11/09/00 5:45 p.m.
Forever Selma
Jesse Jackson’s idée fixé.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

esse Jackson — er, excuse us, the Rev. Jesse Jackson — is marching on Florida, saying it was the new Selma. Florida has august company: Houston was another Selma, too, back in March, when he was fighting to preserve two race-preference programs (Houston Chronicle, March 11). A few months before that, the New York Times reported on Jackson's efforts to win more lenient treatment for students who were being punished for fighting at a high school in Decatur, Illinois: Decatur was just like, you guessed it, Selma (December 12, 1999). In February 1999, Jackson found Selma in, of all places, Riverside, California, after an accidental police shooting. That's four Selmas in less than two years.

Selma, Selma everywhere. It drives a man to drink.

Forever Wilentz
Like Jackson, Sean Wilentz appears to be on hand for any partisan circus. Wilentz is the professor of history at Princeton University who testified to the House judiciary committee against impeachment and then organized an open letter from historians in the same vein. A decade ago, he also signed a "historians' brief" to the Supreme Court arguing — on the basis of falsified evidence — that abortion was a common-law right at the time of the American Founding(!).

Today, the historian is said to be organizing a letter to appear in tomorrow's New York Times demanding new elections in Palm Beach County. We are told that a draft of the letter says that eventually a bipartisan commission of Congress and the Supreme Court may have to decide the matter, as in 1876. (Wilentz is a historian, after all.)

Wilentz was adjusting the wording and asking others to find the most famous people they know to sign. Presumably Wilentz has backed off his contribution to Salon , in which he urges an internationally-supervised runoff election. "Bring in Kofi Annan, I'm not kidding."

Maybe the man has a case. Anyone who wants to sign Wilentz's statement can e-mail him at swilentz@princeton.edu.

A Ridge Too Far
For obvious reasons, the really fun post-Election Day festivities — the recriminations — have not reallly started. And any assessment of what a campaign did right or got wrong must begin with the man at the top. But some Republicans began playing what-if on Tuesday afternoon, as exit polls convinced them that Florida was lost and all hope for George W. Bush resided in Pennsylvania. When the networks called it for Al Gore, a thought ran through many minds: What if Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge had been on the ticket?

As things turned out, the question seems not so pressing. But it's worth reviewing, if only because a faction of the GOP still believes this should have been a Bush-Ridge year. Set aside the most obvious problem Ridge would have created for the ticket — he favors legal abortion in a party that opposes it — and look at the election results. Gore carried Pennsylvania by 5 points. The polls didn't show Ridge helping Bush by that much in the state. One lesson from Tuesday is that governors don't deliver states the way they once did. In Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — to say nothing of Florida — prominent Republican chief executives came up short. There no reason to think Ridge would have made a difference this week.

A Bush-Mack ticket, on the other hand, is looking pretty good right about now…