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Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank Griffin who wrote (6599)	11/18/2000 3:49:56 PM
From: ColtonGang	Respond to of 10042

News Analysis: Doubts of Legitimacy, Whoever Wins By R. W. APPLE Jr. ewsAnalysis WASHINGTON, Nov. 18 — Having given only occasional lip service to the need for national unity, each side in the struggle in Florida demonizes the other every single day. If Vice President Al Gore wins the presidency, the Republicans say, he will do so because unclearly marked ballots were illicitly counted in heavily Democratic counties by cynical Democratic officials who guessed at voters' intentions with eyes cocked toward how many votes he needed. If Gov. George W. Bush of Texas wins the presidency, the Democrats say, he will do so because his Republican allies in Tallahassee, Fla., led by the villainous secretary of state, Katherine Harris, and backed by compliant courts, systematically excluded the bona fide votes of thousands of citizens in Florida. Whoever wins, unless the partisans relent, these mean-spirited emotions will not evaporate when a victor is definitively declared. He will stand under a cloud outside the Capitol on Jan. 20 to take the oath of office. He will go down in the history books with an asterisk, or at least a footnote, indelibly inscribed next to his name. Denied a mandate by an equally divided electorate, faced with an equally divided Congress, he will start with an even bigger handicap: widespread doubts about his legitimacy as president. "Both sides are playing this to delegitimize the other candidate," said a disenchanted former official of the Gore campaign. "It's tragic, and it will have nasty consequences, but it was inevitable once it started." The action of the Florida Supreme Court on Friday blocked the possible outcome that would have been most damaging to presidential legitimacy: the chance that Ms. Harris could have certified Mr. Bush as the winner, thereby giving him the psychologically potent imprimatur of the state, only to have the subsequent completion of the manual recounts show Mr. Gore ahead. For a few days or a few weeks, under that worst case, the nation would have had two competing almost-presidents-elect, like rival claimants to some European throne. Now it is at least possible that the Florida Supreme Court will rule on the admissibility of the late counts after the last of the contested ballots have been counted or rejected, a much more orderly procedure, although it would be naïve to expect that the lawsuits will end when the court makes its ruling on that one issue. There has been enough bungling in the conduct of the Florida voting to keep a regiment of lawyers busy for a year. The longer they litigate, the more slowly wounds will heal. Many Americans, probably more than the political professionals believe, take a relaxed approach to all of this. Some actually seem to relish the combat and confusion, as if this were a National Football League game with constantly changing rules. Two reasons for this suggest themselves. Neither man, for all the buckets of money spent and torrents of words uttered, was able to connect convincingly with the electorate; hence the closeness of the vote. The country senses, moreover, that no great issues are at stake here; it is about power, as implied in the role reversal between the two parties, with Republicans looking to Washington for help and Democrats championing states' rights. Comparisons to the disputed election of 1876 overlook an important difference. Then, the electoral struggle played out against the backdrop of Reconstruction, with the great national schism of the Civil War still haunting the American consciousness, but now an unusually broad national consensus prevails on ends, if not on means.