The "politics of personal destruction," which Bill Clinton has publicly deplored, has been his method of operation for years, going all the way back to his days as governor of Arkansas. Al Gore has now taken over the techniques of his mentor, with his operatives' innuendoes about Ralph Nader's sex life on the eve of the election and their digging up George W. Bush's minor brush with the law 24 years ago.
More is involved here than "dirty tricks" or the character flaws of those who engage in them.
These corrupt ways of operating are a danger to the very nature of American government. If you can steal an election by blackmailing members of the electoral college, then democracy becomes a farce.
Constitutional checks and balances mean nothing if you can blackmail anyone who would expose your illegal actions and ruin a few of them just to show that you mean business. Bob Livingston was scheduled to become Speaker of the House, but now he is not even a member of Congress. Who would ever want to prosecute any president for anything and be subjected to months of character assassination like Kenneth Starr, including reckless and inflammatory charges that Starr had violated the law? These charges all turned out to be wholly unsubstantiated when examined in a court of law, but that did not stop them from being repeated anyway on nationwide television during the impeachment hearings.
If the government of the United States is going to be run like the mafia or a Third World despotism, what does our freedom amount to? Any of us could be thrown into prison and kept in solitary confinement for months like Wen Ho Lee, until we "confessed" to something -- however minor -- just so we could get out, and so that the administration gets off the hook legally and Janet Reno can discount our statements as those of a "criminal."
Is this America? Do we want another administration like this?