Machines and shadows

The newspaper industry was turned on its head by the Presidential election. A Bush victory was projected and then un-projected. Reporter’s deadlines were stretched and then broken. Headlines were printed and then contradictorily re-printed. What a mess.

Even yours truly here wrote of a Bush victory, though yours truly also mentioned he had thought all along that Gore would be the winner. So, I’m not red faced on this miscall, given that the entire print medium in the states was rocked by the same thing. And, Gore did win a plurality of the votes, so I consider my instincts validated.

But now, the real question: Can this election be stolen from Bush by vote counting monkey business in Florida?

The answer: Absolutely. It’s not only possible, it is likely. Not inevitable, mind you, but likely.

Areas in Florida that are heavily Gore and Lieberman aligned are run by machine politics. I s’pose most folks in Saipan haven’t been exposed to the term, so I’ll give an amateur’s description. A political machine is an entrenched, old-boy, corrupt, and centrally orchestrated political and power making well, er…uh…. “machine,” where various organs of the government are connected with a secret arrangement of gears and levers. It is often aligned with mobsters, and usually aligned with unions.

Not that mobsters and unions are mutually exclusive things.

Every American political machine I ever heard of was–surprise–a Democrat machine.

The ultimate political machine was Mayor Daley’s Chicago. Yes, this is the same Chicago where voting fraud became an issue in the 1960

Kennedy–Nixon election; so much of an issue that it is still mentioned in the history books.

But why look to ancient history for Democratic political voting monkey business? Just a couple of days ago, a judge in Missouri–reportedly a Democrat crony of Dick Gephardt’s–ordered certain polls to remain open past the legally mandated closing time, thus padding the Democratic voting tally. Only a moron can’t see how selective extension of polling hours at certain locations couldn’t be used as a tool to engineer voting results.

The question becomes this: Can the Florida machines deliver for Gore and Lieberman? I don’t know. But I know they’ll try to deliver. A machine that can’t deliver isn’t much of a machine.

There is, then, a funny twist in this for the Commonwealth. We’re going to have to deal with the next President, and it’s an important call for us; most businesses folks here would prefer Bush. But the political structures here are no cleaner than they were in Mayor Daley’s Chicago (though I’m not suggesting that vote fraud happens here). In essence, then, an important factor in the CNMI’s future lies in the hands of corrupt pols in a far off place that most people here have never even seen: Florida. I can flip/flop the analogy to our local angle here, but I’ll let you fill in the blanks.

Maybe a clean re-count will happen, Bush will be crowned, and everyone will get on with things. But, having grown up around Chicago’s machine politics, I’m of suspicious mind. There are, no doubt, all sorts of things happening in the shadows.

Stephens is an economist with Stephens Corporation, a professional organization in the NMI. His column appears three times a week: Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Mr. Stephens can be contacted via the following e-mail address: ed4Saipan@yahoo.com.