Another troubled election: different time, different place, similiar issues

September 25th, 2007

I want to tell you about another presidential succession battle. It was a very different time and place but was also between a vice-president and an incumbent, both of whom had been figures in the independence movement which led to the emergence of their young democracy. They were friends who became deadly rivals in their bitter election battle.

It was fought on the basis of a deeply flawed electoral system that ensured the new president would be chosen not by popular vote but by a small elite purporting to act on their behalf.

All campaigning was frowned upon. To find out what the candidates thought, voters had to rely on a motley collection of rambunctious newspapers which spewed out vitriolic attacks on those they did not favour and reported scandalous details of their personal lives. One candidate was attacked for being atheist, the other was devoutly Christian. One muckraking journalist went to prison for sedition during the campaign.

The electoral body which met to make a quick decision to finalise the elections took a week because the sitting president’s allies got up to all sorts of chicanery, so determined were they prevent his rival from taking office “at all costs�.

Does some of this sound familiar? Well, it is a simplified view of one of the very early US presidential elections, the 1800 battle between Thomas Jefferson and President John Adams. I learnt about it in a review by Harvard history professor Jill Lepore of Edward Larson’s new book, “A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous election of 1800, America’s first presidential campaign�, published in The New Yorker magazine last week.

It was that country’s fourth election, but the first two had seen George Washington elected unopposed, and the third had been a neat handover within the ruling party. The fourth was the first which saw a transfer of power between opposing political parties, and it is said to have established the dual-party system which has prevailed in the US since then. It was so tumultuous that, according to Lepore, “many people … thought it might spell the end of the American experiment�.

It was called the first real campaign, but Larson writes in the book, “partisans worried that it might be the young republic’s last.�
There were, Lepore reports, no presidential debates, and very few speeches, “no campaign managers, no Web sites, no televisions ads, no You Tube Interviews, not so much as a Horse and Cart Across America tour�. When Adams, travelling to the capital city, took a detour through two others states, newspapers questioned the propriety of this.

The differences between the two men were asserted in the “unabashedly partisan� newspapers of the time, of which there were more than 250. “The engine is the press,� Jefferson observed, but neither candidate risked writing in the papers themselves.

James Callender, by the way, was the pamphleteer who went to jail for nine months for sedition because of what he wrote about Adams, but later turned on Jefferson and revealed and named his slave-concubine. Unreliable friend or independent muckraker?

Only about 10% of the population were enfranchised, with most states limiting the vote to white males who owned property or paid tax. Maryland had black voters and New Jersey allowed white women in the polling booth, but these “loopholes� were later closed down.

In any case, it was the electoral college which chose the president and even the few who had the vote could only choose their legislators or sheriffs who then went on to choose the president. Lepore calls it “possibly the least democratic election in American history�. The tale is replete with attempts to manipulate the voting and prevent Jefferson winning, because of the belief that anything was justified to prevent an atheist taking office.

In the end, Jefferson won and made a unifying inauguration speech. Later, the system was improved and reformed (though, as we saw in the most recent election, the flawed electoral college remained in place) and American democracy went on from there.

The lesson for South Africans in this strangely familiar tale? I think it is that we tend to see every faltering element in our democratic process as one of life and death, and need to see that we are taking one step at a time, and faults in the system and setbacks in democracy are just that – things which can and may in time be corrected. We are not the first young democracy with an imperfect electoral system, politicians who use and abuse it to hold onto or gain power and journalists who are both essential to and sometimes disruptive of the process. The test is whether the system holds, and whether in time we correct the faults we find as we go along … and let a noisy and pesky media do its job.

*This column first appeared in Business Day, 26 September 2007

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism