Truth be known, I, me, Burt, personally, was responsible for Gore s woes in Florida. On election eve, I called a friend in Boca Raton, and although I don t quite remember the message, every member of his poker group was so persuaded by my argument they switched their votes from Gore to Howard Phillips and his Constitution Party. Those votes tipped the scale. Former President Jimmy Carter, at a press conference on November 9, repeated the mantra, and we will hear it ad nauseam. If we can find him, let s award a lottery prize to the fellow whose single vote determined the result of the election.
American elections are a referendum on indifference.
The remarkable dead-heat distribution of the one hundred million votes indicates how difficult it is to distinguish between the two parties. No one will ever notice if you don t participate. Third parties that truly threaten the two-party system are unacceptable. They are tolerated only when they are irrelevant. When Ross Perot was spearheading the Reform Party, he exceeded the amount of influence that could be tolerated.