counties as well, making a mockery of the notion that the end result will be a “full, fair and accurate count.”
Let him have it as the Florida Supreme Court breezily overruled its own extended certification deadline and added 215 votes from Palm Beach County to Al Gore’s total – thus violating the separation-of-powers doctrine that makes the U.S. political system work by issuing fiats directed at the Florida secretary of state, who is a member of the executive branch and does not work for the judiciary.
Let him have it. Let him attempt to govern the United States when untold tens of millions of Americans consider him an illegitimate president. Let him be the president who must preside over the economic slowdown with a program that will only accelerate that slowdown and a world in which terrorists and other provocateurs will delight in testing his dimpled presidency.
Let him and his supporters in the Democratic Party face the wrath of a Republican electorate so maddened by the hijinks in Florida that they will turn out in numbers in the congressional elections of 2002 that will make even the huge Republican surge of 1994 look like a line at Starbucks.
Let activist judges like the Florida Four find themselves beset by the kinds of principled and indefatigable intellectual assaults that helped turn the country away from its headlong rush into left-liberalism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Let him have his prize and see it turn to gall and wormwood. The country will survive him.
E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com