GSA to go Bush

By MARK KUKIS

WASHINGTON, Dec 13 (UPI) - The White House's General Services Administration was set to hand over transition space and federal funds to GOP Texas Gov. George W. Bush on news of the Supreme Court ruling against Vice President Al Gore, whose hopes for overturning Bush's certified Florida victory dwindled Wednesday.

"I think that we've seen something happen that is a major marker in this process," said General Services Administration spokeswoman Beth Newburger, who hinted that the high court's block of Gore's Florida recount request was enough confirmation of Bush's apparent victory to free $5.3 million in federal transition resources that have remained in limbo since Nov. 7.

General Services Administration chief Dave Barram is expected to make a statement sometime Wednesday, perhaps before Gore and his legal advisers have a chance to react publicly to the latest legal development. Barram has total discretion to release the funds once a winner is "apparent," according to federal law. So far, Barram has left the transition resources on hold while Democratic legal challenges to Bush's certified Florida victory play out.

At issue is financing and office space in Washington dedicated for an incoming administration's work through inauguration Jan. 20. On two floors in one of Washington's most expensive commercial areas, some 90,000 square feet of office space complete with computers and phone lines to accommodate 540 employees has sat empty since the White House race between Bush and Gore fell into confusion more than a month ago. The lease for the transition offices costs an estimated $700,000. The rest of the funding goes toward salaries, travel and other transition-related expenses.

The White House transition resources have become a political prize of sorts as both Bush and Gore sought ways to lend credence to their competing claims to the presidency amid a conflicted vote count in Florida, where Bush managed to eek out a 537-ballot lead over Gore to clench the Sunshine State's crucial 25 Electoral College votes.

Both candidates had moved ahead with tentative transition plans, though Bush made a greater effort to promote his would-be White House publicly with appearances alongside prominent Republicans like Colin Powell, Bush's likely pick for secretary of state. Gore, meanwhile, held transition meetings with his staff behind closed doors at the White house and made no suggestions about cabinet picks.

Bush's campaign raised the profile of its transition efforts recently by opening an office with private funds on the outskirts of Washington. But so far little work appears to have been done in the space, located in McClain, Va. Most of planning or Bush administration has taken place in Austin, where Bush has met with his staff and Capitol Hill Republicans.

Meanwhile, Bush's running mate Dick Cheney has worked on pending transition issues from Washington, holding press conferences and meeting with top lawmakers regularly.

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Copyright 2000 by United Press International.

All rights reserved. GSA HANDING KEYS TO BUSH...

-- Ain't Gonna Happen (Not Here Not@ever.com), December 13, 2000

Answers

Found this in the Sydney morning Herald... sometimes someone from outside can put into words the feelings and emotions of a situation better as they aren't emotionally attached to the event. This past month has left a bad taste in my mouth and I wonder how soon before the first presidental scandle is broken to the public, will we hear words of impeachment in a few years?? The impression I am getting is the democrats won't let this go... they've seen 8 years of abuse heaped on them and what I hear is more like what goes around comes around and revenge is a dish best served cold! anyways, the link for the article is http://www.smh.com.au/news0012/14/pageone/pageone4.html

Nobody won; America lost

COMMENT by Gay Alcorn

We appear to have a winner. But there is no joy in this victory, only a grim relief that this long election night is almost over.

Surely, even the sunny George W. Bush knows this victory is bittersweet, for him and for the country. In the 35 days since the nation voted, the layers have been pulled back, day after grinding day, to reveal a truly post-modern America.

Nobody won the election. It was a tie, after a dispiriting campaign between two uninspiring candidates. Bush didn't win more votes than Al Gore in any objective sense; indeed an honest assessment would conclude that, had the Florida poll not been such a fiasco, the vice- president would most probably have won.

But Bush was the last man standing after a political war, waged through the constant buzz of 24-hour cable news channels and in the courts, suspiciously partisan on both sides.

In this world, the candidates wave to the cameras and say barely a word. In this world, the lawyers become the public face of political parties.

What more fitting way to end such an election than the five ideological conservatives on the United States Supreme Court handing the Oval Office to George W. Bush on the grounds that there wasn't enough time to get the hand-counting done properly.

