"A lot of people understand there was something rotten in Florida."
Excerpt from article, Analysis: Bush's Desire to United Will Be Tested
By David S. Broder
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 14, 2000 ; Page A01
"It was a mixture of nostalgia and hope that prompted George W. Bush to deliver his first address to the nation as president-elect from the chamber of the Texas House of Representatives, a place, he said, "where Democrats have the majority [but] Republicans and Democrats have worked together to do what is right for the people we represent."
With few exceptions, Bush has had his way with the Texas Legislature for the last six years. If he does that well with Congress, he will have fared better than either his father or President Clinton.
But Bush knows as well as anyone that it won't be easy. In this era of heightened partisanship, starting his term as president with no mandate from the election, no majority in the popular vote and only the barest of Republican margins in Congress, he will need all the skills as a conciliator he told his campaign audiences he would bring to warring Washington, D.C.
Negotiating a safe passage between conservative Republicans, eager for ideological victories in the first Republican-dominated Washington in almost 50 years, and Democrats eyeing recapture of Congress in less than two years--and angry over how the presidential election ended--will be a tough test of Bush's political abilities.
George Edwards, a political scientist connected to the elder George Bush's presidential library at Texas A&M University, said, "This Bush will face a very difficult situation," because of the way he won--without even a plurality of the popular vote--and with his party losing strength in Congress and the state capitals. "He's coming into a highly polarized situation," Edwards said. "It doesn't give him any leverage and he's not likely to have a honeymoon."
Others say Bush can overcome the odds by being "the uniter" he called himself during the campaign, building a string of small bipartisan victories and gradually expanding the public support and the personal alliances that can make him a successful president.
The effort began last night when Bush followed a gracious concession speech from Vice President Gore with an address in which he vowed to bring "the spirit of cooperation I have seen in this hall" to a national capital scarred by "the bitterness and partisanship of the recent past."
That was a theme of Bush's campaign and--from all the evidence--a statement of a strong personal conviction. Before he ever announced for president, Bush told reporters, "I wouldn't want the job if I didn't think I could change the atmosphere in Washington," which he had seen close-up during his father's up-and-down presidency.
But translating that hope into reality will be a daunting challenge, given the circumstances of Bush's election. Immediately ahead lies a truncated transition period, in which he must name the key members of his administration and set his budgetary and legislative priorities, to say nothing of introducing himself to the international community that looks to the White House for leadership.
"It's never easy," said Anne Wexler, a Washington lobbyist who went into the White House with Jimmy Carter and had a front-row seat as that governor struggled to come to terms with the Washington establishment. "And this time there are a lot of hard feelings around . . . a lingering feeling among Democrats that Al Gore really won. It's never going to go away."
Howard Paster, another lobbyist who served as President Clinton's first liaison to Congress, said the biggest barrier Bush faces is the narrowness of party divisions on Capitol Hill, where the Senate is split 50-50 and Republicans hold only a five-seat majority in the House. "Congress is all about the next election," Paster said. "The Democrats will see this as their best opportunity since 1994 to recapture Congress, and there's nothing he can do about that."
Yesterday, Democrats were publicly disclaiming any such political agenda. "To focus now on 2002 would be self-defeating," said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.). "If we do not show a good-faith effort to work with this president, then we will not fare well."
"I hope we don't go through a two-year or four-year period of just thinking about the next elections," said Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.). "There's got to be a time when governing is the agenda."
But despite these statements, unions and civil rights groups representing the core of the Democratic Party organized demonstrations in Florida against the state's voting irregularities and against the divided Supreme Court decision that, in effect, awarded Bush the presidency. Eddie Williams, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said, "There won't be closure right away, because a lot of people understand there was something rotten in Florida."
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