A consistent Republican

Constant Republicans are so rare. Democrats too, I suppose, and I admit I have a few candidates there, damn few, maybe, at least that aren't lunatics, but a few.

Anyway, while I haven't followed Katherine Harris's congressional career, she has been admirable and remarkable since her entry to the national stage.

The bottom line of the Florida vote was that our national election machinery has precision approximating that of the 2004 elections--several states had vote outcomes on the order of a difference of 100,000 votes, say, 1 percent of total population. If things get closer than that, forget it. It's all noise. You may as well flip a coin. What did Florida boil down to? 527 votes? Forget it. (I love it when people say Florida proved how important each vote is. No, it proved that even in the most bizarre election ever, so close that it's probably impossible to be beaten, your vote still doesn't count. You would have made it only 526, or 528.)

But Harris kept her cool. She did the only thing she could do, and certify the results. It was only the wretched behavior of Gore and the Florida court that made the problem. (My criticism is tempered, for Gore, at least; any of us in that situation would have found it awful and hard to resist, constitutional democracy be damned.)

So her decision to continue her fight in the Florida senate race against Ben Nelson is consistent with her cool. I hope only that the $10-million she's spending isn't her last $10-million.