Prestigious Panel’s Deliberations Stymied by 59,301 Ohio Voters
After almost three months of work, a bipartisan panel of nationally renowned lexicographers reports that it is deadlocked over whether President George W. Bush’s election win over John Kerry was a “convincing mandate,” as the president and his supporters claim.
The panel of lexicographers was appointed shortly after the November election to assess the convincing mandate claim after some English language purists questioned use of both “convincing” and “mandate” in light of the narrowness of Bush’s win based on electoral college votes.
“It’s fair to say we are deadlocked, though I, at least, am not yet ready to say we are ‘hopelessly deadlocked,’” said J. Robert Edward Merriam-Webster, professor of lexicography at Harvard University and president of the National Association of Sticklers about Precise Use of Language.
“We had hoped to have a decision before the inauguration, given how crucial it is to clear up this convincing mandate claim in light of the ambitious second-term agenda the president has laid out,” he said. “But despite some long sessions and an abundance of argumentation, we are split evenly, four to four.”
Merriam-Webster said that in the hindsight the NASPUL leadership should have appointed a nine-member panel so that someone could break a tie vote.
The panel’s deliberations apparently ran aground over the issue of electoral college votes versus popular votes. Bush won the popular vote by 3,00,262 votes, or 2.48 percent of the total votes cast.
However, electoral college votes, not popular votes, determine who will be president. Bush received 286 votes, Kerry 252 votes. The total needed to win was 270. Ohio, which has 20 electoral college votes, turned out to be the crucial state in determining who would be president.
Bush won Ohio by a margin of 118,599 votes. Had he lost Ohio, Kerry would have the presidential election won with 272 electoral college votes to Bush’s 266.
“It’s this margin of popular votes in Ohio that has our deliberations so stymied,” Merriam-Webster said. “It’s obvious to anyone who looks at the numbers that if 59,301 people had voted for Kerry in Ohio instead of voting for Bush, our current president would be John Kerry.”
Merriam-Webster said that four of the panel’s members are adamant that such a razor thin victory cannot possibly be called a mandate, let alone a convincing mandate. He would not identify the four members, nor reveal whether we was one of them.
“These four panel members, who are all nationally known lexicographers and deliberate, reasoned, self-aware, and God-fearing citizens of the highest moral character, become apoplectic whenever the discussion turns to the narrowness of the Ohio vote and how a mere 59,301 people could have changed the course of the nation’s affairs for the next four years,” Merriam-Webster said. “They won’t budge on agreeing that the use of either ‘mandate’ or ‘convincing’ by the Bush people is appropriate.”
Merriam-Webster said the panel had extensive deliberations about words that might be properly used to describe the Bush victory. He said a majority of the panel was willing to approve “razor-thin” or “extremely narrow” as a way to characterize the Bush win. But this majority then fell apart when it came to choosing a word that either of the phrases might then modify.
“There was an unwillingness to call Bush’s win a ‘razor-thin mandate’ or an ‘extremely small mandate,’” he said. “As far as the four diehards are concerned, use of ‘mandate’ with any modifiers is a non-starter.”
Merriam-Webster said he hopes some arm-twisting of certain panel members might lead to a compromise at the panel’s meeting later this week.
“We might get a majority to approve something like ‘razor-thin victory,’” he said. “In that case, it would mean that the president would be on safe ground, at least from a lexical standpoint, if he said something like, ‘Because of my razor-thin election victory, I want to reform Social Security,’ or something like that.”