'Recount' recalls 'Bush v. Gore'
... Sports analogies are way overdone in politics, but keep this one in mind if you watch Recount, the new HBO movie about the 2000 presidential election that will make its debut on Sunday, May 25, with a repeat broadcast on Monday, May 26. One game — the contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush for a majority of votes on Election Day — was played throughout the entire country in all the familiar ways: debates, speeches, rallies, fund-raising campaigns, ads, hoopla. But when that game ended in a virtual tie, another game began. This one was played in Florida, the state whose verdict, once rendered, would deliver the presidency to whichever candidate won its 25 electoral votes. Borrowing from the title of a book by the political scientists Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter, let's call the second game "politics by other means."
Ginsberg and Shefter published the first edition of Politics by Other Means: The Declining Importance of Elections in America (Basic Books) in 1990, 10 years before the events of 2000. They argued that because Republicans and Democrats have each failed in all but a few recent elections to break the modern pattern of divided partisan control of the various branches and levels of government, both parties now rely on "institutional weapons of political struggle … to weaken their political rivals and gain power for themselves." This struggle plays out in bitter battles between the different governmental institutions — federal, state, and local; executive, legislative, and judicial — that each party controls. In a sense, Ginsberg and Shefter contended, institutional combat has replaced electoral combat as the arena in which many battles over public policy and political power are won and lost.
The struggle between Gore and Bush supporters in Florida was rich in dramatic clashes of laws (ranging from the Constitution to Florida's vague and contradictory election statutes), ideas (Gore: count every vote, Bush: obey the rule of law as determined by the U.S. Supreme Court), personalities (former secretaries of state, the Democrat Warren Christopher and the Republican James A. Baker III, led the two sides), strategies (keep the count going until Gore's ahead, "bring it in for a landing" while Bush still leads), and tactics (count dimpled chads, mount street demonstrations)....
Read entire article at Michael Nelson in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Ginsberg and Shefter published the first edition of Politics by Other Means: The Declining Importance of Elections in America (Basic Books) in 1990, 10 years before the events of 2000. They argued that because Republicans and Democrats have each failed in all but a few recent elections to break the modern pattern of divided partisan control of the various branches and levels of government, both parties now rely on "institutional weapons of political struggle … to weaken their political rivals and gain power for themselves." This struggle plays out in bitter battles between the different governmental institutions — federal, state, and local; executive, legislative, and judicial — that each party controls. In a sense, Ginsberg and Shefter contended, institutional combat has replaced electoral combat as the arena in which many battles over public policy and political power are won and lost.
The struggle between Gore and Bush supporters in Florida was rich in dramatic clashes of laws (ranging from the Constitution to Florida's vague and contradictory election statutes), ideas (Gore: count every vote, Bush: obey the rule of law as determined by the U.S. Supreme Court), personalities (former secretaries of state, the Democrat Warren Christopher and the Republican James A. Baker III, led the two sides), strategies (keep the count going until Gore's ahead, "bring it in for a landing" while Bush still leads), and tactics (count dimpled chads, mount street demonstrations)....