Bush demonstratively met with Republican and Democratic officials in Washington December 18 and held a press conference with the leaders of both parties in the House and Senate, where he promised to help heal "whatever wounds may exist" from the election. The next day he held meetings with both President William Clinton and with Gore. Vice president-elect Richard Cheney also met with senators and congresspeople from both parties.

Gen. Colin Powell was the first cabinet member named, with the position of secretary of state. Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon in 1989-1993, including during the U.S.-led attack on Iraq that led to the slaughter of at least 150,000 Iraqis in 1991.

At a press conference in Texas, Powell addressed the incoming administration's determination "to go forward" with an antimissile system, stating that it is "an essential part" of U.S. military policy. The missile system was a top priority of the administration of William Clinton, who drove to conclude a series of tests in order for construction of a system to begin while he was still in office. The aim of deploying an antiballistic missile defense system is to give Washington nuclear first-strike capacity that can be used against the workers states in Russia and China especially.

While Democrats and Republicans have expressed differences of degree in the scope and pace of development of such a military system, Clinton's active pursuit of a "limited" antimissile plan has paved the way for Bush, who advocated a larger system during his campaign.

Powell said the weapon system "takes away the currency associated with strategic offensive weapons and the blackmail that is inherent in some regime having that kind of a weapon and thinking they can hold us hostage." This echoes the campaign the Clinton administration has waged to brand North Korea and other governments as "rogue states" supposedly threatening the United States with nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.

As to resistance to the antimissile system expressed by Washington's imperialist rivals in Europe, as well as by the governments of Russia and China, Powell said he expects "tough negotiations," and that "they will have to come to the understanding that we feel this is in the best interest of the American people."

Like his Democratic predecessor, Bush's cabinet and appointees are solidly pro-big-business. His initial cabinet appointments include oil executive Donald Evans as commerce secretary, Alcoa Corp. chairman Paul O'Neill as treasury secretary, and former California Department of Agriculture chief Ann Veneman as U.S. secretary of agriculture. Melquiades Martinez, Bush campaign cochair in Florida and a county official who is Cuban-American, was named housing secretary.

Others include Condoleezza Rice, former provost at Stanford University, as national security adviser; Bush campaign spokesperson Karen Hughes as a counselor to the president; and Alberto Gonzales, a Texas Supreme Court justice, as general counsel in the White House. All are longtime Bush associates.  
 
Clinton hails final appropriations bill
Meanwhile, the 106th Congress passed a $450 billion omnibus appropriations bill December 15 by a vote of 292 to 60 in the House and by a voice vote in the Senate after final negotiations were concluded with the president. The legislation was in line with a number of bipartisan policies that have been carried out by Clinton and the Republican-dominated Congress over the past half-decade.

In addition to pointing to additional appropriations for the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, Clinton praised the legislation for including more than $1 billion to put 50,000 more cops on the streets. The measure also adds 500 agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms as well as 600 "gun prosecutors" nationwide. This is on top of Clinton meeting his commitment "to help communities hire 100,000 new police officers," the White House bragged in a statement. More cops, and "anticrime" and "antiterrorist" legislation targeting the rights of working people, have been a hallmark of the last six years of the bipartisan assault on workers and farmers.

"Anticrime" laws are having a big impact on working people who are under parole restrictions. Some 600,000 people will be released from state and federal prisons in 2000, up from 170,000 in 1980. With harsher enforcement, such as parole officers revoking parole for minor violations, the number of those being sent back to prison has skyrocketed. In California, the percent of people admitted to prison in 1999 on parole at the time tripled: from 21 percent in 1980 to 68 percent--nearly 90,000--in 1999.

The appropriations bill also included a temporary revival of a provision to allow some 700,000 immigrants to apply for green cards while residing in the United States. This provision had expired in 1998, reverting to the terms of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, signed by Clinton in 1996, which forced thousands to leave the country and return to their homelands for several years while applying for U.S. residence.

The new legislation, however, also kept in place the draconian terms of the 1996 law that retroactively defined a range of misdemeanors and other "crimes"--as minor as jumping a subway turnstile--as aggravated felonies for which a person could be deported.

In addition, Clinton touted the "sustained increase in defense spending" in the appropriations bill, in which an additional $15.8 billion for war expenditures was added, totaling $296.4 billion this year.  
 
