1996 Election Report - Page A1
November 7, 1996 THE AMERICAN VOTERS' PARADOX
by William Heartstone, Politics Writer, The Daily Republican Newspaper
WASHINGTON DESK - If there is any meaning to the 1996 elections it is that it is the end of politics as we know it. American voters failed to exercise their franchise. Less than half of those eligible to cast ballots, showed-up on November 5th. The United States is now run by the tyranny of the minority.
With less than a 25% plurality of those voting on Tuesday, there was no mandate given for president Clinton and none for the Republican congressional leadership. This is the end of democracy, as we knew it.
The American electorate, did not take any civic interest nor pride in the democratic process on Tuesday. The democracy cannot be run by the tyranny of the minority!
The Clinton administration is corrupt. The democratic process has failed America in 1996. The scandals of the Clinton administration present the voters with sufficient grounds for turning Clinton out of office. Clinton has been a continuous target for criminal investigations over the entire four years of the first administration.
Political discontent has been expressed everywhere president Clinton appeared in this campaign year. Further evidence came to hand in the failure of political books, the shrinkage of television audiences for debates and, finally, the shabby vote at the polls on Tuesday.
For the first time since the and of the Harding administration, fewer than half the Americans of voting age bothered to cast votes.
Among those who did vote, more than half told reporters they had no faith in president Clinton's honesty or trustworthiness. More than half those who backed Clinton said they did so with serious doubts as to his character.
Clinton failed for a second time to obtain a majority vote. He finished with only 49 percent, and Clinton failed to gain Democrat Party control of the Senate and House of Representatives.
Clinton's dismal failure came after he spent millions of Democrat Party dollars and millions more from organized labor.
Under these circumstances it was all that Democrat Party officials could do to point out that a Democrat Party president had been elected to a second consecutive term.
In the South, Bill Clinton and his running mate, Al Gore, won only their home states of Arkansas and Tennessee plus Florida. Democrats are falling further and further behind in the South, once unchallenged Democrat territory.
Americans have re-elected a corrupt Administration; they will regret it. The re-election of President Clinton is not an unprecedented political event - 13 out of 18 incumbent US presidents seeking re-election in this century have been successful, but it is an important moral event and could prove a dangerous economic portent.
Judge, Robert Bork, writes in his new book Slouching Towards Gomorrah about the moral corruption of the Clinton administration and the under-whelming moral reaction of the American electorate to such disclosures over the past 4 years.
Thirty years ago, president Clinton's past and current behavior would have been absolutely unacceptable.
Since the 1992 election, the American voter has learned far more about the Clinton character void. The additional information adds new charges to a list that is already lengthy.
It is not just what president Clinton has done, but the American voters' acceptance of what most people are ready willing and able to believe he has done that is disturbing.
The American people know that he ran a corrupt administration in Arkansas as Governor, and has run a corrupt Administration in the White House as President. There is substantial evidence that the Clinton administration has obstructed justice, told lies in its own defense, and put private before public interest.
On Tuesday, about 25% of the electorate appeared at the polls and Clinton was re-elected. It is clear that the key minority 25% could care less that president Clinton ran a corrupt administration for the past 4 years and conducted a political campaign in which foreign nations contributed millions of illegal political contributions for which Clinton passed-out the resources of the United States in exchange for graft.
More than half of those polled said that they regarded Clinton as untrustworthy. Less than a quarter of the electorate actually voted for him. If these issues had not been raised, or the electorate had not believed the charges, one could have said that Clinton won his second term because people did not know what sort of man he was.
It is quite clear that everyone knows what kind of corrupt politician Bill Clinton is. It is also clear that the American political system, as we have known it, is no more. But, Clinton will be around for some time to come!
COMMENT
The Daily Republican Online
© 1994-1996 HTML Tahoe Web Press,
All rights reserved.