A CHOICE NEVER MADE?
bryan beller (11.07.00)

My heart was pulsing with the adrenaline of a driver sitting in pole position at Indy. The closest election in forty years had just gotten closer.

Bush's D-dubya-I back in bicentennial Maine lit up the newscasts. Twenty states were in play. Improbably, in November, Bush was campaigning in Florida and Gore in Tennessee. Pundits were predicting a split verdict between the popular vote and the electoral college. Political junkies like myself were mainlining, our faces betraying thousand-yard stares from overdoses of C-Span, The Capital Gang, The O'Reilly Factor, Crossfire, Hannity and Colmes, Hardball, even The Edge with Paula Zahn, for cryin' out loud. Oh, the ironies of Perot endorsing Bush, of Gore chasing environmental votes, of Bush's character under assault, of Nader's-Ralph Nader's!-growing cult of personality. So many great things to digest, process, analyze, spin....

Then, on Saturday, November 4, my father called me. His mother, Freda Beller, originally of Brooklyn, NY, had died of a sudden, massive heart attack at the age of 83.

Jewish tradition dictates a burial as soon as possible. The family needed to get to Margate, Florida, her place of residence for the past thirty years. Next day plane arrangements, bereavement fares and rental cars collided in dissonance with the shock of sudden and irreversible loss.

And all of the blathering analysis of the horse race that substitutes for coverage of our election became irrelevant. In an instant.

My choice would no longer be subject to influence by mass media. I was too busy packing and flying and driving to watch Your Choice 2000. Now I would enter a cocoon, just me and my conscience, grappling with The Choice.

I realized two things within minutes. One, I was that dreaded of all clichés-an undecided voter. Perhaps one of the most highly informed of the breed, but still undecided nonetheless. Rush Limbaugh's been making fun of me for weeks. Oh well.

Two, there was a possibility that I wouldn't even get to cast a vote at all. My flight left Los Angeles at 8:00 AM Sunday morning. I didn't know when the funeral was, but I guessed either Monday or Tuesday. As far as my return flight went, it was up to my father. If he wanted me to stay through Tuesday night or Wednesday, I would stay. No questions asked. That would put me out of California on Election Day and well past the deadline (or even the possibility) of filing for an absentee ballot. Talk about irony.

So during my trip on Sunday, I forced myself to become a decided voter. Whether or not I got to vote.



Saturday afternoon I was getting my car smog-checked by an Armenian-American technician. I asked him how he was voting. Bush, he said. He didn't like Gore, didn't trust him. Wanted lower taxes. Bush just "feels right," he said. I asked him why. "Sometimes you just know these things."

That, along with Bush reaction to the DUI story, angered me. Bush's campaign accused the Gore folks of a dirty trick, of a smear. Earth to Bush: a smear is a lie. A dirty trick is breaking into an opposing campaign's headquarters and destroying people's reputations based solely on innuendoes. This soiree in Maine really happened. Al Gore didn't make the decision not to reveal it and hope against hope that you could get through an entire presidential campaign without anyone finding out. Calling it a Democratic dirty trick ranks down there with scaring blacks and seniors into the voting booth -- which the Gore campaign, with their push-polling and heavy negative advertising, has absolutely done-as a low mark of the campaign. Especially for a candidacy supposedly based on accepting personal responsibility. Bush's idea of personal responsibility appears to be, "Yeah, I was young and made mistakes, like drinking and driving and some other stuff that I'll never tell you about. But you
shouldn't even be asking me about it, and if anything I did that I didn't tell you about comes to light, it's the Democrats' fault for bringing it up, and the fact that they told you about it is worse than what I actually did in the first place." Pathetically hypocritical. And still, guys like my mechanic have been brainwashed into thinking that untrustworthiness is, for this year, an exclusively Democratic concept. It made me angry enough to consider swallowing hard and voting for Gore just to counter this guy and stick it up Bush's ass.

The thought flashed intermittently through my head as I made my flight arrangements and packed a small bag. It's close, even here in California. If Bush wins -- and he could -- will I be able to live with myself if I didn't vote for Gore? I agree with him on more of the issues than any other candidate, but I don't respect him. I don't respect his candidacy. It wouldn't be a vote FOR him.

I didn't know for sure, but my mother was "almost positive" that the funeral would be on Monday morning. I booked my return flight for Election Day, 6:30 AM out of Miami, arriving in Los Angeles at 1:00 PM. Plenty of time to cast a ballot. The polling place just happens to be in the lobby of my apartment complex. I'll make it. Now if only I could make a decision.

Another mental flash, this time in Green. I can't vote for Nader. I mean, I'm for universal health care, but I can't condone the redistribution of wealth on such a massive scale. I don't think that eliminating the mortgage tax deduction for anyone who makes over $100,000. is fair. My father has busted his ass his whole life, used various mortgages against his home to put three kids through college (including two Ivy League schools), never accepted nor qualified for any financial aid, always paid his taxes, never cheated, contributed to the economy and the community, and HE'S the bad guy?! Furthermore, I respect Nader for everything he's done, but sorry-there is a difference between Bush and Gore, just as there's a difference between Antonin Scalia and David Souter. I wouldn't be voting for Nader, I'd be voting against Gore. And if I'm voting against anybody and making it count, it's for Gore and against Bush.

