A story in the international section of today's New York Times reports in all seriousness on a mock election held in Beijing in which Chinese communists favored Al Gore over George W. Bush, 762 to 396. The article quotes one of the Chinese as saying, "I think Clinton has been good to China, and I think Gore will continue that." You can say that again. There's no sign in the article that the Times realizes a quote like that resonates in an ominous way among those concerned about the Clinton administration's technology transfers to China, about the leakage of nuclear-missile secrets to China, and about the effort by Chinese communists to sway the American election in 1996 by making illegal campaign contributions to the Democratic Party.
Probity and Judgment: The lead editorial in today's New York Times comments in passing on the two former secretaries of state, James Baker and Warren Christopher, who are overseeing the Florida recount on behalf of the Bush and Gore campaigns. "Their reputations for probity and judgment provide a reasonable hope that contentious issues can be resolved without lengthy litigation," the Times says. "Judgment"? Probity, maybe, but only the Times could manage to consider Warrren Christopher a paragon of judgment. This, you may recall, is the state secretary who traveled to Damascus more than a dozen times to prostrate himself at the feet of the Syrian tyrant, Hafez al-Assad, in pursuit of a Middle East "peace" deal to prop up that tyrant, and who hemmed and hawed while the Balkans, Rwanda and Somalia deteriorated. As for Mr. Baker, maybe the Times considers his stint running President Bush's losing campaign in 1992 to have been evidence of his good judgment. Or maybe the reference is to Mr. Baker's pressure on the democratically elected government of Israel.
Unfair from Day One: The Times prints on its op-ed page today an article from a Yale Law School professor claiming that the Electoral College was "unfair from day one" and that it does not resonate with "the American value of one person, one vote." The same argument could be used to dismantle the Senate. After all, the votes of the senators from Rhode Island, Montana and South Dakota are worth as much as those as the senators from the far more populous states of California, New York and Texas. That's not exactly "one person, one vote." Though the Constitution begins "We the people," not "We the states," the name of the country is the United States of America, not the United People of America, and our political system is a hybrid of individual rights and states' rights. The folks attacking the Electoral College all of a sudden now that it is working against Al Gore's chances of winning the presidency are going to have to reckon with the fact that the logical conclusion of their argument would also dictate a dismantling of the Senate. There may be arguments for doing that, but it would be a radical reform to a system that has served America pretty well over the years.