for 27 March 2001. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Tim Cavanaugh
Special Guest Editor

Terry Colon
Art Director

Heather Havrilesky
Senior Editor

Joey Anuff
Publisher

"the forces that most effectively drive [BeliefNet] are the same ones that propelled George W. Bush into office — the millions of Americans who take seriously the notion that Bill Clinton was a figure of unprecedented vice and immorality in American politics, that our moral crisis demands answers bigger thanourselves, that we need to take a cold shower in our spiritual traditions."

I'll grant you that this is an effective description of the forces that drove W. into office, but I find it hard to believe that those forces — Messrs. Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist, and Kennedy, and Ms. O'Connor-- are the ones that most effectively drive BeliefNet. If they rely on those five people for most of their traffic they're in worse shape than you think.

In other words, don't you think "propelled" is a little bit strong for someone who backed into the White House the way W. did? His popular-vote loss wasn't even the smallest of the last 40 years. (Kennedy-Nixon 1960, Nixon-Humphrey 1968).

Matt Weiner
<mcwst5+@pitt.edu>

Thanks, Matt.

It's true that if we lived under a different Constitution, George W. Bush might not be President right now. It's also true that that would be a good thing. It's even more true that we should make a Constitutional amendment eliminating the electoral college, and most true of all that we should make a constitutional amendment requiring that the entire Bush family be paraded through the streets of Baghdad naked in cages.

However, since Bill Clinton is the only recent Democrat who's been able to win under the current system, and since it's going to be a long, long time before the Democrats can find a candidate with anything like Clinton's skill, it's smart to stop viewing Gore's loss as some kind of judicial error and start assessing it as a loss. If Gore hadn't been such a fuckup, if Bush hadn't gotten a ton of votes (more than Clinton received either time, and possibly — if we recounted every county in every state in the country — a majority), the case never would have come to the Supreme Court in the first place.

yr pal,

tim