The coming presidential election may well offer voters their starkest choice since 1984, in terms of national security, the economy, and electoral legitimacy. Democrats seem poised to campaign on at least three themes: (1) the “stolen” 2000 presidential election, (2) the terrible shape of the economy, and (3) the ill-considered war in Iraq and its messy aftermath. If these issues are, as it appears, to be front and center in the campaign, they deserve more light and less heat than has been emitted to date.

Who Stole Florida?

The election 2000 issue resonates only with the Democratic faithful, but strongly, and thus, the Democratic nominee can be expected to use it to draw the party’s base to the polling booth. His version of events, however, is likely to differ somewhat from what really happened in those extraordinary weeks between Election Day and the Supreme Court’s ultimate ruling.

In the aftermath of the initial Florida vote count, Democratic candidate Al Gore had a simple, legitimate option, the exercise of which would not have raised so much as an eyebrow: requesting a single, statewide, machine recount. Such a recount was unlikely to produce a more reliable result than the original count, but no one would have had grounds to begrudge Gore that option, clearly permissible under Florida state law. But Gore had other ideas. Instead he asked for a selective, manual recount, targeting four heavily Democratic districts—a request of dubious legality that was nonetheless sanctioned by a divided (predominately Democratic) Florida Supreme Court. When asked by that court if the candidate wanted a statewide recount, Gore’s counsel declined.

Thus, the case was a dispute about how to recount the votes—not a dispute about who won the most votes. (Bush was affirmed the winner in every recount, including those conducted by several independent news organizations after he was inaugurated.) Gore’s insistence on a particularly eccentric recount that would favor his chances is what resulted in the bitter court battle that ended in the U.S. Supreme Court. By pursuing his selective recount strategy, Gore ensured that there would be a legal battle and that whoever emerged victorious would be tainted, considered an illegitmate president by a significant portion of the electorate.

We can set aside the legal arguments made in the case that decided the election, in that neither side had a slam-dunk legal case. Two points made at oral argument settled the outcome: Gore’s counsel argued (a) that state judges could order what the Florida legislature could not, and (b) that interpreting “chads” could be allowed to vary not only from county to county but even from table to table within each voting precinct. This argument was rejected by seven justices, five of whom concurred in the Court’s ultimate decision that by late December there was not enough time for a statewide, manual recount (which, again, the media’s recounts demonstrated would have affirmed Bush the winner).

Some have understandably seen this decision as influenced by the justices’ own preferences, but it is important to note what would have happened had the Court not ruled as it did. Within 24 hours the (Republican) Florida state legislature would have certified a competing slate of electors different from that certified by the Florida Supreme Court, and this competing slate would have been sent to Washington under the signature of Governor Jeb Bush, the Republican candidate’s brother. According to Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, both slates would have been submitted to the new Senate, then divided 50-50, a body presided over by the still-sitting Vice President—Albert Gore, who was hardly disinterested in the outcome. With a 50-50 deadlock, Gore would have cast the deciding vote certifying which slate would be accepted by the Senate. This scenario certainly would have qualified as a constitutional crisis.

Would Gore have recused himself in favor of the president pro tempore? The new Senate would have had to choose one, per Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution. What choice would a 50-50 Senate have made (with Gore, again, as tie-breaker)? Democrats would surely have cited Gore’s popular vote win, legally irrelevant but politically potent.

Though it did not ultimately result in such a catastrophe, Gore’s challenge inflicted serious damage. He forced several courts to rule on arcane matters, with sparse precedent, under intense political and temporal pressure. These are the worst possible circumstances under which to ask courts to make important judgments, as they may prove unwise precedents for future controversies. (Notably, equal-protection rulings have often opened a Pandora’s Box of future claims.) Public confidence in a widely disputed decision was bound to be shaken.

In any case, despite Gore’s and his fellow Democrats’ disappointment over the outcome, the 2000 election was by no means stolen. On the contrary, it was the prolonged court battle that shook the public’s confidence in the fairness and reliability of its system for choosing a president. Had the Supreme Court not intervened as it did, public confidence might well have been destroyed.

The Federal Budget Deficit

More noise is made about federal government budget deficits, to less effect, than any other issue in American politics. We can set aside at the outset the gazillion-dollar projections of deficits over the next umpteen years. Small variations in various economic numbers—GDP growth, inflation, unemployment, interest rates—can have vast effects on the actual numbers. The simple fact is, we do not know now what the cumulative federal budget deficit will be over the next five years, period.

We can set aside as well the “deficits cause higher interest rates” argument. In fact, interest rates and deficits frequently move in opposite directions, as they did in the Reagan years and have done for President Bush as well. Although intuitively it appears that a higher deficit should put upward pressure on interest rates, clearly there are far larger factors at work—asset value shifts, for example—that swamp the interest-rate impact of federal budget deficits.

