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Speak Out
Inaugural address was on the mark
Carl Heintze's Presidential Inaugural Address, which ran in the Nov. 22 issue of the Saratoga News, is indeed the one the country wishes it could hear on Jan. 20, 2001!
Two hundred plus years ago, the framers of the Constitution saddled us with the electoral college. It seemed like a good idea at the time--a compromise between those who wanted a straight democracy and those who felt that the general population was too ignorant to make an informed decision about the candidates (no TV, no Internet, no spin doctors--how did they survive?) and that it was better to have the House of Representatives select someone as President. My, how times have changed! Not only are we better informed on a minute-by-minute basis, which Alexander Hamilton and company didn't have imaginations wild enough to envision, but the electorate now includes an enormous bunch of people who, at the time and for a variety of reasons, were not considered "fit" or "worthy" to vote. That compromise has now come back to bite us on our collective butt.
This is the first time in living memory that the popular vote will go to one candidate and the electoral vote, in all likelihood, will go to another. Whoever eventually wins (and I use the term loosely), half of the voters who bothered to vote will feel cheated--wronged-- "hey, we been had!" Although I voted for Gore, I am now beginning to think that perhaps, under these circumstances, Bush might be the better man for the job, after all.
For months now, "W" has been telling anyone who would listen that he is absolutely marvelous at building bipartisan cooperation. Well, it looks as if he is going to have to put his governing ability where his mouth is. This is one campaign promise he cannot afford to break if he ever hopes to achieve even a modicum of success as president.
Yes, George W. Bush will probably receive the majority of the winner-take-all electoral votes, but he will make a grave mistake if he reads into that any kind of mandate. He has been described as arrogant--that he was born on third base and acts like he hit a triple. I hope he can rise above that arrogance. I hope he's really as smart as the GOP and his mother have been telling us. I hope he really is capable of being his own man, and won't simply do as his "handlers" tell him to do.
He will need humility, intelligence and independence if he is to govern well. I pray he can dig down and find all three. The first sign that he has found them will come on Jan. 20 when he faces us all and we hear, for the first time, what our president has to say for himself.
Jerri Olivari
Saratoga
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
