Bush pushes his luck
Florida findings should give him pause

Special report: George Bush's America
The Guardian UK
Tuesday January 30, 2001


George Bush has been in effusive mood this past week, his first in office, shaking hands, slapping backs and turning on the charm. His sense of wonder at his White House surroundings would be almost touching were it not as tacky as the redecorated Oval Office's peaches-and-cream colour scheme. "Today everything is so promising and new," he told his assembled staff. "My hope is that the day will never come when some of us take this honour for granted." Mr Bush acts like a man who can hardly believe his luck. An awful lot of American voters cannot believe his luck, either.

As a painstaking Washington Post analysis of election records in eight Florida counties has now established beyond reasonable doubt, the state's voters were disenfranchised last November in extraordinarily large numbers by inadequate, antiquated balloting machinery and misleading procedures.

The intention of 45,608 of them was to vote for Al Gore, while 17,098 backed Mr Bush. But all these ballots were declared invalid due to double or multiple-punching. A separate investigation, into the notorious Palm Beach dimpled chads, found Mr Gore should have benefited from a net gain of 682 votes. Mr Bush was officially declared the winner in Florida last month by a margin of 537 votes.

This ruling, fixed in stone by the Supreme Court when it halted all recounts, handed him the presidency over which he now unctuously gloats. But it does not take a mathematical genius to work out that the will of the Floridian (and thus the national) electorate was thwarted, the outcome was an avoidable travesty, and it is Mr Gore who by right should be picking out drapes in the west wing.

Nothing fundamental is going to change now, it seems. Under America's odd rules, it is all too late. Some states may modernise their voting systems; Mr Gore is embarking on a teaching career. Move on, say all those smirking Republicans. But is it really too much to ask Mr Bush to show a bit of humility in the face of this hard evidence that Florida was a shaming, fixed-up farce?

His very first initiative as president was to rescind US funding for family planning groups providing abortion advice overseas. He simply has no mandate for such crass, divisive, ideologically driven steps. And is it too much to ask opposition Democrats in Congress to stop fawning over the new man? Most Americans did not want Mr Bush. Their voices must be heard.


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NO NO