Bill's party does what you gotta do

By Robert L. Bartley

NEW YORK -- "You gotta do what you gotta do," a victorious Bill Clinton told Bob Dole when he complained about the demagogic Medicare ads that helped defeat him. By now this seems to have become the mantra of Mr. Clinton's party.

To put the current midterm election in perspective, consider how the Democrats won their one-vote Senate majority. After losing the House and the White House, they won the Senate by persuading Vermont's Jim Jeffords to abandon the party in which he'd just been elected. For voting with the other side in organizing the Senate, he was rewarded with a committee chairmanship and an eventual expansion of his beloved Northeast dairy subsidy, a piece of pork notorious even in cynical Washington.

Party switches are not uncommon in Washington, of course, but none in my memory has overturned control of the Senate. Indeed, when Wayne Morse left the GOP in 1953, he remained an independent voting with Republicans on organization, finally becoming a Democrat only after the next election.

When Sen. Phil Gramm left the Democrats, he resigned his House position and ran as a Republican. The Jeffords switch could have been offset if Georgia Sen. Zell Miller had become a Republican; while he's hinted at that, he's also expressed admiration of Sen. Gramm's upstanding way of changing parties.

Democrats were in position to claim Sen. Jeffords' 51st vote only because they'd won their 50th vote with Missouri's Jean Carnahan, who took office without benefit of ever appearing on a ballot. Her husband died in a campaign plane crash three weeks before the election, but the Democratic governor promised to name her to the vacant seat if her deceased husband won the polling, in effect counting his votes for her.

In the end the dead man got 49,000 more votes than Republican incumbent John Ashcroft. This was after Democrats found a friendly judge to extend poll hours in heavily Democratic St. Louis, setting off a dispute that clouded the outcome, with some voters casting after-hours ballots and some poll judges leaving their posts unattended. Republican Sen. Christopher Bond called for a federal investigation to deter such shenanigans in the future.

Senator Ashcroft had multiple grounds for challenging the outcome, for example whether a dead man is an eligible candidate and whether the governor or the Senate is judge of the election outcome. But he declined, remarking "There are things more important than politics." Meanwhile, of course, presidential aspirant Al Gore, who once talked of the need to "rip the lungs out of anybody else who's in the race," was litigating to the hilt in Florida. Even before the polls closed, he had a telemarketing firm calling to prepare a basis for challenging the "butterfly ballot." He called George Bush to withdraw an earlier concession, and orchestrated a smear campaign against Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Ultimately Mr. Bush won all of the official recounts, and later also nearly all the media-conducted reconstructions. But in 36 days of litigation, Mr. Gore's lawyers got the Florida Supreme Court twice to sanction his version of recounts, until the U.S. Supreme Court put an end to it.

Democrats now come to preserve their narrow Senate majority by fudging the rules to substitute a second candidate when the first one collapsed in the polls. Sen. Bob Torricelli's ethics problems were scarcely a secret when Democrats chose him in the primary; release of a letter detailing them served mostly to raise the question of why U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White didn't indict him. The substitution of aging Frank Lautenberg is an attempt to repeat the Carnahan coup without a plane crash.

The New Jersey law clearly says the change came too late, but the state Supreme Court says it's OK, a ruling with even less of a basis than the Florida one. The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to intervene, no doubt because voters have a chance to sort it out.

In the Montana Senate race, Republican Mike Taylor dropped out, charging that a Democratic ad insinuated that he was homosexual. Some 20 years ago he promoted beauty products on TV, and a clip showed him in flamboyant clothes and patting a man's face. Democrats claim the ad was about financial improprieties at his beauty school, but on his pro-gay Web site Andrew Sullivan, citing the music and tag line, concludes "I'm sorry, this was gay-baiting." It would be a scandal if run by a Republican against a Democrat, he adds, "But because it's a Democratic ad, it's a non-story." In South Dakota, where Tom Daschle's junior colleague Tim Johnson is in a tight race, a Democratic registration drive on Indian reservations seems to have been caught with forged signatures for absentee ballots. The bogus documents came from an "independent contractor" to Democrats - that is, someone paid to register voters.

Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton protege who heads the Democratic National Committee, charged that President Bush can't deal with the spate of corporate scandals because as a businessman "he has engaged in the same practices." But Mr. McAuliffe told Jeff Gerth of the New York Times that his own $100,000 investment in Global Crossing rose to an $18 million stake.

President Clinton himself took to the British Labor Party convention in Blackpool to warn that "pre-emptive action today may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future." And President Jimmy Carter wrapped up an arguably overdue Nobel Peace Prize by writing that "there is no current danger to the United States from Baghdad." Former presidents are allying with foreigners, that is, to undercut a sitting president on the brink of war. With today's standards, we scarcely notice the enormity.

"What you got to do" standards and "meaning of is is" localisms persist because voters tolerate them. Perhaps it's time for voters in places like New Jersey, South Dakota and Missouri to call a halt.

Robert L. Bartley is the editor of The Wall Street Journal.