2000 election drama seems so distant now

By Calvin Woodward

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — On an endless election night a year ago, America’s divided voters and balky voting machines produced a deadlock over what seemed the highest stakes imaginable: the White House.

Chads went under the magnifying glass in the weeks that followed. Florida became ground zero. The presidency could depend on whether or which way punched-out scraps of ballot paper dangled.

Now, a war against terrorism led by President Bush is the campaign with no end in sight. The magnifying glass is trained on deadly germs. Ground zero has gone back to its awful root meaning.

"So much has changed," Sen. Joseph Lieberman observed in a weekend speech in New Hampshire that was a paean to national unity and Bush’s leadership, with a few tender criticisms of Republican tax cuts thrown in.

A year ago, the Democratic ticket of Al Gore and Lieberman deployed an army of operatives to Florida to engage Bush’s Republicans in a five-week tug of war over the postelection outcome.

Since Sept. 11, grievance has been redefined and the spectacularly tangled events of that election night — capped by Gore’s offered, then retracted concession in the wee hours of the next morning — do not seem so dramatic anymore.

"We have a sense of the term ‘injustice’ that puts everything into perspective," said Barbara O’Connor, director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and the Media at California State University, Sacramento. "Politics as we know it is no longer opera."

Indeed, the air has been practically sucked out of politics, so eager has been the rush to rally behind the commander in chief and set aside partisan argument for another day.

Progress and setbacks in the 10-month Bush presidency include the standoff with China after a Whidbey Island-based surveillance plane made an emergency landing on April 1 on Hainan island; a 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut in June that included a tax refund of $38 billion; withdrawal from the 1997 Kyoto agreement on global warming in March; and in August imposing a policy that restricts stem cell research.

Bush’s approval ratings in polls, becalmed at around 50 percent after a tough spring and summer, have soared into the 80s and even 90s since Sept. 11.

This, for a man who got fewer popular votes than Gore on Nov. 7, 2000, and who eked out a one-vote Electoral College win based on results effectively determined by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision.

Bush’s public approval and bipartisan support give him a strong hand to prosecute the war and probably will help him with other issues, O’Connor said. But judging from history, much will depend on how the war goes.

"When it’s not going well, we start to eat them alive on all fronts," she said.

Bush is far from that fate right now.

And a year ago, America was far from knowing which man would be that one president.

Gore conceded to Bush in a phone conversation after TV networks, reversing an earlier call, declared the Republican the winner of Florida’s crucial 25 electoral votes and therefore the presidency.

But even as Gore’s motorcade drove along rain-slicked streets of Nashville for his public concession speech at the War Memorial, Bush’s 50,000-vote lead in Florida rapidly shrank to 500.

Bush, victory speech ready, took another call from his opponent, this one placed from a bunker at the memorial, retracting the concession.

Thus began five weeks of recounts and ferocious legal wrangling over Bush’s lead in Florida votes — an edge that was always changing and consistently microscopic, but never vanished.

On Dec. 13, 2000, a day after the Supreme Court stopped a hand recount, Gore declared, "I accept the finality of this outcome" and conceded. "Our nation must rise above a house divided."

Risen it has, in response to Sept. 11.

Copyright ©2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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