In addition, the very process of giving a dollar number for deficits tells us nothing useful: the ratio of the deficit to GDP is the relevant figure. And today’s debt-to-GDP ratio is roughly half the comparable number at the end of World War II. Running deficits during wartime is nothing new.

Another “cut the deficit” argument is that we are burdening our children. As one whose taxes helped pay down our nation’s World War II debt service, I can say that I was glad to do so. I benefited by the “Greatest Generation” having saved the world from Hitler and his Axis allies, and later stopping Stalin from swallowing all of Europe. Similarly, tomorrow’s Americans will enormously benefit from a victory in our War against Terrorism. Were winning the war to cost one trillion dollars, this is a sum equal to less than ten percent of a single year’s GDP. The “pay for it now” argument is only valid in one instance: when a generation passes on to the next costs without benefits. (Think: transfer payments.)

Furthermore, it is not possible to talk intelligently about any kind of debt without reference to assets. The millionaire who owes $1,000 is better off than the pauper who owes a dime. In the 1980s, the United States took on $3 trillion of new debt, to the horror of the deficit hawks of the time. Meanwhile, however, we added $17 trillion of assets. Not a bad trade. We are, as George Gilder and John Rutledge remind us, unwisely obsessed with flow-of-funds analysis, instead of focusing on asset values as we should.

Worse still, consider exactly how President Clinton balanced the budget: by taking an eight-year defense “procurement holiday.” That decision is why our forces are stretched so thin in the global war we now find ourselves engaged in. Was budgetary balance then worth shrinking military assets to fight the war now? Ask our soldiers and their families.

Far better than obsession with today’s deficit numbers would be a move to adopt, in some form, former Treasury secretary Felix Rohatyn’s proposal to create a federal capital budget. Every household and business has one, and it is time the government did as well. That way, infrastructure projects, which increase national assets, would not be counted in the same way as social programs, which do not. In sum, we are a vastly wealthy society, in no foreseeable danger of drowning in red ink unless economic growth tanks. However, panic-induced measures to cut the federal budget deficit could bring about that very result. That is a more worrisome economic threat than risk associated with budgetary imbalance.

Refighting the War

According to the potential Democratic presidential nominees, President Bush sent us to war by using politicized intelligence to mislead the public into believing that there was an imminent threat that Saddam Hussein would use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against America or its allies. In reality, Democrats are creating a false impression that Bush deliberately misled the public.

Here is exactly what President Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address:

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option. [Applause.]

What Bush—and an applauding Congress—recognized is that we no longer can count on massed armies at a nation’s borders, or missiles on launch pads, to tip us off about an impending attack. Furthermore, reliance upon deterrence presumes not only a rational adversary but, equally important, an ascertainable “return address” to use in the event of an attack. Had intercontinental ballistic missiles detonated on United States soil during the Cold War, we would have known that it was not a sneak attack by Guatemala.

Moreover, retaliating if deterrence fails is not a viable strategy if we cannot trace an attack. Suppose that a nuclear bomb in a shipping container detonated in a major U.S. harbor. It does not take an Albert Einstein to know that the container—and the ship and much of the harbor—would be vaporized. It would be extremely difficult, in such a case, to determine where the device came from, and therefore against whom to retaliate. Remember: more than two years later, we still do not know the source of the October 2001 anthrax attack.

Absent an ability to determine when an attack is truly imminent, and without assurance that after an attack we will be able to trace it to its source, we can no longer prudently rely on either classic deterrence or on traditional criteria for preemptive action. Since September 11 revealed the ability of small terrorist groups to inflict vast harm, we must instead rely upon estimates of the capabilities and intentions of our adversaries, matched against our own vulnerabilities. And if our intelligence proves faulty, well, better to be safe than sorry. George Bush, British prime minister Tony Blair, and Australian prime minister John Howard understood that. They were right to respond in they way they did, even given the apparent absence of stockpiles of forbidden weapons in postwar Iraq. (Critics also chide the White House for applying “worst case analysis” to Iraq. That the White House did so was entirely understandable, given that failure to make a worst-case assessment of al Qaeda led to the loss of 3,000 innocent lives on September 11.) If presidents are to influence the course of events they must act early, relying often on inconclusive evidence supplemented by assessing complex risks—of inaction as well as action. To act only after all the facts are in and courtroom proof exists is how we get a September 11.

Nor do charges that Bush pressured intelligence analysts to slant their assessment stand up to scrutiny. Separate inquiries by House and Senate committees, an internal CIA unit, and weapons inspector David Kay all concluded that intelligence on Iraq had not been “politicized.”  (Equally, Tony Blair was cleared of the charge that he had “sexed up” Iraq intel in making the case for war.)