We’ve just had a weird election where the rules changed in the middle of the extended campaign creating an appearance of partisan fraud, and the President is on social media making his case (rather poorly in my opinion). Ultimately, the courts will at some point probably side with the various states that the certification of results is a state issue and that is all that counts. Will this undermine the next President’s administration? In the wise words of Bugs Bunny, “hmmm, could be.” But with an adoring press and social media probably not.
This got me to thinking about the road we’ve traveled to this point. Elections have always been a contentious thing with good and bad winners, or good and bad losers. I don’t think John Adams was particularly enamored with his job after coming in second to George Washington, and not too long after that the election of the Vice President became linked to the election of the President.
In the early, to mid-nineteenth century the South would routinely threaten to leave the union unless their favored Democrat (or Democrat-Republican) was elected. With the election of Abraham Lincoln, they made good on their threat. I guess this would be the ultimate example of “delegitimizing” a Presidency. After the war, the winners got the spoils and there was a period where only Republicans were elected followed by a relatively even period of swapping where both parties traded power back and forth. At least until Franklin Roosevelt felt it was his destiny to save the nation and held onto the office for four terms (he died in office or it might have been five terms).
After the latest of the World Wars (2nd for those keeping track), both parties were made up of liberals, moderates, and conservative, but with the advent of President Johnson’s “Great Society,” and the recognition of the overt racism still plaguing America that began to shift as the parties seemed to abandon an inclusive approach to appeal to specific population segments. I often wonder if the creation of the Presidential primary system did this? For me, it is kind of a chicken and egg question. Did the primaries create the power of political activists or did the activists lead to the creation of the primaries?
What I’ve seen in my lifetime, the role of the President has gone from an astute politician/administrator, seeking to protect the country from its outside enemies, while working towards what he viewed as best for the nation (meaning he would work with the opposition when he could convince enough members of the other side it was in both parties interest) to the point where we are at today where each party believes only they have the nation's interest at heart and they need to control the entire government so they don’t have to work with those “other guys,” or if they don’t have the entire government they have enough to stop “those other guys” from doing all sorts of bad things.
We as a society, thanks to the internet and social media, have pushed that relationship with mass movements to legitimize or delegitimize both parties and their candidates. For brevity let's only go back to the very end of the last century where the Florida election held up the concession of Al Gore until the Supreme Court ruled in GW’s (Bush the younger) favor. I think he would have remained a challenged President by the losers if 9/11 hadn’t united the nation at least for the next several years.
In 2009 when Barrack Obama was sworn in – those who didn’t like him spent years on the conspiracy trail claiming he wasn’t really a natural-born citizen and in so doing sowed the seeds of dissent. The fact he came out of almost nowhere to win the Democratic Party’s nomination and all his records were sealed only added fuel to the conspiracy fire. For the eight years of his Presidency, the press seemed to find a lot of things to investigate, but those questions weren’t high on their list of things to wonder about.
Then we come to 2016. A year when both the major parties find as their “best choice” candidates, people who carried as much excess baggage as Jacob Marley. When the anointed Democratic woman lost, the left went wild. We had women marching where the women wore “pussy hats” to demonstrate their mature response to the loss. We had street riots where stores were vandalized to demonstrate the principled response to what was clearly a stolen election. Then there were the never-ending investigations of the Trump campaign and principles associated with the campaign. The evidence now strongly suggests many of these activities were begun by the previous administration which had, in its words, “a scandal-free administration.”
I’m just guessing here but I assume two things. First, President Trump will be unsuccessful in his appeals since the Federal Courts are hesitant to step into something that is really a state issue. (The Dominion Servers issue might be a federal issue which the court could address under the Commerce clause but that seems unlikely to me.) The second is the media will return to its preferred role of quiet partnership with the DNC where its sole role is to protect the Democratic incumbent whoever he or she might be.
