Ashcroft, Liberman, and Gore
What do terms like "charitable choice" and "faith-based" amount to? They are verbal smoke-screens invented by politicians to evoke just the right religious sentiments in the voting public and thereby also to justify bad legislation.. After the dust settled around the Florida recount and the high court decisions of the year 2000 election, George Bush held the presidency while Al Gore held only an exceedingly marginal and completely worthless "popular" vote. Because of the controversy surrounding the recount and the so called popular vote, the diehard followers will probably always claim that Gore, being the “legitimate winner”, was robbed of the presidency on a mere technicality. But the real truth of the matter is that neither Gore nor Bush deserved to win, and consequently it was the American people who turned out to be the real losers.
The final national count had Gore ahead by some 540,520 votes. Viewed in isolation, this may seem like a rather huge number. But roughly 104 million people voted in the election, thus making Gore's lead on Bush less then 50 percent of all votes cast and only about one-half of a percent edge among all votes cast for Gore and Bush combined.. With so many people voting, it is probably possible to turn the numbers in some way to make Gore's half percent look statistically significant. As with other things in the world, sometimes there is a difference between "statistical significance" and "practical significance". Suppose for instance that only 200 people had voted in the election nation wide. In such case, a half percent difference would amount to a final tally of 101 votes for Gore versus 99 votes for Bush, a one vote difference separating the two from a numerical dead heat. Viewed from this perspective its rather difficult to ascribe practical significance to Gore's so called popular edge. Further, looking at the number of states that each candidate won, it could appear that the election was a landslide in Bush's favor. Although only speculation, if a recount had been performed on every district in the nation, the real numerical difference in popular vote might have shrunk to an even smaller value. On the other hand, the same recount might have closed the gap in electoral votes in Gore's favor. Anyway, even though the diehards will want to vigorously deny it, the standing popular results, were for all practical purposes, a virtual tossup.
The salient problem with the 2000 presidential election was the glaring lack of anything decisively significant to distinguish the candidates on the most important issues of the election. The important issues were "faith-based" social welfare reform and consequently separation between religion and government and other related civil liberties issues. Well, those were the important issues for at least some of us. Evidently, however, many others viewed them as pretty much a done deal. In fact, the whole fiasco was more like a political dual over who was going to be the first official pope of the United States rather then a legitimate presidential election.
All other things being equal or unequal, it is notable that democrat Al Gore, a staunch proponent of charitable choice, rode the legislative bandwagon with right wing republican John Ashcroft. Ashcroft was the person actually credited with authoring the charitable choice clause during the welfare reform movement of 1996, which President Clinton dutifully signed into effect. After this maniacal defacement of the Constitution, the people of Missouri literally voted a dead man into the Senate rather then allow Ashcroft to serve another term. Still, Ashcroft is by no means the only perpetrator of the "charitable choice" clause, not with money-changers like Clinton, Gore, Senator Joe Liberman, and now President Bush and his constituency stepping up to take a cut of the metaphorical bag of silver coins. On this, it was also notable that Al Gore failed even to carry his own home state of Tennessee during his 2000 presidential bid. Evidently first to coin the phrase, “faith-based”, Gore stood up in front of a Salvation Army audience during the 2000 campaign and declared that "freedom of religion" does not necessarily presuppose "freedom from religion". Although pleasing words to the religious right, it was an unforgivable kiss of death to anyone embracing a more legitimate constitutional stand. Consider the matter from the standpoint of an analogy like, "freedom of Taliban fundamentalism but not freedom from Taliban fundamentalism", and the twisted nature of Gore's rhetoric should become readily apparent.
The bottom line is that Al Gore and Joe Liberman sold the heart and sole of both the Constitution and the Democratic Party down the river in their greedy attempt to capture the right wing religious vote from the republicans. By the time they got through articulating their platform, they had alienated enough people who otherwise would have voted democratic that it was impossible to carry a decisive popular majority and George Bush won by default. With nothing but a perverse choice between anti-constitutional candidate A and anti-constitutional candidate B, the election was polarized into a complete sham with those still willing to go to the polls trying to guess which candidate would do the least damage to our sacred Constitution. Other then some lip service in favor of Second Amendment rights from George Bush, a guess was all that anyone's choice-making could really amount to.Because of the closeness of the election, some people in democratic circles want Gore to make another presidential bid. It is the studied position of this website that the "charitable choice" clause should not be allowed to stand as law in the welfare reform legislation, nor should the present faith-based legislation be allowed to augment it as new law . In addition, however, George Bush and his "faith-based" agenda do not deserve to win another term in the Whitehouse. Yet, by the same token, if the likes of Al Gore or Joe Liberman are the best measure of what the Democratic party stands for these days, then it does not itself deserve to retake the Whitehouse any time in the near future. Both parties must stand up with something universally more valid and faithful to the mandates of the Constitution then what they are currently peddling or they will continue to do incalculable damage to the Nation.