Clinton brags: 8 million off welfare
In a radio address the following day, Clinton said he was "pleased to announce that over the past eight years we've cut welfare case loads by more than 8 million people," citing it as one of the central accomplishments of his administration. In carrying out his campaign pledge to "end welfare as we know it," Clinton, together with the Republican majority in Congress, eliminated Aid to Families with Dependent Children, carrying through the first big assault on social security. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act put a five-year cap on any individual receiving welfare, a cutoff millions will face in 2001. In 1999 up to 50 percent of those denied payments had no jobs, and most of the rest were doing make-work jobs paying minimum wage with no benefits.

The change in administration is also taking place in the midst of affirmations of support for the death penalty by both Clinton and Bush. A total of 84 people were executed in the United States in 2000, slightly fewer than the 98 put to death in 1999.

Bush, the governor of Texas, recently presided over the execution of the 40th person in that state--the largest annual number on record in any U.S. state since 1862, when the U.S. Army executed 39 Native Americans following an uprising in Minnesota. Bush set seven executions to occur during November and December, with one a day from December 5 to 7.

In September the Justice Department released a report documenting that four-fifths of the 682 defendants who have faced capital charges in federal courts were Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans, and that a handful of U.S. attorneys are responsible for 40 percent of federal death penalty cases. Citing these figures, Clinton issued a temporary stay of execution for Juan Raul Garza, the first federal prisoner scheduled to be put to death in 37 years. While handing the decision on Garza to Bush, Clinton made clear his support for the death penalty, as he has since his 1992 campaign, when he signed the execution order for Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally retarded man.  
 
Ruling-class relief at settling of election
Bush's electoral victory was sealed at 10:00 p.m. on December 12 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, rejected a recount of ballots in several Florida counties ordered by the Florida Supreme Court. The selective hand recount would have opened the chances for Democratic candidate Albert Gore to reverse his defeat in the state, which Bush is credited with winning by a very narrow margin. The high court majority ruled the recount as ordered did not meet "minimal constitutional standards" to be accomplished by the deadline--two hours later--after which the state's electors would be open to a challenge in Congress.

When the November 7 vote total in Florida turned out to be close enough to require an automatic machine recount, the Gore camp began looking for a way to steal the election from Bush. Gore asked for hand recounts in three heavily Democratic counties where chances were best that the procedure would tip the scales in his favor. Out of 67 counties in Florida, Gore asked for manual recounts only in Broward, Palm Beach, Volusia, and Miami-Dade, where he won the vote.

Although casting his quest as a fight to get every vote counted, Gore never requested a full recount in the state. This was an issue raised by judges from the Leon County Circuit Court to the Florida Supreme Court to the U.S. Supreme Court. Bush attorney Benjamin Ginsberg scored his opponents, saying, "Going statewide, they're [Gore's campaign] really not sure they can win. Their overall mistake is being so hypocritical about what they are asking for."

The Supreme Court ruled just two hours before the midnight deadline for certification of each state's delegation to the Electoral College. If the court had not ruled, Florida's 25 electors could have been challenged in Congress, where there was sure to be a public fight on the floor of the U.S. Congress and a factionally tinged decision by that body on the outcome of the presidential elections--something broad wings of the ruling class were relieved did not get posed.

This relief with the move by the Supreme Court to end the contest was palpable the following day in ruling circles. Leading figures in the Democratic Party urged Gore to end his legal challenges to the Florida vote. Edward Rendell, general chairman of the Democratic National Committee, urged Gore to "act now and concede." Democrat Robert Torricelli of New Jersey urged "the people [to] accept the finality of the judgment. I think George Bush comes to the presidency in very difficult circumstances and it is incumbent on all of us to put the bitterness behind us and help him to succeed."

Rep. Charles Rangel, Democrat from New York, urged the "American people," according to the New York Times, "to rally around Mr. Bush for the good of the country." In his concession speech Gore also urged "all Americans" to back the president-elect, as did Clinton.  
 
Antiwoman assault
For 35 days this legal maneuvering--with Gore fighting to get a narrow recount carried out and Bush opposing Gore's moves--was the framework of the post-election battle. But the legal challenges were accompanied by a heated factional struggle, one that included demagogic attacks by liberals and Gore loyalists as well as right-wing forces.

The coarse tone of this factionalism manifested itself in the personal, antiwoman assault unleashed against Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris, who was targeted by liberals when she moved to certify Bush as the winner of the state's electoral vote. This included feature columns in the Washington Post, including one by journalist Robin Givhan, who wrote about Harris at a press conference that she "applied her makeup with a trowel.... Her lips were overdrawn with berry-red lipstick.... Her skin had been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat. And her eyes...bore the telltale homogenous spikes of false eyelashes."

