The 2000 Election

Not a President-elect, but a President-select!

Mr. Bush must live with the knowledge that he won Florida by just 537 votes out of 6 million cast, with a manual recount abandoned, thousands of ballots short of completion, at the order of a court split 5 to 4. Many people noted today that he would take office as the 43rd president by a margin of a single judicial vote, and some people, politicians as well as journalists, vowed to complete the recount on their own. If such a recount showed Mr. Gore the "winner," it could destabilize the Bush administration to a degree. But the historical record shows that narrow victories can grow into commanding political power; Lyndon B. Johnson's entire subsequent career rested upon the shaky base of a tainted Senate victory in Texas by just 87 votes. Rev. Jesse Jackson, � compared Mr. Bush's tactics to those of Slobodan Milosevic and the court's decision to that in the Dred Scott caseof 1857, which held that slaves were not citizens. "Illegitimacy clouds his presidency," Mr. Jackson said of Mr. Bush. "Legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed, and he lacks that." http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/14/politics/14ASSE.html?pagewanted=all