Some Tildenesque Final Thoughts

I went to a high school in Brooklyn named Samuel J. Tilden, There was a portrait of Samuel J. Tilden in the main hallway just outside the principal’s office and every month in the logo of the school newspaper. He had gray hair, a thick swatch of it across his forehead, over a full well-fed looking face and seemed to be pouting.

A history teacher told me Tilden had been the governor of New York and had run for president of the United States in 1876 and had lost the election even though more people had voted for him than his opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes. I could not understand how that could happen but immediately realized why he wore such a sour expression. It seems Hayes had received one more vote than Samuel J. Tilden in the electoral college.

The rest of the world is now in the same position I was in back then. Like me, they may have heard of American colleges such as Harvard and Yale and USC and UCLA but not of the electoral college. Indeed, I remember wondering where it was located and what kind of faculty of wise men it had who could be entrusted to make such an important choice.

I read in the school library that more than two centuries ago, after the successful revolution against England, the founding fathers had several ideas about how to choose a leader and the electoral college system represented a melding of them.

Like so many compromises, the system was obviously flawed and unfair from the very beginning, especially with most states voting as a bloc their entire apportionment of electoral votes. But since the winner of the popular vote and the electoral college seldom conflicted there was rarely great concern about the fact that the electoral college system might be like a time bomb ticking away.

Until this election, that is, when it exploded with a vengeance and the result was confusion.

So what if it took a few weeks longer than usual to choose a president? Since Richard Nixon’s preoccupation with the Watergate proceedings, Ronald Reagan’s gentle nappings throughout his tenure, and Bill Clinton’s total immersion in the impeachment trials, it seems to me we can get along well enough without a president for an extended period of time.

We also can get along without the outmoded two-party lock-step setup in national elections. One can vote Republican or Democratic, but unlike a parliamentary democracy, any third-party vote will not be taken into account in the formation of a new administration. As no less a political scientist than Jesse Ventura has proclaimed, “What’s so great about the two-party system? It’s just one more party than they had in Russia.”

At the beginning of this year’s election campaign I was a Ralph Nader supporter. But as the race between Al Gore and George W. Bush tightened I realized that even though Nader may be pure as the driven snow and Gore and Bush were both gray as dirt stains, I had to choose between the two grays.

I voted here in California where Gore, as it turns out, did not need my vote under the electoral college system. But if I had voted in Florida, my vote would have been priceless. It just doesn’t seem fair and I have come away feeling short-changed.

Back in 1876 when Tilden lost in the electoral college by that one Republican vote, that vote came from Florida. However, that does not mean Florida Republicans are traditionally more corrupt than politicians of either party in any state. No matter what face the United States likes to present to the rest of the world, elections in America have always been circuses featuring high-wire partisan acrobats.

One final word: Rutherford B. Hayes turned out to be one of the worst presidents we ever had. He may have been elected by that one electoral vote but his leaving office was received with almost unanimous approval. Still I’m not sure Tilden would have been any better as a president. My high school bearing his name was not that great.