| Jacquielynn Floyd: Hey, nobody got killed in this election 12/16/2000 By Jacquielynn Floyd / The Dallas Morning News
Most of us incline toward drama and hyperbole – I love them more than life itself – but some of the descriptions of our extended presidential election seem a little inflated.
It has indeed been a long, strange trip, and the calls now for mending our fences, or at least getting back to business as usual, are certainly commendable.
Suggestions that we require intensive "healing," though, or that our political process has been poisoned, or that faith in our institutions has been universally undermined, strike me as exaggerated.
No blood was spilled, no noggins broken. We should take a minute to congratulate ourselves for participating in a society that remains genuinely shocked at the idea of political violence.
Even when partisan tempers were at their highest pitch, combatants confined themselves, at worst, to waving signs, hollering and the occasional boorish remark. You see more rancor at a hockey game.
Blunt instrument
The heart of the matter, I think, is a boring, basic mathematical reality: The voting technology employed in much of the country is too blunt an instrument for a task as precise as counting millions of votes with a zero-percent margin of error.
Before now, it never made much difference because the odds of an election as close as this one are statistically remote. The fact that thousands of antique punch-card ballots were too ambiguous to count, by machine or by human eyeball, is just a byproduct of the process.
One political theorist I know – OK, it was my brother – made this sensible analogy:
"If a scientist wanted to measure one part per 300,000 in a chemical solution, he'd need pretty sophisticated equipment, right?" he pointed out. A funnel and a couple of mayonnaise jars wouldn't suffice. "But if he didn't need to, why bother?''
Partisan bickering aside, I don't think we've been through any great national trauma. We've been irritated and annoyed; some of us genuinely disagree with the end result. In the end, though, we got somebody elected, and we're all still on speaking terms.
Serious rancor
If you're looking for serious political rancor and bitterness, consider Congressman Preston Brooks, the antebellum South Carolina representative who caned a colleague on the Senate floor.
On May 21, 1856, Mr. Brooks, enraged by an abolitionist speech made by Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner and addled by romantic notions of Southern honor, attacked Mr. Sumner shortly after the Senate adjourned for the day. Using a walking cane topped with a gold knob, he beat the senator nearly unconscious.
Mr. Brooks later made a lofty speech to the House suggesting that he could have killed Mr. Sumner if he'd wanted, and furthermore, Mr. Sumner had it coming. He then resigned, paid a $300 fine and was handily re-elected a few months later.
Mr. Sumner nearly died when the gashes in his scalp got infected. It took him the better part of three years to recover and resume his career. (The pendulum of fate swung back in the end: Mr. Sumner lived another 18 years, while Mr. Brooks caught the croup and died the year after the attack.)
Now that was political rancor, a violent exhibition of the passions that led, ultimately, to civil war. It was an era of divisions that ran so deep that there are people in this country who aren't over it yet.
Except for a handful of politicians and their battalions of lawyers, I predict most of us will be over the presidential election divide by Inauguration Day. I even have my doubts about the dreaded "congressional deadlock" so many sore tempers are supposed to portend.
We have a pretty resilient political system. It survives scandal and folly, cranks and zealots, big showdowns and petty spats. It has endured war, national tragedy, wrenching episodes of grief and rage. Other governments have crumbled under less pressure than that.
So be annoyed, if you want to, but don't be traumatized. You'll be fine.
Jacquielynn Floyd can be reached at 214-977-8065 and at .
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