Understudy follows master's plan

ROGER FRANKLIN takes a personal, critical look at the Florida "fiasco" and argues that it represents the Clinton legacy at work

NEW YORK - So, now that we are almost at the very end of his eight tumultuous years, just where do you find that Clinton legacy the President's friends keep talking about?

Certainly not in the emergency rooms of major American hospitals, where the poor and uninsured still wait for the national health care plan he promised would be his Administration's top priority back in 1992.

Nor in Havana, where America's relations with one of its closest neighbours have warmed but a few insignificant degrees from the depths of their Cold War chill.

And certainly not in the Middle East - not there of all places, despite all those long weekends and photo ops with Yasser and Ehud at Wye River and Camp David.

Even in the military, where the new President Bill Clinton promised that opening the ranks to gays would require but a stroke of his presidential pen, the love that dare not speak its name remains just that.

All those causes were items on the Man from Hope's to-do list when he came to power. Yet not one has been achieved, and most were unceremoniously abandoned beside the low road of political expediency that has dipped and weaved from each of so many scandals to the next.

So where do you look for that Clinton legacy. His supporters and shills point to a happy, humming economy and almost a decade of economic expansion, crediting their President with the acclaim less partisan observers are more inclined to divide between Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan and the geek legion that wired the world to the internet.

Eight years on, the answer - the only firm and definite answer - to the question of what Clinton has given his country has to be the ongoing electoral fiasco in Florida, where the Clintonian dictionary of subjective definitions has become Vice-President Al Gore's playbook.

Two years ago, when he was busy denying those frolics with Monica Lewinsky, Gore's presidential master looked into the cameras and swore that oral sex was not really sex at all, that the verb "is" comes in a variety of ambiguous shades, and that a man and woman are not necessarily "alone" when doors are locked and no one else is in the room.

When the Monica mess broke on Super Bowl Sunday in 1998, Clinton summoned then-pollster Dick Morris and commissioned him to divine how the American people would react.

Morris reported that public sentiment would not tolerate a President who dallied with the White House help, and that Clinton would most likely be forced from office if he fessed up to any funny business. "Well," Morris recalls Clinton saying, "well just have to win then."

Aided by a kennel of attack dogs and a spin machine that put inquisitor Kenneth Starr on trial rather than the man he was investigating, Clinton barrelled into the fray and did just that. Now his vice-presidential understudy is doing much the same, albeit without the master's consummate skill.

After two Florida-wide recounts - and as many as four in some districts - Gore's refusal to concede the presidential race depends on his innovative interpretation of "win." It used to mean the guy who amassed more votes than his opponent. But no longer. These days, if the Florida farce is any guide, the victor is the man with the biggest team of lawyers, the most aggressive spinners, the slickest smear machine.

Make no mistake about the Sunshine State. From the moment the tide of ballots began to go against him, Gore has never deviated from the dark path his President pioneered.

It began on election night when a Texas telemarketing firm was hastily hired to pick through the Palm Beach phone book and blitz residents with Jewish-sounding names.

"Are you sure you voted for the right person?" some 5000 elderly recipients were asked by callers reading from a standard script. "Perhaps you punched Pat Buchanan's hole by mistake on that confusing butterfly ballot?" Each of the calls ended with an exhortation to call Palm Beach electoral authorities and lodge a complaint first thing in the morning.

The fact that Buchanan has been a notable defender of Nazi war criminals and a frequent critic of America's alliance with Israel made those calls all the more effective.

And certainly, amid the manufactured outrage, few in the media took time to notice that while some 19,000 votes were invalidated last week, about 15,000 had been punched incorrectly in 1996, when voter turnout was considerably lower.

Only much later, long after the furore had acquired a life of its own, did a few curious reporters check the precincts where most of those Buchanan votes were cast.

What they found were pockets of Ukrainian migrants, who could reasonably be expected to hold Buchanan in high esteem since he had fought to stop the deportation of an elderly fellow countryman accused of having served as a concentration camp guard.

Having given the three Democrats who comprise the Palm Beach electoral board a reason to doubt their own competence in public, the focus shifted south to the Miami area, where the Rev Jesse Jackson was soon hustling about the city's black districts.

Although black Floridians represent just 14 per cent of the state's total population, they made up better than 16 per cent of voters on election day.

Yet there was Jackson insisting that his brethren had been denied equal access to the polling booths, invoking the ghost of Martin Luther King, and all but accusing Governor Jeb Bush, George W.'s brother, of having a Klansman's white robe in his closet.

By the end of the day, it was an article of faith in black communities from Maine to Malibu that a sinister conspiracy had disenfranchised minority voters.

In New York, a broadcaster on Harlem's WLIB even likened the Bush brothers to Bull Connor, the arch segregationist of the 1960s. "All they needed was the police dogs and fire hoses," disc jockey Gary Byrd repeated over and over again.

It has been ugly, dangerous stuff - and straight from the Clinton dictionary.

When impeachment was the issue and white Democrats were hesitating about coming to their President's defence, it was the Black Congressional Caucus that threw itself into the fray.

As Clinton himself acknowledged only a month ago in a speech before the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People: "When they had tied me to the stake and the flames were burning, it was African Americans who first poured water on the pyre."

In Florida last week, it was those same black leaders who dutifully added fuel to the fire of racial suspicions that Gore and his surrogates have been attempting to fan.

Meanwhile, various Gore mouthpieces attacked Florida Republicans as Stalinists, or asserted that those states which Bush won represented the corners of the map where "gays are crucified on fences, right-wing fanatics blow up federal office buildings ... black men are lynched behind trucks."

And that was but the open face of the Clinton-style campaign. In private, just as they had done against Kenneth Starr, those who stood in the way of the selective recount the Vice-President is seeking were dealt smears from the bottom of the deck.

Select and sympathetic reporters were furnished with "dossiers" detailing "opposition research" on the private life and marital history of Florida's elected Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the Republican who scotched Gore's bid for recounts in only those districts where his tame officials could be expected to find the vital few votes he needs.

Of Palm Beach electoral boss Carol Roberts - the Democrat who contributed $US2000 ($4969) to the Gore war chest, shared his hospitality at the White House and sports a GORE 2000 bumper sticker on her car - the Vice-President's spinners depicted her as a model of even-handed impartiality.

Even late this week, after police found the piercing mechanism from a balloting machine in the boot of a car belonging to one of Roberts' closest aides and allies, the same Gore lawyers and flacks insisted that everything in Palm Beach was above board.

That fact that Roberts' board had decided not to charge the man with what is clearly a breach of the election laws was but an example of her abiding compassion.

Clinton was out of the country this week when all this was going on. And that is indeed a pity because it would have been interesting to see if he was capable of observing the Florida maelstrom without blushing.

Chances are, however, he would have done nothing of the kind. Even more than the desertion of the sick, the betrayal of gays, and the abandonment any US-brokered settlement in the Middle East, his legacy lies elsewhere.

As Ralph Nader noted during the campaign, Clinton's biggest gift to his country is the death of shame as a moderating influence on the excesses of American politics.

With Gore's team raising millions of dollars from lobbyists to finance its 300-plus team of lawyers in Palm Beach and other contested counties, the Florida standoff remains the ultimate proof of that.

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Florida Dept. of State Division of Elections

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