Does anyone truly think, that if the candidates' positions were exactly reversed, that the five conservatives would have been so worried about dimpled and hanging chads?

And does anyone honestly doubt that the equally divided decision of the Democratic Florida Supreme Court to allow hand counts at the last minute, in a haphazard way, had a whiff of partisanship about it? What was this election? A melodrama? A Wagnerian opera? A Shakespearean farce? There was irony everywhere.

George W. Bush, campaigning as a "uniter not a divider", played a role along with Al Gore in dividing every bit of this nation.

The public is cynical about politics, the courts are trashed, the Florida election officials ridiculed, the local citizens holding up ballots to the light demeaned.

Not even the vote, that last sacred right of citizens to bypass poll- driven, contrived American election campaigns, was left undamaged.

One fifth of Americans used punch-card ballot machines - 1960s inventions that were denounced 12 years ago as unreliable.

African-Americans living in the poorest areas turned out in record numbers only to find that they were the ones who had the older, cheaper voting machines, disproportionately discarding more of their votes as a vote for no-one.

According to a Los Angeles Times investigation, the richest country in the world has neglected the mechanics of voting to an extent that no person can be confident that the right man won.

Alaska has 38,209 more names on it rolls than its voting age population. A Washington company that cleans up registration rolls says one out of every five names on Indiana's rolls is bogus.

Voting "whores" paid by campaigns pay money to people in return for their absentee ballots.

But now it's almost over, and Americans will be subjected to speeches about the need to heal the wounds, the need to work across party lines.

Al Gore, who will regret for the rest of his life his cynical decision to ask for hand-counting just in Democratic areas rather than the whole of Florida, will make a self-serving concession speech.

He will, in effect, launch his campaign for the presidency in 2004.

And what of Bush, who has revealed himself as not such a nice guy after all, but a ruthless man willing to protect his slim lead on election night by whatever means necessary?

He was quietly willing to accept his brother and Florida governor, Jeb, handing him the electors for the presidency if all else failed him. But they didn't fail him. He had the Supreme Court.

On January 20, it will be Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist who will stand on the steps of the Capitol to administer the oath of office to President Bush, with the four dissenting justices squirming in their seats.

There will be American-style pageantry, and grand speeches about the best democracy in the world. But the myths have gone. The masks are off. The people have seen the underbelly of their politics, and they know.

-- Rob (celtic64@inficad.com), December 13, 2000.

Excellent article, Rob; thanks for posting it. Covered all the bases quite nicely.

Maybe the deafening silence here and on Poole's board is an indication that people finally "get it"; what some of us were trying to tell them all along.

Too late now. But, IMO, this is for the best in some ways. Maybe now that people see what's broke, it can finally be fixed.

I'm ever-hopeful.

Ain't, you can stop SCREAMING now. We've all heard you; you've won.

If you can call that "winning".

-- Patricia (PatriciaS@lasvegas.com), December 13, 2000.

Not a bad article, but Gay Alcorn has missed a critical observation -- that in a winner-take-all election, there simply is no way to handle a tie vote gracefully, especially when we have a tie within the accuracy of the machinery, rather than a "real" tie.

Small elections have ties fairly often, with each candidate receiving, say, 25 votes. Even 250 votes. Different ways of resolving these small scale ties have been used, even flipping a coin. But what's important is, everyone agrees that both candidates "really got" the same number of votes.

In an election with many millions of votes cast, this does not happen. Instead, we have results close enough so that almost anything can swing the election either way. Given the vagaries of life, partisans for both sides can claim as many different "improper influences" on the nominal vote count as their imaginations can devise, most of which did indeed affect the count to some degree or another.

All of these competing claims that "if it hadn't been for X, MY guy would have won" are simply, theoretically beyond resolution on this scale. Any number of them, or all of them, might be true, and nobody can ever know one way or the other.

So what we have seen is the second line of determination, when the first one (the popular vote itself) makes no clear decision. This method doesn't need to be used often, but it did the job. Had it failed, we were already limbering up the third line of determination via the legislatures. This is no underbelly, this simply demonstrates that both candidates really wanted the job, both thought they deserved it (ties are like that), and both were willing to do whatever they could to get it.

So the system worked. We don't always get a knockout in the first round.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), December 13, 2000.