Take On the Talking Heads
Gore Sides With the Lawless
by Garry Wills
April 6, 2000 --Good for Maxine Waters. She did just what she should have, facing Al Gore's cowardly, opportunistic and lawless statement on Elian Gonzalez. The congresswoman from California said she is reconsidering her endorsement of Gore for president.
What Gore did should make everyone reconsider. I did not agree with Bill Bradley and his supporters when they said that Gore's record shows no firmness of principle. But you would have to go far to discover a less principled statement than his new one.
Gore has given moral support to the mayors in Florida who are doing exactly what George Wallace and Orval Faubus did when they refused to enforce federal law during the civil rights era. Miami-Dade County Mayor Alex Penelas and Miami's city Mayor Joe Carollo have proclaimed that they will not cooperate with federal authorities if a legal decision goes against the wishes of their constituents -- exactly what the Southern governors did in the 1950s and 1960s. Twenty-four mayors in the Miami area have expressed solidarity with the two defiant ones -- as segregationists did all across the South when Wallace and Faubus were defying the law.
The distant relatives of Elian Gonzalez, led by his great-uncle, have declared their determination not to obey a court of law if it goes against their wishes. This whole drama has been marked by illegality from the outset. Elian's mother kidnapped him from his father, who had custody of him -- Elian went without clothes because those were at his father's house, where he was staying, along with his books and backpack. The mother took him off without notice to the father or consent from him, and put him on an unsafe boat with no life preservers. Then the distant relatives made it clear they would keep Elian from his close relatives -- his father, his grandparents, his half brother.
The Cuban community in Florida has regularly shown itself ready to defy U.S. law in its crusade against Fidel Castro. The leader of the street demonstrations now going on, Ramon Saul Sanchez, has tied up traffic in former demonstrations, and threatens now to block the Miami airport and the city harbor if the government tries to enforce U.S. law. Sanchez, who belonged to two anti-Castro commando groups, Alpha 66 and Omega 7, spent four and a half years in federal prison in the 1980s for refusing to testify on a murder attempt against Fidel Castro during his visit to the United Nations.
Those are the forces of lawlessness to which Al Gore is giving aid and comfort. To find its parallel, one must imagine Vice President Richard Nixon throwing his support to Faubus when President Eisenhower was trying to uphold the law, or Vice President Lyndon Johnson taking George Wallace's part against President Kennedy.
Gore said he would show some independence from the president while running his own campaign. I did not think he would also show his independence from the rule of law. He is asking us to put him in an office where he is pledged to take care to uphold the law. What could disqualify him for that task more than pandering to lawlessness in order to woo Florida voters?
Copyright © 2000 Universal Press Syndicate
