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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ColtonGang who wrote (116518)	12/15/2000 1:19:09 PM
From: Bill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769669

Tom DeLay is too liberal.

To: ColtonGang who wrote (116518)	12/15/2000 1:41:21 PM
From: ColtonGang	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769669

A divider, not a uniter Thanks to his post-election power grab, George W. Bush becomes a president who lost the popular vote -- a man without a mandate. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Bruce Shapiro Dec. 14, 2000 \| "Heal the wounds" became the media's mantra so quickly on Wednesday that somehow it was left to a Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, to tell the plain truth on television that night: George W. Bush may have won the Electoral College, but he is a president-elect with "no mandate." On Wednesday night Bush did his level best to convince the public otherwise, intoning some variation on the theme of "bipartisanship" more than a dozen times in his brief remarks. But as Specter understood, the very terms of Bush's victory cloud his presidency before he begins it, and no return to his pre-November "uniter, not divider" language is likely to expunge the Bush campaign's vote-suppression tactics of the past few weeks from the public's memory. As for Al Gore, nothing became his campaign like his ending it. Gore's speech Wednesday night -- conceding the election but not the justice of an Electoral College defeat secured by Supreme Court intervention -- underscored a remarkable shift. Gore as post-election cheerleader for voting rights -- the kind of Great Society civil rights politics that Gore had always disdained -- roused far more passion and loyalty than Gore as hawker of centrist policy-wonking in the election proper. Gore withdrew with good humor and made the appropriate bows to putting aside "what remains of partisan rancor." But he acknowledged the source of some of that rancor as just, invoking "those who feel their voices have not been heard" and comparing his defeat to other historic "challenges to popular will." All the talk Wednesday night was about feelings: the feelings of the two candidates, the feelings of Gore or Bush partisans in the electorate. What makes certain that Bush has won a no-mandate presidency, though, are not feelings but inconvenient facts that will not go away. Some are obvious -- like the 9,000 inconvenient facts from Miami-Dade County packed in a Tallahassee judge's evidence locker, with reporters standing in line to count them under the state's far-reaching "sunshine" laws just as soon as the Florida Supreme Court's now-moot proceedings are formally concluded. Some of the inconvenient facts, on the other hand, seem marginal just now but will grow in importance as Bush assumes power. Consider the connections, revealed in the run-up to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, between conservative Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and the Republican operation: Scalia's son works in Bush lawyer Ted Olson's law firm, while Thomas' wife is coordinating the hiring of Heritage Foundation associates by the Bush transition team. Neither justice was required by law to recuse himself from the case. But these intimate relationships nonetheless are a window into just how small and inbred the Republican power circle is, and how closely tied that circle is to the most conservative elements of the party. Those relationships might not matter -- except that the public is already keeping a right-wing conspiracy scorecard, which lists Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Fox News election caller and Bush cousin John Ellis, thousands of mostly minority Florida voters wrongly disenfranchised as ex-felons by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and a Republican-cozy consulting firm and a Supreme Court majority made up exclusively of the new president's ideological allies. After two years of Republicans jeering Gore for his confusion about the purpose of a single Buddhist temple fundraiser, this Republican habit of treading the ethical gray zone has laid political land mines for Bush before he even takes office.............................................Bush won because he drew on decades of Republican power shifting in all branches of government, and on a transformation of strategy and philosophy for which the suppression of votes is a perfect metaphor. Who needs a mandate when you have the Supreme Court? This is the Republican freight train that ran down Al Gore, and he never really seemed to know what hit him.