It now appears that Al Gore is going to have to concede the US presidential election and concede soon. The reason for this is that a majority of Americans feel that he has had enough chances to achieve his goal, that he has failed to do so within the generous time allotted and as a result should put up and shut up.
Polls taken on Sunday and Monday suggest that Americans want Gore to concede by a margin of 2:1. Remember that the nationwide vote in the election gave a slim lead to Gore and that's a significant number of Democrats crying enough already. The same polls showed a consensus that the Florida legislature should not get involved with this matter, and though they split almost evenly on the question of "dimpled chads" -- once again between two-thirds and three-quarters of those polled said they would accept the legitimacy of whoever was determined to be president in the final outcome of the still ongoing process.
For us in Taiwan that last fact is perhaps the most interesting lesson we might glean from this year's US election process. For it might well be that Gore could, if given long enough for the recounts he seeks to be completed, actually win the US presidency.
Frankly, we will probably never really know who won the most votes in Florida -- given that a statewide hand count is almost certainly not going to happen. But the strange thing is -- and we see this as one of the terrific strengths of US democracy -- it might not matter. Whether the election issue goes to the Supreme Court or not, it has been tried in what is called the "court of public opinion," a rather grand name for tens of millions of kitchens, bars, lunchrooms, even bedrooms, across the nation with a fairly clear-cut result which even the losing side -- among the public -- is largely prepared to accept.
Expect politicians this week to wake up to this public consensus and put huge pressure on Gore to give up. For it is a strength of the American system that "the court of public opinion" matters. What a shame that it doesn't matter in Taiwan.
It is a simple fact of political life here that all political parties show an outrageous contempt for public opinion. A couple of interesting examples: Public concern was for the maintenance of stable supplies of electricity before the cancellation of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, but the government took no pains whatsoever to reassure the public on this matter before canceling the project. It is a measure of the contempt in which this government holds the electorate that it saw no reason to address this topic until after its decision was announced.
An example of the same phenomenon can be seen in the recall drive against Chen Shui-bian (
Why do politicians from both parties in Taiwan display such resolute disdain for the concerns of the people who elect them? Looking across the Pacific we can say that while its election process has been treated with derision around the world, the US remains an extraordinarily robust democracy in which the peoples' voice is heard and acted upon. If only the same were true here.
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