Stories, Games,
and Deliberative Democracy

Daniel T. Rodgers

Shocked though Americans were by the narrowness of the presidential election of 2000, no one could say that they were at a loss for words as they went through the crisis that began on election day and ended when the United States Supreme Court effectively handed the presidency to George W. Bush. To the contrary, the tide of words was one of the most conspicuous marks of the postelection contest: an eruptive tsunami of words rolled out from the television and radio talk shows, the Internet chat rooms and the street corners, the nation of instant talking heads, explaining and obfuscating events, mobilizing and contesting. In the overdetermined political circumstances of the struggle, rhetoric held no simple key to the Bush victory. Once the Republicans realized that they could send a slate of Republican electors chosen by the Florida legislature to the Republican-controlled Congress to challenge whatever certified or uncertified vote tallies might emerge from the Florida canvassing boards, the contest over the outcome of the presidential election was effectively over. But even in an electorate that recognized the instrumentality of language and the fine arts of rhetorical "spinning," the contest over words went on with deadly seriousness, absorbing and radiating power and consequence. The historian cannot but ask what that contest revealed about contemporary political culture and, perhaps deeper still, about the intensely charged yet diminished character of the political language of our times.	1
As in all rhetorical eruptions, the structures lay just below the surface. It was an all-but-unbroken rule on the television news shows that the talking heads should talk in pairs; party-paired congressional representatives, law professors, and pundits showed up on the television split screens like squads of tag-team wrestlers, following the scripts and playbooks of the day with the faithfulness of disciplined athletes. Sound bites circulated, crystallizing in figures of speech the essence of the matter—the infallibility of machines; the cheap, shoddy equipment passed off on minority voters; the partisanship, character, and tastelessly applied makeup of Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state whose rulings curtailing manual recounts were central to the Republicans' postelection strategy; the partisanship and character of those who would heap such scorn on a dutiful woman who was merely executing her public trust; the thousands of Palm Beach County votes that had been counted twice, or, to the contrary, had never been counted once—all of these moving like incommensurate particles through the partisan chains. Words written thousands of miles away showed up overnight on Florida placards. Other words, failing to make it past the sorting decisions of television producers and newspaper editors as to what was news, barely showed up in the media at all. But the critical structuring elements, it seems clear in retrospect, lay not on the surface of the debates and maneuvers, but in the construction of narrative formulas powerful enough to hold the swirling events together and to control their political meaning. The struggle over words was, at its core, a contest between rival stories.	2
The Republican story was the quicker to form. In the Wall Street Journal, at the epicenter of the Republican rhetorical campaign, Peggy Noonan's day-after-election column of November 8 still mused about the nation's need to find a way to live with its deep and (as the election showed) evenly divided cultural differences. Only nine days later, with manual recounts under way in four Florida counties, Noonan was certain the Democrats were stealing the election. By late November Noonan was exhorting Republicans to enlist in a holy war against the theft of the Florida results: to set out lawn signs and start up e-mail chains, call the talk shows, march on Washington (dressed in black), "howl" the truth, and pray unceasingly. By then, though the party's public spokespersons politely distanced themselves from it, the story of a theft in progress was sweeping through the Republican party core. George F. Will, the press's most prestigious conservative columnist, wrote of "slow-motion larceny"; the New York Post wrote of a "coup d'état" in process. In the counting rooms, the story went, the Democratic canvassing board majorities were poking out chads, eating the evidence, divining dimples, "making up votes" as fast they could get away with it.1	. . .