Spot the Characters?

By MARGARET CARLSON

Democracy: The series has no smooth football star on trial for the murder of his beautiful wife, no American prince plunging his plane into the black waters off Martha's Vineyard and, so far, no Monica. Yet cable is getting sky-high ratings for the first time since Donato Dalrymple, the house cleaner-fisherman, hid Elian from Janet Reno's SWAT team.

For the moment, at least, civics is cool. This election has brought home how much we treasure the right to cast a ballot we can decipher and a machine that will count it. People racing to make airport connections stop for a gulp of CNN on the latest court ruling letting the hand count proceed. Look, Gore just got 53 votes in Broward! (Note to TV execs: Please reinstate the running hand-count tally.) Hey, no certification this Saturday! Bush will have to cancel the champagne and the Four Seasons ballroom. Celebrating Saturday night would be premature exuberance.

Who would have guessed that the news that antiquated machines routinely miscount votes could compete for audience share with the sexual recollections of a White House intern in a thong? There are no brief outfits in this drama, and only the briefest appearances by the principals, who must realize from election results that half the country would be happy never to see them again. Bush, criticized for playing host to photo ops with a ghost Cabinet resurrected from Dad's White House, retreated last week to his ranch to nurse a boil, surely a biblical reminder that we'll all need the patience of Job before this is over. He reappeared midweek to slap down Gore's surprise proposal to recount all 67 Florida counties. The press gave Bush mixed reviews for his candidate-held-hostage look, but reporters were already a bit cranky after a week of trying to cover what could be the next summer White House--close to the Days Inn in Waco, but 100 dusty miles from the Four Seasons in Austin and expense-account restaurants, with the closest hot spots being the Dr Pepper Museum and the remains of the Branch Davidian compound. Gore, whose campaign press corps is now home, fared better despite resorting, for his short, pedantic statement, to a TelePrompTer in his own house. Does he use it for after-dinner toasts?

Gore's stand-in is Warren Christopher, the man who put the elder in statesman. He's so dull, he ordered Irish coffee during a layover at Shannon Airport with the instruction, "Hold the whiskey, and make it decaf." His very presence undercuts former Secretary of State James Baker's dire warnings that if we persist in this crazy "unconstitutional" recount, markets will collapse, world leaders will wobble and general mischief will abound. In Baker's view, the bipartisan counters are secret croupiers itching to stack the deck. There are more surveillance cameras than in a Las Vegas casino and more on-site baby sitters than in your average day-care center, but somehow these volunteers are going to cook the books.

The only person who looks like a character from one of the more usual cable dramas is Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris, a Bush campaign co-chairwoman who mixes the pious certitude of Linda Tripp with the hauteur of a Dynasty protagonist. She once performed in a Sarasota nightclub, getting audience members to join her in flapping their arms to music in a peculiar art form called chicken dancing. Until the Florida supreme court enjoined her from certifying the vote, Harris, often compared to Cruella De Vil, snatching ballots rather than puppies, was briefly the most powerful woman on the planet. She decided to flunk all the essays by county officials explaining their late returns and then announced she would certify the winner last Saturday without all the hand counts. To grasp the enormity of what Harris was up to, imagine James Carville as a political appointee of Governor Roger Clinton's, deciding to shut down a legal recount of an election with a 300-vote margin and award the victory to Roger's brother Bill.

For his part, Baker uses litigation to delay hand counting while inflaming the public against the delay that hand counting will cause. Laws in Texas and Florida recognize, and industry experts agree, that hand counts are more accurate than machine counts. Still Baker depicts the practice as a dangerous improvisation, not to be attempted in front of the children. Last Thursday all Republicans seemed to have the same "Trust machines, not people" talking points. Touch the ballots too often and they'll crumble like the Dead Sea Scrolls. The stunt of the day was to hold an imaginary ballot to the head and mimic Johnny Carson's Carnac the Magnificent. Like ancient papyrus, jokes do wear out with repeated handling. Everyone pointed to chads falling off as evidence of fraud, but chads are supposed to fall off.

What's fraudulent is the very notion that one side's political operative could singlehandedly decide a disputed election. If this were a horror movie, the audience would be mentally shouting, "Stop this woman! Call the authorities!" To many, an I VOTED sticker is like a badge of civic honor, a talisman erasing all that was messy and rancorous in the campaign before. Casting a vote helps each of us accept the legitimacy of the sum of all votes cast, one of democracy's gifts, delayed but soon to arrive.