Anyway, the common man who, in campaign rhetoric, was going to be king in a Bush administration, is now in meltdown in Florida. The Texas governor has not come to their rescue. Nor has his younger brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, who suffers silently as his constituents are being mercilessly trashed. It's also awkward for local-control freaks like the Republicans to be trooping in and out of federal court for relief. Florida is mortified by what it wrought on Nov. 7.
People fulminate that they produced a plane wreck of an election and damaged democracy.
Others see the embarrassment as more of a fender bender, not to be mistaken as evidence of a flawed system, but to be taken calmly as a monstrous sloppiness in its functioning. On Friday, a judge upheld the right of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who was a Bush state campaign co-chair, to exclude updated hand count tallies. The matter was immediately appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, which ordered her to delay certification. One extra in the great recount spectacle is a notary named Natalie Gladstone, who lives in Delray Beach in Palm Beach County. A transplanted New Yorker who has her own secretarial business, she donated four days of her time to taking affidavits from voters who say they inadvertently voted for Pat Buchanan on the county's bewildering butterfly ballots.