By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

What do you suppose is the greatest disservice the Clinton presidency has done to the nation?

The Lewinsky scandal? Nonsense.

His unfulfilled promise of a "middle class tax cut"? Nope.

His program to weaken our military strength? A distant second place.

His self-serving partisanship when dealing with Congress? An even more distant third place.

The most lasting ill effect of the Clinton presidency, in my opinion, is his use of the "Bully Pulpit" to dumb down Americans' understanding of their government, and to turn us away from the guidance of the Constitution that he swore to protect and defend.

True, he didn't invent the false concepts that he has perpetuated, but we've never had a national leader before who could match him in his ignorance of and apparent contempt for our founding documents.

I could go on for days about the activist judges he has appointed, people who think it's their duty to change the laws, not just interpret them. Or about the way he has used federal agencies to regulate with the force of law, effectively overruling the powers specifically granted to the states in the Constitution.

His perjury in the Lewinsky case alone is worthy of a few paragraphs.

But one need only listen to the claptrap that passes for informed discussion of the so-called "constitutional crisis" in Vice President Al Gore's attempt to hijack the election to realize that we have lost our way, and we're getting farther from the path every minute.

At first I thought the "expert" commentator on one talking head show was going to make some enlightened comments when the anchor asked him whether we are indeed facing a constitutional crisis and he answered in the negative.

But then the spectre of a decision by the Florida legislature to name its own slate of electors came up, and the commentator backtracked. That, he said, would be a constitutional crisis. We need to find a way to resolve this that allows the people of Florida to make the choice, he said gravely.

He claims to be a constitutional expert and he hasn't even read the document, apparently.

The constitution sets out very clearly the methods of choosing a president, and nowhere does it mention election by popular vote.

State legislatures are given the responsibility of naming electors, who are charged with naming the president. It is fully within the power of the Florida legislature to conduct the General Election without even putting the presidential candidates' names on the ballot.

In fact, that's the way it was done in all the states until the 1820s, when state legislatures all decided it would be a good idea to let the voters choose the electors, and later some of them even bound the electors by law to cast their votes in concert with the wishes of the popular majority.

If the process bothers you because it doesn't sound democratic enough, just remember that pure democracy can be defined by the example of three castaways on a desert island, as two of them vote to kill and eat the third.

In pure democracy, you can forget civil rights. The only rights would belong to the majority.

All this talk about doing away with the Electoral College is, therefore, pretty dangerous. The founding fathers crafted a system in which part of the power was divided by population, and part by equal representation.

That's why we have a Senate in which each state elects two members and a House in which the number of members is determined by population. It's why we have a census.

That's why we assign numbers of electors to each state so that the less populous states also can exert some influence on national elections. Without that system, national affairs would be run by a handful of heavily populated cities like New York and Los Angeles. The farmers out in Kansas could dry up and die and no one would take a moment's notice until the price of bread shot through the roof.

Read the Constitution, folks. I think you'll find it's a pretty cleverly crafted document.

Below is the portion that deals with how the president is elected:

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