How American Low Information Voters Reject Progress But Reward Incompetence & Failure…

In the year 2,000, with all of the non­sense that was float­ing around that all com­put­ers would crash, air­planes would drop from the sky, and for all intents and pur­pos­es, an end to the world as we knew it, there were nation­al elec­tions between Al Gore rep­re­sent­ing the Democratic par­ty and George W Bush of the Republican party.
Al Gore was the for­mer Vice President who has just served eight years in the Bill Clinton admin­is­tra­tion, he was hop­ing to be elect­ed pres­i­dent as a con­se­quence of all of the great things that occurred on their watch.
The inter­net came on stream for many Americans, Silicone val­ley had cre­at­ed tens of mil­lions of jobs, with that came more mil­lion­aires than at any oth­er time in the nation’s history.

Additionally, the coun­try was not entan­gled in any major wars over­seas. In a sense, the Clinton Presidency, (though many will dis­agree on cer­tain specifics), was a peri­od of peace and pros­per­i­ty for the coun­try. If of course, you are able to set aside the dis­gust­ing chap­ter of Republican pres­i­den­tial harass­ment that con­tin­ued unabat­ed for the eight years of Bill Clinton’s Presidency.
That is not to say that Clinton did noth­ing wrong inso­far as Monica Lewinsky was con­cerned, but all of that pales in com­par­i­son to what is hap­pen­ing in the white house today.

George W Bush was a Texas Governor, the son of for­mer Republican one-term pres­i­dent, & Ronald Reagan’s Vice President Herbert Walker Bush.
It was an elec­tion tai­lor-made for Al Gore to eas­i­ly win, the coun­try was expe­ri­enc­ing a peri­od of pros­per­i­ty and there were no major over­seas wars.
Sure, Republicans in the con­gress under Newt Gingrich’s lead­er­ship had made life hell for Bill Clinton, but none of that could have rubbed off on Al Gore who had con­duct­ed him­self with pre­ci­sion-like deco­rum and statesmanship.
So why did it come down to Florida on elec­tion night of 2,000? Al Gore had done more than enough to dis­tance him­self from Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scan­dal, he had even gone so far as to proclaim,*“I am my own man”*, in an effort to estab­lish him­self as an inde­pen­dent enti­ty, free from what­ev­er neg­a­tive that could be attached to Bill Clinton his for­mer boss.

At the time, I per­son­al­ly thought Gore’s strat­e­gy was the exact oppo­site of what he need­ed to do. I believed he need­ed to hug Bill Clinton as tight­ly as pos­si­ble and talk about the great things they had accom­plished togeth­er for the country.
I also thought that Gore should have gone after the Republicans with a scorched earth attack for their use of Kenneth Star, in what was an unprece­dent­ed abuse of the *inde­pen­dent coun­sel *process.
The new Democratic par­ty nev­er seem to be able to use the gifts that Republicans give to them to win elec­tions. So in 2,000, it came down to Florida, a state which had a Republican Governor, Jeb Bush who was the younger broth­er of George Bush, the man he was up against for the pres­i­den­cy of the United States.

Al Gore went the oth­er direc­tion, in the process, cre­at­ing as much space as he thought was need­ed to put dis­tance between him­self, and the still wild­ly pop­u­lar Democratic President Bill Clinton.….…..until it became clear that his strat­e­gy was not work­ing. By the time Al Gore began embrac­ing Bill Clinton and Clinton was asked to appear at cam­paign events, the horse was already through the gate.
According to Gallup Clinton’s approval rat­ings soared to 76% after the Senate reject­ed arti­cles of impeach­ment against the pres­i­dent. By the time Clinton left office, he was still at an admirable 62% approval rat­ing and was the first pres­i­dent to demit office with such high approval since Harry Truman.

The Atlantic’s Ena Alvarado-Esteller, David A. Graham, and Amy Weiss-Meyer wrote: By the end of the night, Gore held a lead over Bush in the nation­al pop­u­lar vote, which he would nev­er lose, but the con­test in the Electoral College was tight, and it all came down to Florida. The elec­tion, both cam­paigns under­stood, was far from over.
Leading up to the elec­tion, polls had indi­cat­ed that the race between Bush and Gore would be close, with an espe­cial­ly slim mar­gin in sev­er­al key states. Potentially affect­ing the out­come were two oth­er can­di­dates: Ralph Nader, of the left-wing Green Party, and Pat Buchanan, of the right-wing Reform Party On Election Day, a num­ber of coun­ties in Florida report­ed prob­lems. A con­fus­ing bal­lot — the so-called but­ter­fly bal­lot — in Palm Beach County prompt­ed thou­sands of vot­ers to cast their bal­lot unwit­ting­ly for Buchanan. Ballots in Duval County also caused con­fu­sion; some 22,000 votes there were dis­qual­i­fied because vot­ers chose more than one can­di­date. The punch-card appa­ra­tus used else­where in the state some­times failed to punch out a hole com­plete­ly, mean­ing that the machine would not record a bal­lot choice. (The Atlantic)