Facing protests over the article, the Post ran a defense of Givhan by columnist Geneva Overholser that added to the crude attack. "Harris was not born with a bulbous nose," Overholser wrote. "She made cosmetics choices that are way out of the norm. If you watched her on TV and didn't think so, the women in your life look different from the women in mine." She said she was "delighted in this vigorous commentary by a woman [Givhan] with a strong point of view."

Caryl Rivers, a professor of journalism at Boston University, decried this attack. She wrote in Women's e-news that "a Democratic operative labeled her [Harris] Cruela deVil, the villainess of '102 Dalmatians,' and the term got repeated everywhere. The Boston Globe said maybe she was planning to unwind at a drag bar, because of all her makeup, and the Boston Herald called her a painted lady." A Herald columnist wrote of the 43-year-old secretary of state, "There seemed to be something humiliating, sad, desperate and embarrassing about Harris yesterday, a woman of a certain age trying too hard to hang on."  
 
Rightists seize on 'military' ballot issue
Right-wing forces seized on two questions. One portrayed the recount of absentee ballots as an attempt to target for disqualification votes from U.S. military personnel abroad. Some also asserted that the Democratic contender was trying to increase the number of absentee "ballots from Israel," an unsubstantiated charge. This dovetailed with undercurrents of anti-Semitism from rightists and their appeal to layers in the military, especially the officer corps.

In a November 24 column in the Wall Street Journal, "Now we must fight for our country," conservative commentator Peggy Noonan wrote that during the recount of ballots, "there is no evidence that the absentee ballots of felons have been challenged. But the absentee ballots of members of the military were challenged. Many were thrown out." Noonan claimed that the "Democratic army of lawyers and operatives marches into the counting room armed with a five-page memo from a Democratic lawyer, instructing them on how to disenfranchise military voters."

Noonan quoted from what she says was e-mail received from "a Republican" in the counting room. The Democrats "succeeded in a number of cases denying the vote to these fine Men and Women. This was a deliberate all-out assault on the Armed Forces solely to sustain the Draft Dodger [Clinton] and his flunky."

The right-wing Drudge Report, an Internet news sheet produced by Matt Drudge, carried a feature November 25 titled, "Surprise: Broward 'finds' 500 more ballots, many from Israel." The article referred to is a news piece on the recounts, explaining that Broward county officials announced they "located 500 untabulated oversees ballots," although there was no mention of Israel in the article. Broward is a heavily Democratic county with a substantial Jewish population.  
 
Coarsening of tone
The 35 days following the November 7 election marked the sharpest and most prolonged outbreak of the factional infighting within the wealthy ruling class since events two years ago leading up to and through the impeachment trial of William Clinton. One aspect of this is the coarsening of civil tone and public discourse and debate among capitalist politicians of all parties. Other aspects include demagogic attacks, especially by rightists, targeting the rights of immigrants and the gains that Blacks and women have won in their struggles for social and political rights.

These political battles and the coarsening of debate are a registration of the irresolvable divisions within bourgeois politics over how best to prepare for the social explosions and class battles that more and more of the U.S. rulers fear will come. The wealthy capitalists know that the economic expansion cannot go on forever and are already encountering resistance by wide layers of workers and farmers to employer and government assaults. They know they cannot make much more progress easily against unions, wages, and hard-won rights of working people, women, and oppressed nationalities; they will increasingly have to take on the strikes and struggles, and even larger class battles down the road.

Contrary to their triumphalist crowing at the opening of the 1990s, the U.S. rulers have discovered they must still confront a working class in the workers states of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that will not willingly embrace oppression and speedup. Nor have they forced acceptance from peoples of the semicolonial countries of national oppression and the devastating social consequences of the world capitalist crisis.

As the changeover in administrations proceeds apace, the NAACP continues to demand the U.S. Justice Department headed by Attorney General Janet Reno look into widespread harassment of Blacks, Latinos, and immigrants seeking to cast their vote November 7 in Florida and several other states.

So far, the Clinton administration has failed to respond to the incidents and requests by the civil rights organization, except for the Justice Department's announcement it will send two people to Florida to see if an investigation is warranted. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has indicated it plans to investigate evidence of denial of voting rights in the election (see accompanying article).
 
 
Related articles:
Join in defense of voting rights
NAACP demands probe of voting rights abuses
 
 
 
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