THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2020
Baker City, Oregon
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EDITORIAL
Count all
the votes
President Donald Trump’s slogan is “Make Ameri-
ca Great Again.”
But a key part of what makes America great is
our election system, and the president doesn’t seem
to have much faith in that system even though it
elevated him to the White House 4 years ago.
Perhaps we will know, by the time you read this,
whether Trump has won a second term or whether
his Democrat rival, Joe Biden, has prevailed.
But as of Wednesday morning it seemed possible
that the outcome would still be unknown, with mil-
lions of ballots yet to be counted.
This is not surprising.
The coronavirus pandemic resulted in millions of
Americans voting by mail who in previous elections
cast their ballots at polling places. And in several
states, elections offi cials were not allowed to start
counting mail-in ballots early. Some states, unlike
Oregon, allow mail-in ballots to be counted so long as
they were postmarked by Election Day.
It’s a frustrating situation, to be sure.
The more so for Oregonians, who, 20 years after
starting vote-by-mail, are accustomed to having rela-
tively rapid results.
But the annoying, even agonizing, wait, is worth it
to ensure that, as the hoary old cliché goes, every vote
counts.
Trump has vowed to go to the Supreme Court to
block the counting of some ballots. He has called for
recounts, as is his legal right.
The election might well end up before the nation’s
highest court — many of us remember 2000, and
Bush v. Gore, and Florida’s infamous hanging chads.
But all voters who properly cast a ballot and met
their state’s requirements should have their vote
counted. That is not, as Trump described the situa-
tion early Wednesday, an attempt to “steal” the elec-
tion, nor is it “a major fraud on our nation.”
Disenfranchising voters, on the other hand, cer-
tainly would constitute a fraud, and a theft.
Trump might win.
It was, if nothing else, an extremely competitive,
and close, race.
But the president, no matter how dedicated he is to
helping America thrive, can only harm the nation by
impugning without convincing evidence the integrity
of one of its foundational principles — that citizens,
by exercising their right to vote, will determine the
direction of their country.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
Obsession with political polling
obscures the most vital issues
By Jay Ambrose
If you watched TV news during this
presidential election campaign, you
would sooner or later know every-
thing that matters, namely which of
the two candidates is most likely to
win, although not for sure. Maybe, on
second thought, polling information
doesn’t matter that much, at least not
as much as who should win.
Like so much that now surrounds
us, the absolute absorption in polls
is next door to insane, not because it
isn’t important to the tune of daily
updates. But dwelling on the mat-
ter almost to the point that nothing
else matters is absurd. Consider, for
instance, that early on in a campaign,
you could have polls showing Candi-
date A is winning 97% to 3%. But it
does not tell us the outcome because
it has not yet been revealed that
Candidate A once robbed a bank. And
the day before the election, why care?
You’re going to get the true answer
pretty darn soon, although, in these
days of mail-in commotion, it may not
be that soon.
In 2016, pollsters told us for
months that Hillary Clinton was
going to win, thereby going lame on
in-depth talk on all kinds of other
topics and hurting her feelings when
she didn’t. I would tune in to PBS
NewsHour to catch up on the news
and hear she was still winning and
then I switched to it on election night,
saw the tears and knew she had lost.
The main thing wrong with this
overkill is that it does skip what
actually does matter, namely issues
along with character and capability.
Consider the last debate between
President Donald Trump and Joe
Biden. We had the issue of frack-
ing oil and natural gas and whether
Biden was against it or not and
Trump said Biden was against it and
it would cost millions of jobs. Biden
said he had never said he was against
it, although he has as much, and he
has made clear he hopes to start a
program to eventually get rid of all
fossil fuels.
What certain TV news analyses
then focused on was what effect all
of this would have on Texas and
Pennsylvania where oil and gas are
major industries with lots of jobs
depending on them. Polls show Biden
doing unexpectedly well in Texas for
a Democrat and also slightly ahead
in Pennsylvania, a battleground
state that could be huge in who wins.
Might his words hurt his standing
and what would he do to work his
way around it and what might Trump
do to take advantage of it? Here are
some other questions.
Is fracking a serious environmen-
tal hazard? And even if it is, isn’t it
crucial to our now being energy in-
dependent? And hasn’t the use of the
low-CO2 natural gas it produces done
more than anything to lessen CO2 as
it has been substituted for coal? And
isn’t our energy growth, facilitated to
some degree by fracking on federal
lands, fundamentally important to
our economy and therefore to solving
social problems and enhancing our
future? Are we really going to try to
get rid of all fossil fuels, and wouldn’t
this be totalitarianism worse than
a virus shutdown? Is that crucial
to fi ghting climate change, and if it
is, shouldn’t we be looking more at
nuclear energy as a replacement than
unreliable renewable fuels?
And what difference does it make if
China does not do anything?
The questions are endless, just
as they are in reducing the military
budget, enacting a national $15 mini-
mum wage, packing the Supreme
Court and getting rid of the Electoral
College, for instance. And yes, these
matters are discussed, but not nearly
enough and too often simply in the
context of what it means to stand-
ing in the polls and who is an awful
human being. Time is so terribly, ter-
ribly wasted in dwelling so much on
minor polling shifts that may or may
not mean anything and have nothing
to do with who would or would not
serve the country best.
Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for
Tribune News Service. Readers may
email him at speaktojay@aol.com.
Next president’s top task is to revive bipartisanship
By Doyle McManus
America is a divided nation —
and the presidential campaign
only made the condition worse.
Partisanship has spiked. Armed
militias showed up at campaign
rallies. Gun sales soared.
In New York, Los Angeles,
Washington, D.C., and other cities,
shop owners nailed plywood over
their windows. In a Gallup Poll
last month, a record 64% of people
said they were “afraid of what will
happen” if their favored candidate
doesn’t win.
“You just don’t want to talk
to people anymore,” Mary Jo
Dalrymple, a 56-year-old retiree
in Greensburg, Pennsylvania,
told me. “You’re afraid it will be
unpleasant.”
This isn’t normal — not in
decades, perhaps not since the
Civil War.
Even with nearly a quarter-mil-
lion deaths, and 100,000 infections
a day, our most durable problem
isn’t the COVID-19 pandemic; a
vaccine can solve that. Nor is it
the recession; the economy likely
will recover once the virus is
quelled.
Our biggest challenge is the po-
litical polarization that has made
the country increasingly ungov-
ernable, no matter who wins.
Polarization has been part of
our politics for decades. But under
President Donald Trump, it has
turned into something worse:
delegitimization — the practice
of condemning your opponents as
un-American, undemocratic and
unworthy of respect.
Trump entered politics by ques-
tioning President Barack Obama’s
legitimacy, suggesting falsely that
he might not be a U.S. citizen. This
year, he charged — again with-
out evidence — that Democratic
nominee Joe Biden was mentally
and physically infi rm and the pup-
pet of “radical socialists” who “hate
our country.”
On the other side, plenty of
Democrats believe Trump is a
would-be authoritarian who would
gladly destroy the Constitution.
At their fi rst debate, Biden
called Trump “one of the most
racist presidents we’ve ever had,”
overlooking the fact that 12 of the
fi rst 18 presidents owned slaves.
Many Democrats and Repub-
licans see the other side not
merely as political rivals, but as
an existential threat. That cre-
ates a dilemma: If you think your
opponents don’t share a basic
commitment to constitutional
government, why would you work
with them?
That problem won’t disappear
once the election is over. Unless
one party captures both houses of
Congress and the White House, it
will stand in the way of the next
president accomplishing anything.
In my view, here’s what needs to
happen.
Step One is making sure the
election is seen as legitimate. Par-
tisans on both sides think their
opponents are trying to cheat — a
sentiment stoked, of course, by
Trump’s constant declarations
that the voting process is “rigged”
and his refusal to promise a peace-
ful transition of power if he loses.
A president who wins by under-
handed means will rightly appear
illegitimate. He may claim a man-
date, but he won’t have one.
The runner-up needs to ac-
knowledge reality and give a
concession speech — the more
graceful, the better. That’s how the
losing side acknowledges that the
winner is legitimate. If the losing
candidate refuses to do it, other
leaders in his party should do it
for him.
Step Two is working to bring the
country together, as earlier presi-
dents did after divisive campaigns.
That means a serious attempt
to revive bipartisan deal making
in Congress, starting where the
two parties share similar goals
— another economic relief bill
to help the country through the
pandemic, for example.
It also requires granting your
opponents the presumption of
legitimacy, no matter how much
you dislike their policies.
Biden, who spent 36 years in
the Senate, has already said he
would try to work with Republi-
cans in Congress if he’s elected.
Progressive Democrats have sniffed
that his nostalgia for a long-ago era
of comity is naive.
But Biden knows how the mod-
ern Senate operates. He was vice
president when Obama tried and
failed to win GOP support for an
economic stimulus bill in 2009 and
for an immigration reform package
in 2013.
His talk of bipartisanship may
have been a campaign gambit;
swing voters like the idea of the
two parties working together. It
may even be aimed at splitting
moderate Republicans from Trump
loyalists. Even so, it’s worth a try.
It’s now almost forgotten, but
Trump was elected in 2016 in
part because he promised, as a
businessman, to work with both
parties.
In his fi rst year in offi ce, he tried
to cut deals with Democrats on
immigration reform and infra-
structure spending. As recently as
last week, he was negotiating with
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — at
arm’s length, to be sure — over a
possible stimulus bill.
Even if the results are modest,
a bipartisan effort would be an en-
couraging departure from gridlock.
A president who gets things done —
as opposed to merely insulting his
critics — could see his legitimacy
and his popularity grow.
It’s been done before: Ronald Rea-
gan did it in the 1980s; Bill Clinton
did it in the 1990s; George W. Bush
did it in the early 2000s after a
disputed election that was decided
in the Supreme Court.
If the next president hopes to
leave a substantive legacy, he
should follow those presidents, work
to stem the tide of polarization
that has poisoned our politics, and
make America’s government work
again.
Doyle McManus is a columnist for
the Los Angeles Times. Readers may
send him email at doyle.mcmanus@
latimes.com