David Boies (Gore lawyer): I was in a sports bar across the street from the Governor’s Inn, in Tallahassee. I had been in the office and had spo­ken to Vice President Gore. We were all very hap­py. The votes were being count­ed. He was steadi­ly gain­ing on Governor Bush. My work was essen­tial­ly done, and I was going home. They had all these tele­vi­sion screens, and a crawler came across that said the Supreme Court had issued an order stop­ping the vote count. My ini­tial reac­tion was that this had to be a mis­take. There had not been an oppor­tu­ni­ty to brief or argue the case. There were sub­stan­tial issues as to whether there was real­ly a fed­er­al ques­tion involved. The Supreme Court had nev­er inter­vened in a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion to affect the count­ing of the votes in a state. (The Atlantic).
Oral argu­ments before the U.S. Supreme Court took place on Monday, December 11. The hasti­ly writ­ten opin­ions, which added up to a 5 – 4 rever­sal of the Florida court, were made pub­lic at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, December 12.
Even sup­port­ers of the out­come acknowl­edged that the deci­sion did not reflect the Court at its best. In a dis­sent, Justice John Paul Stevens famous­ly wrote: “Although we may nev­er know with com­plete cer­tain­ty the iden­ti­ty of the win­ner of this year’s Presidential elec­tion, the iden­ti­ty of the los­er is per­fect­ly clear. It is the Nation’s con­fi­dence in the judge as an impar­tial guardian of the rule of law.” On Wednesday, December 13, Al Gore con­ced­ed defeat.
Oh, how prophet­ic have John Paul Steven’s words turned out to be since then, in the many jaw-drop­ping deci­sion the supreme court has made since them, includ­ing Citizens United & Shelby County Alabama vs Holder.

This essence of this arti­cle nev­er­the­less is not to high­light the dam­age that the supreme court con­tin­ue to do to American democ­ra­cy. Though George Bush was ele­vat­ed to the pres­i­den­cy under the dark­est cloud of sus­pi­cion, by 2004 after the events of September 11^th, 2001 all of the anger was gone.
George Bush had gained the pres­i­den­cy under ques­tion­able cir­cum­stances, aid­ed by Republican oper­a­tives in the Florida machin­ery and Republican tools on the nation’s high­est court.
Despite that and Bush’s ensu­ing incom­pe­tence at the job, the events of September 11^th were enough for George Bush to be re-elect­ed as a wartime president.
By the time Bush left office in 2,000, he had the dubi­ous dis­tinc­tion of being one of the worst pres­i­dents ever. He had the nation engaged in two major wars.
An arguable legal incur­sion into Afghanistan, where the American mil­i­tary is still stuck today almost twen­ty years lat­er and an ille­gal war waged in Iraq, that should sub­ject the American Government to war crimes in the International Court of Justice in the Hague.
Of course, the United States is not sub­ject to the juris­dic­tion of the International world court it was instru­men­tal in cre­at­ing and using to jus­ti­fy­ing the tri­al and incar­cer­a­tion of sup­posed German war criminals.
The United States set itself up above International laws. Today the US Secretary of state Mike Pompeo wants to use his pow­ers to lev­el sanc­tions against offi­cials of the world court, for sup­pos­ed­ly try­ing to bring America under the juris­dic­tion of the inter­na­tion­al tribunal.
It is a dis­grace­ful case of hypocrisy and abuse of pow­er by the United States under Donald Trump.

Fast for­ward to 2016 and Donald Trump was the Republican stan­dard-bear­er hav­ing van­quished all of his par­ty’s oth­er candidates.
Hillary Clinton won that elec­tion by over three mil­lion votes(3,000,000.00+), yet because of the con­vo­lut­ed process known as the Electoral College, and arguable, sig­nif­i­cant help from the Russian Government, as con­firmed by the United States Intelligence Agencies, Donald Trump, a colos­sal­ly igno­rant show­man, was giv­en the presidency.
From day one of the announce­ment that Trump would be the 45^th pres­i­dent of the United States there were protests and demon­stra­tions against it. People had legit­i­mate rea­sons to con­clude that Trump was a Putin stooge.
We are in 2020, and there is a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion due come November.

Donald Trump’s fail­ings and dis­re­gard for American laws are far too many to men­tion. Yet Joe Biden is mere­ly a few per­cent­age points ahead of Trump in the so-called bat­tle­ground states.
What does it say about the vot­ing pub­lic’s intel­lect, or does par­ty trump country?
If this was an elec­torate with Christian val­ues as they pro­claim to be, there is no way that a tax-cheat, who failed at every busi­ness, who divorced his first wife because she was­n’t young any­more, who had unpro­tect­ed sex with a hook­er after his present wife had just giv­en birth to their son.
This is a man who ran a false char­i­ty that bilked peo­ple so that he could pur­chase over­priced por­traits of him­self. A man who dis­miss­es women as thrash and talks about *grab­bing them by the pussy*[sic].
His list of fail­ings is com­pound­ed by the dam­age done to America’s alliances abroad, and his tram­pling on the nation’s laws.
In addi­tion to that, he sat by and declared that COVID-19 would sim­ply dis­ap­pear. Today we are close to 200, 000 Americans-dead from the pan­dem­ic, and almost five mil­lion test­ings positive.

A man who denounces Muslim as evil but declares mur­der­ous white supremacists,*fine people*.
Because of the high rate of infec­tion and the con­tin­u­ing spread of COVID-19, Donald Trump has done every­thing in his pow­er to slow down test­ing for the virus.
Children of peo­ple seek­ing refuge are still ware­housed in mam­moth Federal facil­i­ties where they are locked in cages, away from their parents.
He has all but destroyed the burn­ing hot econ­o­my President Barack Obama gave to him in January of 2017. This seems to fit the recur­ring theme for Republicans. Their poli­cies of giv­ing tax cuts to their rich con­trib­u­tors, while bur­den­ing the poor with pay­ing for it, has basi­cal­ly destroyed the American mid­dle-class and cre­at­ed an ever-increas­ing gap between rich and poor.
Democrats get vot­ed in to fix the mess, then the vot­ers turn right around and put the destruc­tive Republicans back into office.
What does this say about the electorate?

Mike Beckles is a for­mer police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, he is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al websites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.