My poor father. He just lost a parent for the first time. Lucky him; he's 53 years old. But still.

Everything was suddenly getting so personal. Maybe that's why the major party candidates often make such intellectually groundless appeals. They must know how it gets for some people in crunch time.

"It doesn't matter if they knock the wall down when they vote for you or hold their nose. It all counts the same." Guess who said that? Richard Nixon.

I boarded my plane from Los Angeles to Denver (ah, the unbridled joy of connections through Denver) and found myself sitting next to a Caucasian lady of nearly sixty. I queried her as well. She was a Colorado resident, a registered Republican, a '92 Pappy Bush voter, and a '96 Perot voter. This time: Gore. According to her, Clinton was disgusting, the military needed serious retooling, and the federal government needed to get out of the education business completely. Sounds like a Bush lock, right? Not in the year 2000 -- she said, for "selfish reasons," she wanted the economy to stay just the way it was, and she was afraid that Bush's plan might wreck the train.

I no longer wonder why poll results resemble the stock market ticker. Take a random sampling of three people: me, the Colorado lady, and the mechanic. The social liberal (myself) is balking at both Gore and Nader. The blue-collar first-generation immigrant from heavily Democratic North Hollywood is going for Bush. The pro-military Colorado conservative has already voted for Gore on an absentee ballot. Where's my spot on the talk shows? Who wants to publish the Beller poll, margin of error plus or minus 70%?

Nixon was right in one respect: it all counts the same. All things being equal for me, knowing that there are plenty of political pros in both parties who think like Nixon did, I refuse to have my vote shoved in one direction or another simply because they think they know what I dislike the most. When I vote, it's going to be for something. I can't vote for Bush-he's either a fraud or a tool. I can't vote for Nader, I already know that. Can I validate Gore's candidacy in my mind by voting for it? I don't think so. No, I can't. I really can't. His campaign was an insult to people who agreed with him, and how you pull that off I'm not quite sure, but he did it to me. So what do I do?



I landed in Denver in a snowstorm. The connection flight hadn't even arrived at the gate yet. It was sitting on the tarmac in what United Airlines called "airport gridlock." Outside, through the huge windows you only see in airports, snow was blowing sideways. If the funeral was Monday morning and I got stuck in Denver, I might miss it. I'd better call my mom.

As I dialed the number, I thought of the last time I saw my grandmother. So very fortunately, I flew to Florida a couple of months ago to visit her and my grandfather. I'd been meaning to get down there for four years. Why this summer did I finally go do it? I have no idea; sometimes you just know these things.

My memory jogged. There she was, in a white and yellow sundress, sitting on the couch next to me, the lampshade's diffused light shining clear through her platinum, curly, fiber-thin hair. Her feet didn't quite touch the floor, dangling just over the carpet. We were watching, of all things, Al Gore's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. She loved to talk politics with me. I watched in horror as Gore threw his moderate record out the window, fire-breathing that old-time Democratic religion. My grandmother, however, was far from offended. "I like what he's saying. Drugs are too expensive. Social security was never meant to be used as a stock. This is just what I wanted to hear from him. You think the Republicans like the Jews? That Jerry Falwell, that Pat Robertson, those fanatics? They're biting their tongues over Lieberman." And we went on and on, into the night. I thought Gore's populist screed would cost him the election. She thought it would win him Florida. We may both get to be right.

"Hello, Bryan?" My mother must have recognized the incoming number.

"Mom, hey. I'm stuck in Denver. It's snowing here."

"Denver? You should never connect through Denver in the winter."

I looked out the window. The snow was twisting around in circles. "Yeah, Mom, I know. Where are you?"

"Stuck at the airport, some delay or something."

"Yeah, I know how you feel."

I imagined myself still sitting at the gate as night fell, my head propped up against the wall, eyelids drooping.

"What if I can't get out of Denver? Will I miss the funeral? What's going on? Have you heard anything?"

"The funeral is Tuesday. Tuesday morning, 11:45 AM. You can count on everyone getting together and eating afterwards."

I did the math. Then I walked over to the gate and asked about Tuesday afternoon flights back to Los Angeles. Nothing got in before 8:30 PM.

So it was settled.

I wasn't disappointed. Mildly amused at the absurdity of it all, but not dismayed in the least. The truth of family over government was self-evident.

Maybe it was that whimsical sentiment, combined with my belief in voting for something and not against something, which made me realize that, had I made it to the voting booth, I would have pulled the lever for the Libertarian candidate for President, Harry Browne. How do I know that? Sometimes you just know these things.

But more constant than any thought of Gore, Clinton, Browne, Bush, Perot, Lieberman, Cheney, Nader, Buchanan, or anyone or anything political, was the sound of my Grandma Freda's voice racing through my head, the pitch changing like a train horn as it whistled by.

"Bryan, ohhh, you're so delicious! I could eat you up! Ohhh, you're so handsome, so delicious! I love you!!"

I love you too, Grandma. And I'll let you know how it turns out in Florida.