i mentioned last time that this sermon would probably be later than usual, as it would be about the election & i would be glued to the tv tuesday watching returns. i had no clue at the time that this would be a full week late, but then again nobody could've predicted what happened that night, or what's happened since.

i don't need to tell you what's going on; i'll mention the basic facts only briefly, & only so people reading this years from now (cross fingers) can get the appropriate historical context: the presidential race was essentially so close that today, a full week later, we still don't have a winner. everyone's eyes are on florida, if only because florida was close enough & has enough electoral votes that its yet-to-be-finalized winner will take the electoral college. (oregon & new mexico haven't been officially announced yet, but few care about them.)

i spent more time in the past week watching cable news channels than i typically spend watching any kind of tv. the oddball developments in the situation just never seem to stop; they wouldn't even slow down enough for me to squeeze out this sermon. the day after the election everyone was talking about it; it was truly beautiful. for one day in my life, i didn't have to hear anyone talk about football or any other stupid sport while i was at work. i will cherish that memory for years to come.

the arguments have been fierce & dirty ever since that night, split almost uniformly down the middle. no matter what part of the election is being discussed, no matter how fervently the people involved might deny it, every argument boils down to which candidate you want to win. bush supporters all flap the same mantras coming from austin, & gore supporters tend to spout the same lines coming out of the gore camp. but in the interest of truth, i will attempt to be at least a little unbiased & poke holes in a few things both sides have said.

(my attempt to be unbiased could totally fail, of course. the thought of a bush presidency makes me so ill that my bile ducts can't keep up. then again, i did only promise to be a little unbiased...)

neither side has been behaving as well as it should have in the past week, but it seems to me the bush camp has been worse. from the start, bush has repeatedly attempted to claim that he has won, despite the fact that the votes are still not all counted (the gore campaign's tendency to play up his winning the popular vote isn't too endearing either, but at least it's not egotistically presumptuous). even if there is no revote (although a lovely idea, the republicans are right that a revote would "not be the same election"; thankfully by now it's pretty clear that the gore campaign never really intended to press for a revote anyway), & ignoring ongoing hand recounts (more on those in a moment), enough overseas absentee ballots remain to tip the florida vote either way. the gop has claimed those ballots as military men voting for bush, but that assertion rests on two potentially faulty assumptions. the first is that the military vote will necessarily go to bush: while officers & career military will probably vote for him more, the enlisted these days tend to be kids there only for college tuition money, who could go either way. the second assumption is that the absentee ballots will be primarily military: there are thousands of u.s civilians in other countries (including a few thousand estimated floridians in israel) to be considered.

bush has also gone against his own policies twice in his actions since the election (before anyone mentions that gore has contradicted himself before, remember that i'm just talking about what's happened after the election). bush has long claimed to be a proponent of states' rights, but it was the bush campaign that was first to court (federal court, no less. at least when the gore campaign went to court they left it in florida state courts), in a vain attempt to get the federal court to usurp control over how florida runs its own election. bush lost, naturally, & has since appealed the decision. not only that, but the whole suit was an attempt to freeze the manual recounting of votes in certain florida counties, when republicans had agreed to hand counts in seminole county, & when bush himself signed a law in texas 3 years ago allowing manual recounts.

not to mention the disputed butterfly ballot: say what you like about the intelligence level of florida voters. i've heard it all. regardless the reason, it does appear to be fact that a lot of people went to the polls intending to vote for gore but failing. even pat buchanan admitted that he received a lot of votes he didn't deserve. now i won't automatically assume as democrats might that all 19,000 of those double-punched palm beach ballots were intended for gore, but the simple that there were 19,000 of them should raise some red flags. so what if there were a lot in '96 too? that just shows that the ballot always sucked, & it doesn't matter if a democrat approved it because the woman who approved it was not one of those people flipping out in the parking lot as they realized they'd voted for buchanan by mistake. that's especially irrelevant if the ballot turns out to be illegal. these issues clearly need to be investigated, regardless what republicans might say about them. now should those issues affect this year's election? i'm not sure; it's up to florida courts to decide. i'm leaning toward yes on the buchanan swindle, but i really don't know about the double-punched ballots.

the gore campaign itself hasn't done as much to irk me, but democrats have said some crazy stuff. what bothered me the most was the day after the election when i saw a couple democrats on some news channel practically yelling at phil donahue about how nader had ruined this election for gore. i fought hard against this ridiculous idea before the election; it's no more than finger-pointing. it's true that the number of people who voted nader in florida is larger than the gap between bush & gore. but don't forget that bush won 29 other states, including gore's home state. if gore had won more of those 29 other states, he wouldn't even need florida, & there's no way nader tipped the election in all or even most of those states (i think he came in 5th in indiana because he wasn't officially on the ballot. i had to vote write-in. then, in indiana buchanan got more votes than harry browne). furthermore, nader had many supporters who were intimidated by the democrats into voting for gore; if anything, the only reason gore is still in this race is because he stole votes from nader. nader had a large drawing power to this year's election; i know people who wouldn't have voted if not for him. the people who are calling him a spoiler assume that voter turnout without him would be basically the same, but i think it would've been much lower had he not run this year.

that seems like enough for now. next week we just might know who the next president will be. but we might not. we could even have another sermon about the election. but we might not.